Reading response 1

Reading through Avgerinou's article sixteen years after it was originally written, it was so spot on in assessing the increasing ubiquity of visual, digital media as well as laying a framework for necessary understanding and skills to have in order to make critical sense of the form of information. Looking at it in the present day, some of the information feels obvious, such as the blurred lines between creation and consumption, the infusion of power and propaganda, and the implicit influence on our identities that digital media has. It feels clear to me how media literacy has created such a social and political divide, noticeably across the United States and surely globally too, since the rapid domination of digital, visual information has been a revolutionary turning point in the spread of information in general. While the article was deep enough into the 21st century to clearly observe this takeover, the degree of digital media consumption across demographics is more blatant now than ever before, supporting the idea of media you consume being deeply influential to how you act and who you are. One of my other classes explored this topic, but cited that it's not the first time that mainstream shifts in the technology we use to consume information made immediate, profound impacts on culture - and while that sounds obvious when you look at something like the radio, the shift caused by the TV in changing our behavior and influencing the media itself was actually fascinating. The example we used was for the Nixon vs Kennedy presidential debates, where the masses were divided between TV and radio, and the saying after the election became that if you listened to the radio, Nixon won, but Kennedy won if you watched TV - not because of some drastic difference in beliefs between who chose what medium to consume the debates through, but simply because Nixon sounded better suited over the radio and Kennedy was better suited to be compelling on TV.