I have been creating things very often for as long as I can remember anything. When I have an excuse to make something, my mind will turn on some sort of internal TV station presenting me the overall elements and feeling of a personal project. The final piece is often very different but still keeps the overall theme. Any time I create something mentionable I always feel happy, and my skills grow in small bits. This can be said for many people, whether they’re in art, construction, or have dreams of making anything with a passion. Putting things on this planet that were never there before, rearranging particles in mass in a way that your mind reads something communicative and new, is one of the best things about being alive in my opinion. I desire nothing more than a safe world for all and the tools to make whatever I want to; two things that many artists want and two things that have always been deeply challenged.
People have been afraid of leaps in mass communication for centuries, and, as a result, many dystopian novels have been made. With easily accessible and consumable media comes a greater challenge to media literacy. My favorite piece of dystopian fiction I’ve read is Fahrenheit 451, a piece critical on the growth of television, portraying a society where people talk to some sort of AI in their massive TV screens, and where books are completely outlawed and burned. People don’t focus on their issues and fear what they don’t understand in the novel, and to an extent, it is all too real. Books are of course challenged in real life and sometimes banned if people don’t like or agree with them. I’ve seen books with parts taken out of context just so conservative officials can pick at them more easily. I have seen people talk to machines that mimic humanity as if they are talking to real people, similar to the “families” people have inside of their massive television screens in the novel. The author Ray Bradbury has stated it was less about predicting the future and more about preventing it. It goes back to 1953 and it scares me in realizing how horrific and mundane futures imagined by intelligent minds are becoming closer and closer to reality. Who knows what will happen if AI generated material becomes indistinguishable from something captured or made by actual people, all we would have would be the machines which tap our mental buttons of recognition and association with no real intent or outlook behind it. There’s always resistance against these things so we must keep spirit.
The greatest threat to media literacy in my opinion is short-form content as well as a lack of self control. I very often see people just consuming things with no real purpose or thought or questioning of what they are actually watching, every time I see it a great force of confusion and absurdity falls upon me. I once went on tiktok.com to see how it would feel to scroll through a few videos and it gave me nothing more than intense intrigue and mental tiredness. Much of the world now mindlessly lets an app comparable to nothing more than personalized TV static eat itself deep in their brains and all it would take to cut it off is simple self-control. If you do not use something with a purpose and you have little self control my best advice is to just delete it, no excuses.
People used to have to go outside and seek out media themselves (they still sat there with their television sets for too long of course). Content was usually physical and it took time and care to fully appreciate it, or they’d have to wait for something good to come through a radio frequency. I collect physical media and put my creations on there partially to symbolize being against everything being at our fingertips. Now we have an app that shows you things it knows you’ll like, and can do it constantly. Is this really better, or do corporations just have greater means to trap us in webs of dopamine, laziness, and ignorance? The latest president elect certainly proves this, and many around me agree. From all the political media I’ve thought about for years, I think I can say it was voting for either a flawed but sane candidate with some pretty reasonable desires for America or a criminal who’s swayed the public with extreme tribalism and idiocracy, who ran (and won) for potential dictatorship in order to escape a prison sentencing. The way we consume media and the way it’s evolved has played a big part in this, the results will be mass oppression and possible catastrophe if we don’t take a rest to reevaluate for how we live and eventually revolt the best we can. Have you seen the kinds of baseless nonsense people in incredibly powerful positions have been spewing? We’ve been turned against ourselves by some very demented voices, innocent people who just want to live somewhere will be deported and the rights of normal people are going to be taken away because of stubborn misunderstandings. This is the price we have to pay if we steer our humanity in the wrong direction.
I think it’s easy to conclude that people are afraid of change and that fear is not always unjustified, we’ve come to a state of media consumption I have just completely bashed after all. I feel a little lonely in my state of discontent, we aren’t socializing in person very much apart from school and my issues with our education system have long been large. The changes I fear are the changes in our state of awareness. One of favorite quotes from television are “My vision would turn your world upside down, tear asunder your illusions, and send the sanctuary of your own ignorance crashing down around you. Now ask yourself. Are you really ready to see that vision?” The quote comes from the character Huey Freeman who’s my favorite character in one of my favorite pieces of progressive media, one deep in progressive socialism despite only being ten years old. The main reason I’m talking about this is that when I first started watching The Boondocks a few years ago it slightly changed the way I think, I’ve become more critical and careful of mindsight while believing strongly in compassion and rationality. I’ve decided what media to shape my mind with, I believe it’s gone the opposite direction as most around me. I look for things that I can dig deep into, strangely artistic things that boggle the mind and have you search for meaning. When you eventually find that meaning it sticks to you more and more depending on how much effort you put into finding it, some of my favorites are Puella Magi Madoka Magica, anything by Jack Stauber, and the wonderful films thought of by Jan Švankmajer and Hayao Miyazaki.
In theory I think finding the right kinds of media should be easier than ever with our state of technology, I don’t find it hard to stay off my phone unless I think of a definite reason to go on there for a few minutes and I don’t find it hard to just enjoy existence as it is. Go outside and run around for an hour, you might discover something cool and I promise it’s more stimulating and more healthy than your phone.
