Forty-Four: Media Literacy (03-21-2023)
Watching the news or engaging in twitter discourse is, as it has always been, a waste of time. Today, it is expected that former President Donald Trump will be indicted in a case involved a porn star or prostitute or some other womanly entrepreneur. Major news outlets have been gearing up for wall-to-wall protest coverage unseen since January 6th, 2021, and before to the heroic peaceful unrest of summer 2020. This dishonest, sensational reporting is symptomatic of an issue that faces ever American, if not every English-speaking, internet-accessible person- not the commonly identified Mean World Syndrome-diagnosable 24-hour, infotainment news media malignment, but the universal lack of media literacy.
For several weeks leading up to the Oscars, people online debated the political appropriateness of Best Picture nominee The Whale, for having cast regular obese Brendan Frasier in the role of the morbidly obese titular whale. For not finding a 600-pound actor and casting them as a self-destructive, food addicted absentee father, the movie had offended those who believe acting is limited only to those who have direct experience in the conditions of the role they are playing. Further, this subset of the film's audience believed the film's portrayal of the terminally obese was not just sensational and inaccurate, but actively harmful, since the character on screen who was singularly destructive, a hyperbolic caricature, may have been misconstrued by equally but differently inattentive audience members as representative of all obese people.
The Whale is about redemption, salvation, regret, and self destruction. The titular character's weight is only a minor detail, a facilitating condition to his ill health and a visible expression of self-destruction that does not have the undertones of intoxication (as with drug addiction), or sadism (as with typical self-harm). The Whale is also a play, a genre with simple, direct language and direction that cannot necessarily completely obfuscate its message. For a typical audience member, who is likely at least a high school graduate, if not college degree holder, and who also likely frequently engages with media, to not understand the movie whatsoever, is disappointing.
A possible partial source of this disintegration in media literacy is the general disinterest most Americans from Generation X onward have in developing any media literacy. The pervasive complaint of "if the author said the curtains are red, then the curtains are just red, it doesn't mean there's a deeper meaning" has produced a both know-it-all and don't-need-to-know-anything attitude in the general public. When educators instruct students to search for a deeper meaning in a text, they are not alleging that the author intended for the curtain's color to hold additional symbolic or metaphorical meaning, but are training students to engage with the text critically. This is not to allege that the search for symbolism is only a method of developing media literacy, but is too a legitimate way of better understanding a text anyway.
The disposal of media literacy building education, with the promotion of STEM as a religiously productive set of professional fields, may be disasterous for America's service and profession based economy. Many schools, as low as elementary, are developing curricula around STEM-focused paths, that specify student's experiences to better professionalize them ahead of college, university, or trade school. Whatever dark forces are behind this shift, even the good faith, are successful in reducing the amount and impact of "humanities" courses in education. Forcing students, future people, to develop media literacy is beneficial socially, societally, and economically. It would be helpful to compel every student, even if by college graduation, to take a course in painting. One of the most useful skills a person can have is the ability to see what is placed in front of them- and the realization of the difficulty, novelty, and utility of this ability is profound.
In the social realm, it has always been obvious that media literacy is gone. Two fantastic examples of this phenomenon have circulated around twitter in recent days. First, @dieworkwear's thread on skinny jeans was widely misinterpreted as either disapproval of skinny jeans, the unnecessary politicization of skinny jeans, or simply nonsense. The frequency of totally nonsensically illiterate replies is disheartening when the thread is so plain and clear, as the twitter character limit necessitates. The claim that @dieworkwear's thread is itself an act of unnecessary politicization is either an expression of ignorance, for having totally missed the extended era of skinny jean hate from the right, or youth, for having been born too late to have been exposed, if not an expression of totally illiteracy for misunderstanding the thread. The second trending topic has been the seasoning of chicken, brought back into attention by a video from tik tok describing how chicken cooked with the constituent vegetables found in spices and spice mixes is, in fact, seasoned. The indignant explanation of this simple fact is certainly entertaining, and adopts a tone favorable to the exhausted internet commenter who has too long defended non-powder seasoned food. Following this video, some took to exploring highly-biased Wikipedia, investigating why the unsourced claim that Europeans invented fried chicken, but never "seasoned" it, is circulated there and used elsewhere with Wikipedia as evidence. The unclear definition of "seasoned" bolsters confusion, but also entirely disregards that the oldest available recipes, from Europe, for a battered and fried chicken dish do include herbs, spices, and salt. In some cases, false claims (the bogeyman fake news) actually do emerge from nonfactual information on the internet rather than woeful misinterpretation.
And so, today Donald Trump will be arrested, or he won't. Either way, the world has decided to operate as though he will be, increasing security and instilling panic in television and internet news audiences. The inability for people to see the intentional leading astray is a partly voluntary abandonment of media literacy in favor of a cynical and uncritical view of the world, a much more complacent way of being.