loose change

happy monday to all who observe! i’m starting very late today–9:58p–because i lost track of time earlier agonizing over cover letter verbiage until i had to get ready for work. there are so many variables! i want to sound authentic but not unconventional, i need to be concise, i need to prove my desire to work with this company. there’s an infinite amount of sentences that i can type out and then immediately backspace. i’m excited to write here in this unfettered territory!

this week i’ve been thinking about media literacy. in the same vein, thinking about deleting social media apps from my phone, but really struggling to bring the idea to fruition. a family friend recently read the anxious generation and posted a goodbye message to instagram (there must be some irony in announcing a departure from social media), prompting me to look into the book. my mom has it sitting on the coffee table–it’s one of those books that i’m nervous to get into because i imagine the contents of it will change my mind in one way or another. but i digress!

media literacy is defined as the ability to critically analyze stories presented in the mass media and to determine their accuracy or credibility. here’s why i’m thinking about it:

trump does deserve credit for a large part of the misinformation circulating on both social and news media. the lying on his agenda is to be expected at this point–i’d be more shocked if he began accurately opining on the state of our country. but what i’ve been concerned with lately has less to do with him, and more to do with the app formerly known as twitter.

i’ve had a twitter account since the early stages of covid, before elon musk’s takeover but after the Dawn of Social Media Misinformation. prior to becoming ‘x’, twitter was my primary source of up to date wildfire reporting, a source of poetry and musical commentary, and a means of keeping up with politics on a more casual basis than news media. today, at least 25% of the tweets that come across my feed are rooted in misinformation and have very little relation to any of the accounts i follow.

most twitter users know to be wary of bots, specifically those from russia attempting to influence our elections. it becomes more difficult by the day to parse bots from humans. it is dangerous to use twitter without critical thought. the “truth” that was spilled all over twitter in the hours and days following the landfall of hurricane helene remained uncontested for at least 24 hours. it was at least one day before any major media publication dispelled the rumors of entire towns being bulldozed to hide the amount of bodies, of the government denying help to victims, of FEMA’s failure to show up.

i do wonder if media literacy will be taught more widely with the rise of AI, but i kind of doubt it. it feels like we’ve reached the threshold where nobody really has power over the future of artificial intelligence, and that’s terrifying. artificial intelligence feels like something that’s taken place that very few actual people have truly consented to. however helpful AI is touted to be, i’m certain that the cons outweigh the pros.

i began an online course in journalism through michigan state university today, and in the introduction the lecturer stated that more people than ever before are seeking more news and information than they ever have before. i’ve surely written about this before, how i don’t think we were ever supposed to have so much news at our fingertips, especially when so much of it is bad. phil rosen, a finance journalist, wrote in an essay published in 2019:

if you were to reflect on a modern population solely on their evening news channels, it would be impossible not to view the world as a sad, macabre place. now, expand that across an entire society, for generations. what happens to someone’s outlook if they are raised amidst this, and have never known otherwise?

kids have more unsupervised access to news today than we did ten years ago. when i was growing up, my primary source of news was the daily background hum of npr in the kitchen, and the living room, and the backseat of my mom’s car. it was so grown up that i spent most of the time tuning it out. kids today seem to grow up quicker. the news is in their faces more, on tik tok, on youtube, on instagram, on snapchat. it’s more accessible to them, and it’s targeted to their demographic for maybe the sole reason that more clicks earn more money, and young people are primed to click. it’s strange to be 25 when every climate year seems to bring us one step closer to mass extinction. i can’t imagine being 10, or 15–how do you define the future?

anyway, i wasn’t intending to go all in on all of that tonight. it’s been almost an hour of writing, and i’m hoping i don’t wake up to reread it and find it horribly disorganized and wordy, or (god forbid) pretentious. i have not much else to report! it has been impossibly foggy here, to the point that the ground is saturated by sunrise, and i’m wanting to wear lots of sweaters. i cannot believe it’s the second week of october. i cannot believe a lot of things! g and stella are keeping me very warm at night while sam is working. more to follow next week! xo r

8/10 addendum: this article that covers the staggering numbers by which misinfo is spread! cc phil lewis, who shared an excerpt that i stumbled across on twitter. woof