Literacy is an amazingly nebulous concept. The word is commonly used in a binary either / or fashion: either you are literate or you are illiterate. Yet as anyone with even just an inkling of an education will easily assert, it is much more realistic to say that there are degrees or levels (or maybe directions) of literacy. A person may be especially literate (or “well-versed”) in botany and at the same time be barely literate in astronomy. Literacy need not only apply to scientific methods — indeed, someone may be illiterate in women, men, both, children, babies and also cooking, archery or nearly anything at all. [1]
Generally speaking, though, most people are able to communicate something to someone in some kind of language. Yet to be able to use one language is a far cry from being able to use all language. So although we may refer to someone as literate in one language, or even a few languages, I feel I can quite safely go out on a limb and maintain that there is no-one at all who is literate in all languages. In this manner, everyone who is alive or has ever lived (and maybe also everyone who will ever will live) is far more illiterate than they are (or were, or will ever be) literate.
Let me now turn to a very specialized “literacy” topic — and that is what people sometimes refer to as “media literacy“. With this topic, we focus on the technology (and market forces, such as capital) commonly referred to as “media”. These are the nuts and bolts of language, information and communications technology. In order to understand media, we must be aware that these inputs are actually scarce resources. That is fairly obvious with such factors of production as ink and paper, yet it becomes ever more nebulous when we advance to more abstract concepts such as letters of the alphabet, or more generally words and ideas. Yet in linguistic circles it is a well-known phenomenon that when a word exists which already refers to a distinct concept, that same string of letters is sort of “taken”, and therefore is no longer available to refer to another new concept. Over the past few centuries, this has led to governments creating more and more regulations for various terms, including terms for particular companies, organizations and such. Usually, these are very makeshift solutions, and this is probably due to the ephemeral nature of life (and death), namely that these things come and go — so there is really no need to work on something like a permanent solution.
One key idea, though, that has guided the development of regulations for these special terms (such as “brand names” and “trademarks”) is that they must be clearly separated from what regular humans use everyday for ordinary life — namely: language. Note that this is in sharp contrast to the historical development of family names such as “Smith” or “Miller” or “Johnson” (etc.). As a result, in most countries there are government regulations granting entities (such as corporations) the exclusive right to define particular strings which are intended to refer to the company (such as “Microsoft” or “Google”). These terms are assumed to have no linguistic meaning themselves (and indeed: this is usually a prerequisite to these privileges [of granting the right for companies to name themselves] being allowed).
These historical developments have lead to a bifurcated media landscape (which I have referred to elsewhere as the bifurcation of “Rational Media” [ https://phlat.design.blog/2024/01/14/rational-media ] … versus “irrational media”). Yet the traditional media landscape has such a long history that there now is such a long (and large) tail of a wide variety of legacy media brands, that what is now commonly referred to as “mainstream” brands are for the most part meaningless strings. Since these mainstream media brands have no meaning, they are not “about” anything. They seem to be disinterested and unbiased. This has led these mainstream media brands to focus their attention entirely on maximizing profits amidst cutthroat competition. Therefore, the leading mainstream media brands tend to be the companies most prone to push advertising (and similar types of propaganda).
Increasingly, there seems to be less and less justification for anyone to expect to earn a profit by expressing something — whether facts, beliefs, knowledge, information, opinions or whatever. Since more and more people are becoming more and more literate, why should anyone pay someone else for their expressions? Personally, I feel it would be much more appropriate for someone to pay me to have to listen to their meaningless babble or twitter or whatever.
My own interests are much less “consumer”-oriented. I prefer to participate and collaborate with others who also share my own interests, hobbies and such. My hunch is that I would gladly pay an entrance fee to join a community of fans, much in the same way I might join a club or team working towards common (or perhaps complementary) goals.
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