Anyway, I'm glad this post got attention because I think that the "actually you were a Bad Kid if you didn't learn Media Literacy" only hurts people but at the same time, you do need to, like, learn to read.
The Qualifiers: Frankly I think the idea that "Media Literacy" is One Thing is bad in complicated and interesting ways. Frequently I see the argument used as a bludgeon to silence interpretations of a text that the speaker dislikes. At the same time, I think there is a mode of analysis that can be said to "lack Media Literacy".
The Goal: In general, I think we should understand analysis as a skill and a skill that should be practiced. In particular, we must remember that the reason you lack skill in analyzing texts is because it is in the interests of power that you are incapable of critically analyzing media, and thus less capable of criticizing power and organizing against it.
First, uh, what do we want to learn, exactly? The critical understanding here is that sentences have multiple meanings on multiple levels. They have implicit and explicit meanings. The difference between "what happened in the video" and "what is everyone in the video feeling" and "why is the video funny" and "why was the video made". All of these pieces of information can be extracted from a text, and the way to do that is practice.
The underlying and most critical piece of wisdom to keep in mind here is: Every choice that an author makes is a choice they had to make. Which decisions they made at each turning point can tell us about them. Each word in a headline was chosen intentionally and passed through several hands. The decision of when to start and stop the video had to be made. What's cropped out of the photo, or not cropped out of the photo, was done on purpose. This may sound overwhelming. It is!!! It's really overwhelming. The only way to not be overwhelmed is to practice.
Read. Read and talk about what you read. Read and then pause and ask yourself questions out loud. Go back and reread something you read before and point out things you didn't notice the first time and ask yourself why you didn't notice them and how you could have noticed them. And, if you can't read, write. Put yourself in the author's shoes. Learn about the medium. Listen to other people talk about things you've read (and ask yourself questions about what they're saying and why). But how do we read?
I have a small collection of strategies to learn how to read more that I'm proud of and have succeeded for me and others, in particular here are three favorites of mine:
1. Make reading a social activity. Join a book club. Start a book club. Read out loud with friends. Read in silence with friends. Find a friend who read it already and text them your reactions as you read it (they'll almost certainly love you if you do this). Post about your thoughts as you have them and share your thoughts with friends.
2. Schedule time to read. I recommend 30 minutes a day to start, though I usually do an hour. This is in my opinion best for classics and books that are more difficult to get through, but also works for most texts if you're struggling with boredom. If 30 minutes is too long, start at 5 minutes and add one minute every day. When you're done reading, I highly recommend channeling the energy built up while reading into other creative tasks, or even into talking about what you read.
3. Make reading more casual. A lot of my friends struggle not just because they can't make time to read or because reading is too low energy, but because they actively lack reading skills at the level of "it's difficult to focus on the words for a long time". In this case, read fanfiction! Read extremely low energy things! Read things that are just dumb fun! Read until you reach a point that reading is easy, even if that takes years. And let yourself enjoy the process. Like, find a collection of hundreds of stories published online with a tag you like or curated by someone who you trust and just start trying them one by one (this is surprisingly easy to do). I do recommend pushing yourself to spend a certain amount of time on this every day (even if it's as little as five minutes), but the goal is low stress and to work on building up basic skills, so I recommend structuring this requirement as just recording every time you succeed so you can build pride in your progress. The reason I recommend piling a large list of fanfiction is so that you can be able to drop things you don't like. So you can entirely avoid the "I need to read this for an assignment even though it's awful and I hate this" headspace. But ideally it should be a collection that will have things that you'll truly love, so things will hook you and carry you to read them. Good luck! It's hard but worth it.
