{"id":14390,"date":"2024-08-09T11:53:00","date_gmt":"2024-08-09T11:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/?p=14390"},"modified":"2024-09-16T11:54:19","modified_gmt":"2024-09-16T11:54:19","slug":"literacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2024\/08\/09\/literacy\/","title":{"rendered":"literacy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>I\u2019ve spent a couple of years now circling around my concerns, trying to discern what I ought to focus on. I\u2019ve disagreed with myself a bunch, but eventually the feeling of \u201cI\u2019ve got to do <em>something\u201d<\/em> became stronger than everything else, and the general consensus amongst my bickering selves is that we\u2019ve got to talk about literacy.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>!!!!<\/strong> To a lot of people, the word \u2018literacy\u2019 means \u201cbeing able to read and write\u201d. But that\u2019s actually a very low bar. I\u2019m not just talking about words, either. I\u2019m talking about <em>everything<\/em>. So maybe we might say \u201cmedia literacy\u201d more broadly. Ideally I\u2019d like to go even broader than that, but we have to start somewhere.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Where do we start? I <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/visakanv\/status\/1701975682941886964\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">once wrote a tweet<\/a> which I\u2019ll paraphrase: \u201cdon\u2019t assume that someone is saying something that they didn\u2019t actually say. that\u2019s it, that\u2019s like 80% of good reading comprehension and good listening skills.\u201d Right away you may notice that the problem isn\u2019t actually in the words, but in the person making sense of those words. The impulse to make assumptions is strong, especially in a turbulent, high-volume media environment.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Footnote? Yes there\u2019s a lot of scholarship about media literacy already, but I find most of it really tedious. There\u2019s a tendency for scholars to use intimidating words like \u201csemiotics\u201d and \u201cintertextuality\u201d. I want to write something simple and accessible, that parents can share with their teenagers. Just as how I came up with \u201cpsychofauna\u201d as a simplified alternative to \u201cegragore\u201d, I\u2019m looking for a way to talk about literacy.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Tangent? There\u2019s an essay I\u2019ve been wanting to write, tentatively titled \u201cI wrote my way out \/ men of letters\u201d, where I talk about Hamilton (2015), Wozniak, Feynman\u2026 the job of a man of letters, or a public intellectual, is to make sense of things, to argue and explain and to think out loud.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>!!!! <\/strong>There\u2019s a big question of \u201cwilling\u201d vs \u201cable\u201d. I saw a tweet recently that said something like, \u201chaving smartphones and\/or social media seems to lowers your IQ by X points\u201d. The thing I\u2019d want to note here is that it\u2019s not a change to a person\u2019s enduring abilities\u2026 social media is like being drunk or sleep deprived. Why? It\u2019s because you\u2019re bombarded with all kinds of information from all kinds of contexts.\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Hm, in a way, social media gives ordinary people the experience of what it\u2019s like to be a celebrity, or someone with money or power, in that entities are now competing for your attention. Your attention is valuable currency in the marketplace because people can sell shit to you, and they can sell ads to people who want to sell shit to you. (And then there are people who don\u2019t even really want your money, they just want you to look at them. I have a separate essay to write here titled Attention Whores.) Lots of people have observed that celebrities and hot girls are quite curt. There\u2019s a great John Mulaney bit where he talks about what Mick Jagger is like, and how he just blurts out whatever\u2019s on his mind, saying \u201cYes!\u201d \u201cNo!\u201d \u201cNot funny!\u201d to everything with no filter. When you have a large enough audience of people who are interested in you, you don\u2019t really need to be courteous, or at least it will seem like you don\u2019t.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>There is a long history of arguments about the challenges of literacy. Many thoughtful people over the centuries have said things like, it\u2019s more dangerous to be a literate man who incorrectly thinks he knows something because he read about it, than an illiterate man who knows that he doesn\u2019t. Many of the best writers have bemoaned the limitations of writing.\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Then came the printing press, and the radio, and television, and the internet, and social media\u2013 and with each new innovation, we find ourselves thrust into a turbulent new world of confusion. My favorite essay of all time was written by Adam Gopnik for The New Yorker \u2026<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>I\u2019m tempted to go look up vgr\u2019s essays about literacy, where he\u2019s probably covered most of what I want to say, but I want to write out my own thoughts before I do that.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The word \u201cilliterate\u201d is a class-based insult in many places. You might see other phrases lumped together with it, like \u201cdirty, stinking illiterate\u201d.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>what is my conclusion? I think\u2026 ultimately it\u2019s not possible for any one person to do everything, so it\u2019s prudent for individuals to focus on narrow slices of problems they want to address. I believe that there\u2019s a subset of people who possess the technical ability to read but aren\u2019t quite persuaded that it\u2019s worth making the effort to read properly. Those are the people I want to focus on, I think. I have friends who I think are doing well\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I think all serious players end up being in the business of education somewhat. (Most recently in Sept2024 I just saw this in an internal doc that mrbeast wrote for his employees. Andy Grove talked about it decades earlier.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>tbc<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>what is my conclusion? I think\u2026 ultimately it\u2019s not possible for any one person to do everything, so it\u2019s prudent for individuals to focus on narrow slices of problems they want to address. I believe that there\u2019s a subset of people who possess the technical ability to read but aren\u2019t&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[730],"class_list":["post-14390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-substack"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s5gxNz-literacy","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14390"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14390\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14391,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14390\/revisions\/14391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}