Transcription
I recently posted a thread that said, "Literacy is fast becoming a class divide, not formal education, literacy. There are so many people that just don't understand nuance, satire, entendre, or irony. Illiteracy cripples your ability to read the world and the room. The difference between people who regularly wrestle with complex ideas versus people who primarily consume clickbait content is vast. Most people think literacy means, "Can you read?" But, literacy means, "Do you understand what you're reading? Do you understand the situation that's playing out in front of you? Do you understand the context, the subtext, the complexities of the situation in front of you? Can you interpret the meaning behind the meaning?" And, unfortunately, there is a growing number of people who can't. Who cannot do that. And, in this video, I'm going to show you just how dangerous that is. Keep watching."
Hi, I'm Dr. Shante, and welcome to my YouTube channel. And, what I do over here is reframe cultural narratives from a trauma-informed and sociological perspective. So, let's get into it.
So, when we're talking about literacy, it's not just about having access to information and reading the information. It's about the ability to be able to interpret the information that is in front of you, because having information that you don't understand really doesn't help you. And, one of the biggest dangers in this growing divide of people that can read the situation, that can read the room, that can read the politics and the dynamics at play, versus people who can't, is that when you don't have the ability to do that. You are outsourcing your intellect. You are outsourcing the ability to interpret the situation to somebody else because when you can't read it for yourself, then you are at the mercy of somebody who can.
So, in real life, okay, real actual life, think about how this plays out when you're applying for a mortgage or there's a health directive at the hospital when you need to interpret certain clauses within insurance policy, when there are tax changes in your community, when there are referendum on the ballot that you don't understand. And so, when you don't understand what's in front of you, when you don't understand the stakes, the consequences, the players involved, then you are at the mercy of somebody else reading that situation for you instead of you being able to read it for yourself. And what I'm seeing is a growing number of people who are not able to develop an informed perspective. They are developing talking points based on what somebody else said, not on research that they have done, not on the fine print that they have read, not on complexities of the situation that they understand. They are spouting an interpretation of an interpretation rather than actually reading the text.
And as somebody who teaches English, so one of my many hats is English professor. I can always tell the students who have read the story and the students who went Googling on the internet looking for some Cliff Notes, some SparkNotes, some 1-2-3 snapshot summary of the book instead of actually reading the the book itself and understanding character development, nuances, uh unreliable narrators, politics. You can tell when people haven't read it. And so, when we have a vast number of people who are making decisions, who are showing up to voting booths, who have the power to shape policy or or vote on policies that impact large numbers of people and they don't quite understand what's in front of them, that's not just dangerous for them. That's dangerous for all of us, which brings me to point number two.
We, more than any other civilization in history, have more access to information than ever before. And yet, information is not knowledge. And the ruling class, okay, the wealthy, the the tech billionaires and and the moguls of the world, okay? You know what they're doing? They're sending their children to college, good colleges, and telling you a college degree doesn't matter. They're building apps and technology that they want to capture your attention, that they want to engage and entertain you, but in their household, they have banned those apps. They don't let their children get on Instagram. They don't let their children have Facebook. Steve Jobs famously said, "Yeah, my kids don't have iPads." And so, it's okay for you to spend time consuming that content. It's okay for you to be neurologically manipulated because if you are not familiar with brain hacking, there's excellent excellent information out there about the intentional manipulation of your dopamine in order to keep you locked into the algorithm, in order to keep you scrolling, in order to manufacture outrage, in order to manipulate your emotions. All of that is intentional. And the people who created that, they don't let that happen in their homes. They don't let that happen to their kids, but they're letting it happen to you. Because people who cannot think for themselves, people who are more emotional than they are rational, are very easy to manipulate, are very easy to control. And some of you have seen this in your families. You have seen it in their voting patterns. You have seen it in trying to engage them about complex issues of our day. And when you try to hit them with facts, okay, when you try to to to point them towards like research, when you try to point them towards evidence, they don't want to hear that. It's It's emotion. It's anger. It's hostility.
If you haven't, uh there's an excellent kind of like TED X illustration of Plato's allegory of the cave. I use it in my classroom all the time. But, the long and the short of of the allegory is that there are group of prisoners that are chained up in a cave. One of the prisoners gets free and wanders outside the cave. And he realizes that everything he thought was real in the cave was not. It was just shadows. It was just illusions. It was just smoke and mirrors. But, when he gets outside the cave and can actually see, touch, taste, feel, like have tangible evidence that what he thought was a reality was a complete fabrication and illusion, he's so excited, he runs back into the cave to tell the other prisoners, "Hey, guess what?" And the other prisoners, rather than being like, "Straight up, that's dope. Oh my gosh, I want to see. Me, too." No, they they basically pummel him. They are hostile towards him. They think he is a a nut job. They think he is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. And he is met with so much hostility that he kind of like walks away disheartened. And that that framing is very much what has happened to a lot of people who have lost their entire sales in the consumption of flattened content, in the consumption of algorithmic manipulation, who have discarded everything their parents taught them, who have discarded all of their values and and and latched on to these beliefs, to these ideologies that have zero foundation in science, zero foundation in research, that are that is ultimately a grift, okay? A grift. And people, instead of consuming the content and considering it and critically dissecting it, they have allowed the content to consume them.
