Do you need to end this horrible, no-good, awful, terrible, insanely bad, bonkers year on a good note? For the last 75 days of this year, I’ll post free media literacy and art appreciation posts. Each will be about 1-2 minutes, and they will make you feel better about engaging with the world. If nothing else, they’ll take your mind off the worst the world has to offer.
How will this work? Subscribe and/or check in daily for a quick post. I’ll schedule them at lunchtime.
Let me give you a sample of what I mean. When you hear the phrase media literacy, do you focus on literacy or the media? We use the combination of the words in English, but have you thought about the formula your mind uses? Many of us took reading and English language arts for years. You create meaning from letters so quickly that you don’t even perceive the cognitive effort. Language feels instantaneous. This is also why you feel frustrated when a word doesn’t come to your lips on command. The more you struggle, the less likely the word is to manifest.
In visual culture, creators have different goals. Much of the visual culture you see daily is classified as design–visuals in the service of a function. Your icons, your interfaces, the ads you saw online, and the mug you used for coffee are all designed to keep you focused on use rather than the picture. Design is basically art that is invisible to the user so it can be useful. Take the last app you used. What visual cues did you see? If you go back, you might see you missed some. Similarly, can you describe your car dashboard without looking at it? Now describe a spoon or mug you’ve used that was too awkward to put into words. Memorable designs are the ones that don’t work.
Herein lies our challenge in society. We focus on textual literacy, so we're so literate that any missed word is obvious and frustrating. But we don’t train ourselves in media literacy; after all, design is a form of media, so we only notice what doesn’t work.
Media literacy should mean being able to fluently discern the meaning, motivations, and goals of non-textual communication. Many of us focus on literacy, as we are already literate in text. But often, the ways we fail with media literacy miss the nuances of the different types of media our complicated world offers. For the last 75 days of 2026, join me for short articles (about this long) to become truly more literate in our media-rich world.
