Literacy & Publicacy

Literacy and publicacy go hand-in-hand.

The way I see the relationship between literacy and publicacy goes like this: Literacy is the ability to know what others have made public; Publicacy is the ability to know how to make something public.

I think eventually the Twentieth Century will go down in history as a strange time when the widespread trust in corporate progress created phenomenal brand-name behemoth corporations which wielded immense power over the “public psyche”. [1]

At some point, these fictional personas will eventually create such fantastic narratives in their attempts to win competitively versus their corresponding competitors, that the mesmerized populace will ultimately become sick and feverishly shake their heads, or perhaps even tremble and quake all over in a quasi-animalistic attempt to “shake it off” and free themselves from the psychological burdens of constant mainstream propaganda immersion.

Source: some popular video platform search result for **taylor swift shake it off**

Yet this is the kind of yarn of my own which my mind creates on a typical Sunday morning when I let it run rampant. Let me try to bring it back down to Earth by mentioning something not completely different yet different enough to seem more-or-less rational.

Time and again I will receive comments on some of my blogs in which some youngster who is not well-versed in either literacy or publicacy skills will demand that I “take down” some of my own content — because I quoted something they have themselves published (and which they therefore feel they own, such that I must ask their permission in order to quote something they themselves have attempted to make public). [2] Never mind that usually these youngsters seem to have never ever before received any attention from any somewhat conscious life-form at all.

Well, OK — that may be a rather extreme opinion of my own. And yet I find it quite difficult to fathom how shallow the world view that I might need to ask permission for me to simply make an observation about what I feel — from my own perspective — is going on somewhere in the world. About something that has been published. Made public (at least potentially). In the free and open marketplace of ideas which exists in the so-called “cyber-space” more commonly known as the WWW (world-wide-web), sometimes referred to (or “also known”) as THE INTERNET.