And so, the ruling class, the wealthy, their children are not leaving comments, okay, in the comment section. Their children are being educated in the language of power, of money, of commerce, of political landscapes, of history, and art, and philosophy, and other languages. They are learning how power works and how power moves. Meanwhile, a large swath of the population is just scrolling and clicking and commenting and commenting and clicking and scrolling. And I'm not saying that all screen time is bad screen time. I mean, hello. >> [laughter] >> So, I mean, I realize the irony, right? But all screen time is not the same, and there are some people who have become so digitally addicted and so dependent on apps and algorithms to curate their reality that it's hard to pull them out, that it's hard to reason with them. So, you have these two groups where one group is being raised in the language of influence, and the other one is being groomed in the language of outrage. And I'm not saying that everybody needs to go to Harvard, okay? There There's more than one way to access knowledge. There's more than one way to build your knowledge base. There's more than one way to become a critical thinker. But the people who have access and influence and are able to navigate the world in different social circles, in different social circumstances, because they understand the complexities of perspectives other than their own, those are the ones that are growing in power. Meanwhile, there's this dumbing down through technology that is an intention that is an intentional manipulation.
Perfect example, I recently read this, and I'm going to try to find the the exact article and and make sure I put it in the description. But one of the architects of Project 2025, which is basically a a playbook for supremacy, oppression, it's it's tech feudalism where only a few people own everything and everybody else is just kind of like fighting it out for scraps. He studied African-American history. He studied African-American history so that he would learn the history of of black people, their foremost concerns, and what would be the best ways to try to destabilize that community. That's what they're doing and we have not been paying attention.
Which brings me to my last point. Literacy is not just becoming an issue of division of class. Literacy is also becoming a issue of compatibility in friendships and relationships because think about it. If you have someone who is literate, okay, not educated, not formally educated, okay, because I don't want somebody coming in the comments like, "You don't have to go to college and you don't have to have a college degree." No, you don't. You do not have to have any of those things in order to be literate, okay? But when you have somebody who is literate, who understands and wrestles with complex ideas and can navigate those circumstances versus somebody who who primarily feast on a diet of clickbait content, what type of interaction do you think they're going to have? What kinds of conversations and connections do you think they're going to be able to make? And this reminds me of of the sneetches because people who have that flattened sense of the world, meaning everything is black and white, the world is flat, like people who have been consuming talking points and have gone deep down in rabbit holes of of YouTube and other places, they always out themselves. Have you noticed this? There's almost kind of like a a profile of who this is exactly. They almost always have a private account and if they don't have a private account, they don't have any original post. They don't have any original ideas. They don't have any original content, but they got a lot of comments. They got a lot of replies because they have built into their their life scape, okay? They have built into their lives this constant responding to this antagonizing and this parroting of talking points that they heard from other places. And it's like the Sneetches. Like, have you ever read that book The Sneetches by Dr. Seuss? They have stars upon the ours. So, it was like these two creatures and one group had stars on them and the other group didn't have stars on them. Whenever I see the Sneetches in the comments, whenever I hear that rhetoric piping up, I immediately disengage. I'm like, "Oh. Oh, okay." Because I know we're not going to have an honest discourse. There's no point in arguing and debating with people who have not read the same book because you're not having an honest conversation. You are debating an ideology rooted in talking points created by somebody who hasn't even done their own research. You are fighting with the original grifter. And it's like, "Okay. I You got it. And have at it." And so, I don't argue with strangers on the internet.
And I welcome disagreement. I mean, that's what healthy discourse is. In a healthy democracy, everybody's not going to agree. That's why we originally were supposed to have checks and balances. At this moment, that system is struggling, okay? But, the point of the checks and balances is because in a healthy democracy, disagreement is part of the process. But, it's how you disagree. Some people actually engage the idea that is being discussed. They introduce nuance. They offer alternative perspectives. They point to data and research and history. While other people are just parroting the talking points that they heard on a podcast. And I'm just like, "You got it. I That that is not an honest discourse of ideas. That is not an exchange of ideas. That is just a war of words. And where does that get us? Because in this yet to be United States, we have enough issues. But, my point about compatibility is is that it begins to to create striations in your friend in your friendships and in your friend groups. There's this old saying, "Show me your friends and I'll show you your future." And so think about the future of people who consistently consume clickbait content, who consistently listen to harmful or toxic rhetoric, who are looking for echo chambers and itching ears to reinforce their own insecurities or or deeply held beliefs. People who don't want to be challenged, people who don't want to be honest, people who just want to be right about being wrong, people who want to dig deep into the well of grievance. What kind of future is that? Not just for the friend group, not just for them, but also for the economy, for the world, for for the citizenship, for democracy. But in terms of the types of communities that creates, what we have now are a lot of silos. We have a lot of echo chambers. We have a lot of sameness and homogeneity. And as a society, that is fracturing us in ways that are not easy to repair. So literacy isn't just about reading words, it's about wrestling with ideas. And that is quickly becoming one of the biggest forms of social and intellectual compatibility.
