Please Just Learn Media Literacy

When I was in college, I was waxing enthusiastic to someone about the fact that it was Free Scoop Night at Baskin-Robbins, and they were even supporting literacy programs. And she demanded to know if it was literacy or media literacy, which was more important. I believed, then as now, that this was an absolutely bonkers take. Regular literacy is more important. Obviously. You need to be able to read before you can really deal with media literacy in any sensible way. At least in the modern age. But that doesn’t mean media literacy doesn’t matter.

We see examples of this all the time. Politicians who doesn’t seem to know what Rage Against the Machine is raging against. People who somehow don’t realize that Aslan is Jesus. And of course your basic Satanic Panic, where merely mentioning magic is somehow promoting Satanism. My personal favourite is people who can’t quite listen to the lyrics of “Every Breath You Take” and realize that it’s not, in fact, romantic. It’s creepy. Even if Sting says he’s not going to argue with how people take it.

The most recent big example has been KPop Demon Hunters, of course. Over the weekend, I watched some videos of Christian influencers on TikTok complaining that it was in fact Satanic really and you shouldn’t be fooled by the fact that they were fighting demons, because, well, spoilers I’m not going to give. But they were going on about how it’s about embracing shame. Which I think in part is because their definition of “shame” is more to do with embracing a thing you should be ashamed of.

If you think that movie is on the side of the demons, you should really reconsider. It’s not about embracing shame; it’s about not being ashamed of how you were born. Now, a lot of the sort of people I was watching absolutely think people should be ashamed of various ways they were born, and that’s a conversation on its own. But the biggest problem is that these people are all looking at the movie from a fundamentalist Christian perspective and expecting it to follow in any rational way. They aren’t worried about Korean mythology, because it’s obviously wrong.

Oh, I’m not saying I’m an expert in Korean mythology. But I know that my personal cultural filters are not accurate to the job of understanding the cultural context of that movie. And I’m capable of learning where I’m wrong. As it happens, part of how I do that is by reading, which is one of the reasons I maintain actual literacy matters. But man, the people that don’t realize the Empire is the bad guys in Star Wars are beyond even that help.