The Distinct Drop in Media Literacy And A Possible Cause

If you watch TV or movies, read a book or comic, generally ingest any story these days you may notice that, dare you look for any thoughts about it online things have gotten a little…wonky. You used to be able to find solid analysis of media, people writing interesting articles about things, easy enough. More and more though you find far stranger stuff – articles promising to “explain the ending” or a story that had a very (and I mean often very very) simple, well explained, ending.

It’s more than that, of course. When you talk to people, not just go looking for thoughts, you find that they seem to have simplified things down in their own heads a bunch. They’re not connecting with, or unfolding, story the way we used to.

So what happened?

Well, in short form, the internet happened. As much as I mention it was a much better place for these kinds of thoughts and discussions, it is also a terrible place for them.

Because money.

Sites need to keep going. They need money to pay for hosting, traffic, writers, designers, editors, you name it, it costs money. Normally they sell ads, and ads are based on click rate. The more someone opens your article, and the longer they stay on it, the more they see the ad placed there.

How then, can you increase traffic?

Well one simple way is to dumb down the content and make it easily ingestible by anyone, as fast as possible. You might think that goes against the “time spent” but what happens is you make enough people annoyed by it they spend a while there just staring at it. But in general it ups the number of clicks and views easily.

It’s hard to do that and to keep up a good deep dive into a story.

You want the easy read, remember. And the catchy title, and so on. So you’ll explain an ending that doesn’t need it, or ignore what the term “plot hole” means to list a bunch of things that were very intentional, until you phrase them in such a way that you try to make it seem unintentional and that maybe those points should’ve been addressed. (Spoiler alert: No they were still intentional)

Over time, and I mean a decade or more, the readers learn. They’re not seeing deeper stuff, and their only critical thinking about story is doled out by these stupid articles. They discuss them with friends, because of course they do, why wouldn’t they? And slowly but surely the language of how we discuss story changes.

For the worse.

Critical thinking is a muscle, and once people were trained to stop using it, it slowly started to wither. Why look past the surface of a thing when ninety-seven percent of what you see about it will only be surface? Doesn’t that teach you, when people near you do the same, to only think in surface? To only care about it?

You bet it does.

Now is that the only cause? Of course not. We stopped teaching critical thinking, for the most part, and a lot of the stories, as this went down the scale, started to be more simple surface to make them more readily digestible by a group that won’t look past that anyway. It’s a terrible cycle that feeds on itself and it’s seemingly speeding up.

So what do we do?

It’d be great to say “Push back! Write more thoughtful bits!” but who’s paying for them? Yeah, I thought so. Schooling would help. Free educational programing would be cool. Like Sesame Street. You know that thing that is now owned by a for-profit network? Oops.

Honestly, I am not sure what the path forward is, but I know it’ll take money, and a willingness to do this work, and a purposeful hand.

Perhaps if enough of us start pushing where we can and getting people we know to have deeper thoughts, teaching courses on critical thinking and story structure, maybe…just maybe, we can move the rock an inch and start it downhill.

I’m hopeful.