So how do we come out of this, okay? Because I'm not going to say, "Well, just read books." No, it's not that. Please know, every authoritarian regime depends on reducing the critical literacy of its populace. They need the citizenship to be diminished. They need them not to think it through. They need them not to read the fine print. They need them not to be asking critical questions. They need them to be rendered unable to read the room because in that way the authority is not being challenged, and they don't even have the wherewithal to organize themselves enough to even overthrow the authority because they don't know how. And so, what we're seeing, this reduction of people's ability to think critically, is not an accident. It's a strategy.
So, let's turn it around. Here are some practical things that I think that you can do. If you know that you are doing more scrolling than you probably would like to be doing. If you know that you If If you can kind of feel the brain rot starting to set in. If you are growing tired of the same old tired arguments on the internet and and the food fighting and all of that and you just want something more, some nuance, some depth, some knowledge rather than just information, I got you.
One of the things that you can do is read one long-form article a day. Just one article. ProPublica, The Atlantic, AP Reuters, The Associated Press, not to agree with it, to practice reading something that has your full attention. The New Yorker, practice reading one long-form article a day. Preferably in physical form, but I get it, you know, in this day and age with print kind of being out of vogue, but if you're going to be on your screen, read one long-form article a day. That's number one.
Number two, read one non-fiction book per quarter. Not 12, one. One non-fiction book. So, as much as I love a good once upon a time, okay, as much as I love a good story, one non-fiction book per quarter. Four books per year. Just get into it, okay? Whether you do it on audiobook, whether you do it on a Kindle reader, or uh check out a book from your library, perfectly fine. That That is fair game. But but one book per quarter.
Number three, replace 20 minutes of your scrolling time with a lecture or a documentary. Get into it. Just 20 minutes. And a documentary, most documentaries are an hour or sometimes 2 hours or what have you. So, maybe over a period of 3 days, just 20 minutes, it just just go down, you know, a documentarians, you know, paradise and just get some information that has been researched, that has been highly produced, that that that has a beginning, middle, and end rather than just this constant scrolling that invites other perspectives like do that, okay?
Number four, read something you don't agree with that you just flat out I would never because it's important to understand where other people are coming from. You don't have to agree with it. You don't have to validate it, but it's important to understand where other people are coming from because a healthy democracy works towards some semblance of of common ground. And it's hard to work towards common ground when the only perspective that you have is your own. And these things that I'm asking you to do are actually helping you form and you formulate your own opinions.
When I teach reading for my students, so for so for my students who hate reading and are struggling to do so and their eyes are just glossing over the page because they're like uh I have them do a critical response and the critical response breaks down like this. Connections. What connection can you make to this? Like, as you're reading this, what does it remind you of? Reactions. How do you feel about it? You think, "Wow, that's interesting. That's cute. That's some BS. Like, what?" Okay? Reactions. Number three, examples. Can you give examples of this thing that you're reading about happening in other places. For example, if you are watching a documentary about end-of-life, is there an example of of what it is that you're reading or or listening to or watching where you're like, "Oh, this reminds me of a tradition from such and such cultures." So, can you find other examples of it? So, connections, what connections can you make? Reactions, what reactions do you have? Examples, are there other examples of this uh that exist in the world? So, examples are like connections, they're just not personal. Questions. What questions do you have about the documentary that you just watched? What questions do you have about the book you just read? What questions do you have about the article that that you you read today? So, questions. Evaluations. What did you think of it? What are the parts that you agreed with it? What are the parts that you disagreed with it? And then, can you summarize it? Can If somebody says, "Hey, what was that about?" In two or three sentences, can you say, "I read this article about or I saw this documentary about or what have you?" And these are the critical reading strategies that I use so that my students are reading with intention. And so, I'm not just telling you to just kind of like go read stuff willy-nilly, especially if you are trying to retrain the muscle of your brain to focus long enough to do that. Your brain focuses better when it has a project, when it has a question to answer, okay? So, connections, reactions, examples, questions, evaluations, and summaries is a good place to start.
So, that's going to do it for me. In this day and age of AI, in this day and age of constant consumption of clickbait material and outrage and things like that, it is more important than ever, more important than ever to think for yourself, to consume content without being consumed by it, without it changing who you are and what you value, without it changing your personhood. 80, 90% of it is an intentional manipulation. And I do recognize the irony because it's like, well, aren't you here? Aren't you on the screen? I am. But it's kind of like a captive audience thing. It's like, well, since you're here, of all the things that you are watching today, can this be the nonfiction version of the book that you're reading? Can this be the thing that gives you pause and perspective that makes you zoom out from your life for a minute and say, "Hold up. What is What is really at stake here? Am I paying attention to what's going on?" And so, if I can add anything to the conversation, I'd like to add some nuance, some depth, some wisdom, some teaching, the best of my expertise for your best and highest good because I'm not trying to sell you. I'm not trying to manipulate you. I'm I don't need your vote for the next election. I'm just trying to help you. So, if you have any comments, questions, takeaways, or what have you, as always, you are welcome to the comment section, and I will see you next time.