Digital Illiteracy

So one of the things we talked about this week was how to go viral. I thought it was really interesting, until I realized that I had already known all the things you need to make something go viral, I just didn't really know that I knew.

We went over a few things (mostly geared toward videos), like make it short, make it new, make it have emotional responses, things like that. I had basically known all of those things, I'm on the internet often; I've seen a lot of things that have gone viral, and I've seen a lot of things that haven't. But what I kept coming back to, was the fact that even those things weren't a guarantee for a viral post. I've seen plenty of things that have all those aspects, and still don't go viral. I've even seen post that were almost identical, both had those traits, yet one went viral and the other didn't.

To me it really seems like the internet is fickle. It meant that no matter how hard you try, how many of those viral traits your post has, sometimes it won't go viral just because the internet doesn't care this time. A lot of times things need a push from sites like 4chan or Reddit to make things popular elsewhere. To me, it seems like "going viral" can be pretty subjective at times.

Going along with this idea of what's viral, I read an article today in the New York Times titled "Faking Cultural Literacy". It talks about how, before the internet was a big part of our lives, there was cultural literacy, who was who and what was what for the time. People read newspaper articles, listened to talks, they consumed the media more fully. The article goes on to say that now, because of the amount of information that we go through, it would be impossible for us to read every article and watch every video we see. That's one of the reasons that Twitter and Vine are so popular, they have less data and are fast compared to other forms of media. But in our quest to stay relevant and appear knowledgeable and fashionable, we don't want to skip anything. So our only solution is to skim it all. Read the headlines. Watch the trailer. Read a review or a blog post. But we don't every really consume the media or data passed to us. So we really don't know anything. We're a society of ill-informed "know-it-alls".

So we have basically thrown cultural literacy out the window. And some people would argue that through the same process, we're throwing regular literacy out the window too. In a TED talk called "In praise of slowness", Carl Honore talks about how fast our society is, how detrimental it is to us, and how to slow down and really make the most of life. What he suggests is what I think society needs now more than almost anything else in development of our internet culture.