How to Practice Media Literacy in the Age of Algorithms and AI
Your Old Media-Literacy Rules Are Not Enough
How to Practice Media Literacy in the Age of Algorithms and AI
Media literacy used to mean asking who created a message, who owned the publication, what evidence supported the claim, and what bias shaped the coverage.
Those questions still matter. But they are no longer enough.
Today, a single story can become a news article, TikTok clip, reaction video, podcast segment, Instagram carousel, meme, AI summary, headline screenshot, and algorithmic recommendation. Each version may reach a different audience with a different amount of context.
In this episode of Network Issues, media scholar Jamie Cohen and marketing strategist Destinee Day explain how media literacy must evolve for a world shaped by recommendation algorithms, misinformation, memes, clipping, synthetic media, and artificial intelligence.
What Is Media Literacy?
Media literacy is the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act using media.
It is more than knowing how to operate a phone, edit a video, or publish a social post. Those are media skills.
Media literacy involves asking:
Who created this message?
Why was it created?
Who benefits from it?
What evidence supports it?
What has been omitted?
How is the message framed?
What action does it encourage?
How should I respond?
The goal is not simply to identify whether something is true or false. It is to make more informed decisions as a citizen, consumer, creator, and participant in public life.
Why Traditional Media Literacy Is No Longer Enough
Traditional frameworks were largely developed around recognizable media formats.
A newspaper looked like a newspaper. A television advertisement looked like an advertisement. A news report appeared inside a scheduled broadcast.
Digital media does not remain inside those boundaries.
A single piece of reporting can be:
Summarized without its evidence
Cropped into a screenshot
Reframed by an influencer
Clipped into a short video
Turned into a meme
Recommended to an unrelated audience
Rewritten by an AI system
Detached from its original date
Shared alongside false commentary
The original source may still be accurate, while the version circulating through social media becomes misleading.
Modern media literacy therefore requires understanding both the message and the system distributing it.
How Did the Pandemic Change Media Consumption?
The COVID-19 pandemic pushed work, school, health information, entertainment, politics, and personal relationships into the same digital environment.
Destinee describes the change as a stampede: people were already walking through online spaces, and then nearly everyone arrived at once.
Several developments accelerated simultaneously:
Remote work
Livestreaming
Social activism
Platform-based news
Creator economies
Health misinformation
Political polarization
Algorithmic recommendations
Short-form video
Institutional social-media messaging
The pandemic did not invent these systems. It compressed years of adoption into a much shorter period.
People gained access to more information without necessarily receiving better tools for evaluating it.
How Does Corporate Ownership Affect Media Coverage?
Media ownership remains a foundational literacy question.
A media company may have financial relationships with:
Entertainment companies
Sports leagues
Technology platforms
Advertisers
Political organizations
Parent corporations
Production companies
Ownership does not automatically prove that reporting is dishonest.
It does create potential incentives, limitations, and conflicts that audiences should understand.
When evaluating coverage, ask:
Who owns the outlet?
What businesses are connected to it?
Who advertises there?
Does the outlet clearly label news, analysis, opinion, and sponsored content?
Is the story independently confirmed elsewhere?
What Role Do Algorithms Play?
Algorithms help determine what appears in a feed, the order in which it appears, and how often similar material returns.
They may respond to:
Watch time
Pauses
Likes
Comments
Shares
Searches
Location
Previous topics
Accounts followed
Similar audience behavior
This means people do not merely consume media. Their behavior continually trains the system, selecting their next piece of media.
A person may watch an inaccurate rumor because it seems absurd. The platform may interpret that attention as interest and recommend more of the same.
Media literacy now includes understanding that attention is data.
How Can You Evaluate an Online Claim?
Use this five-step framework.
1. Pause
Do not share a claim simply because it creates an immediate emotional reaction.
Urgency is often part of the persuasion strategy.
2. Identify the original source
Determine whether you are seeing:
Original reporting
A screenshot
A reaction
A clipped quotation
A rumor account
Sponsored content
Satire
AI-generated material
3. Read laterally
Leave the page and investigate what other reliable sources say about the outlet, author, organization, or claim.
Professional fact-checkers frequently evaluate unfamiliar sources by opening new tabs rather than remaining on the original page. Stanford’s Civic Online Reasoning program calls this lateral reading. (Collaborative Research at Stanford)
4. Find independent confirmation
Look for reporting that does not simply link back to the same original post.
Several articles repeating one anonymous claim are not necessarily several independent confirmations.
5. Restore the context
Find the full interview, video, report, dataset, speech, or study.
Ask what happened before and after the circulating clip.
What Is Clipping?
Clipping is the process of extracting short moments from longer videos, podcasts, livestreams, interviews, or broadcasts.
Responsible clipping can help people discover a larger piece of work. It can make complex ideas accessible and adapt content for different platforms.
Irresponsible clipping can:
Remove qualifications
Reverse a speaker’s meaning
Exaggerate conflict
Combine unrelated statements
Hide the original source
Reward the most provocative moment
Turn analysis into outrage
The clip is not automatically false. It is incomplete by design.
Treat it as an invitation to locate the original—not as the complete record.
How Do Responsible Creators Use Clipping?
Destinee explains that responsible clipping begins with the full content strategy.
A long episode may become:
Several short videos
Quote graphics
An article
A newsletter
Social captions
Guest pitches
A carousel
Related educational posts
Responsible creators try to preserve the speaker’s meaning while still making the clip interesting.
They should consider:
Does the clip misrepresent the full conversation?
Is the speaker’s qualification included?
Is the original episode linked?
Is the title accurate?
Does the thumbnail promise something the clip does not deliver?
Is controversial language being used only for reach?
Creators are not outside the media-literacy framework. They have additional responsibilities because they understand how framing changes audience interpretation.
Why Do Rumors Look Believable?
Online rumors borrow the visual language of legitimate reporting.
They may use:
News-style thumbnails
Urgent headlines
Professional logos
Source-like usernames
Screenshots of quotations
“Breaking” labels
Anonymous insiders
Partial video clips
Destinee uses Formula 1 rumors as an example.
A quote may begin in a real interview, lose its surrounding context, and generate months of speculation. An account can build engagement by repeatedly presenting that speculation as a new development.
Before accepting a rumor, look for:
A named reporter
A recognizable publication
A link to the original source
A direct quotation
Independent confirmation
Reporting from the relevant organization or individual
Why Does Context Matter More Than Ever?
Online media frequently reaches people outside its original community.
A joke intended for one subculture may be interpreted as a factual statement elsewhere. A clip from a long academic discussion may be presented as a political endorsement. An old video may circulate as though it happened today.
This is sometimes called context collapse.
The audience loses information about:
Who was speaking
Who the intended audience was
When it happened
What genre it belonged to
What came before it
Whether it was serious, ironic, promotional, or satirical
The ability to restore that context is one of the most valuable modern media-literacy skills.
How Have Memes Changed Media?
A meme is not only an image with text.
Memes can include:
Sounds
Gestures
Phrases
Video formats
Challenges
Characters
Editing styles
Repeated behaviors
A meme reduces an idea into a form that can be copied and changed.
That makes memes powerful tools for humor and cultural participation. It also allows political, commercial, or misleading ideas to travel without a traditional argument.
Someone may repeat a phrase because it signals group membership without knowing its origin or broader meaning.
Media literacy therefore requires asking not only what a meme says, but what community, ideology, or event travels with it.
What Changes in the Age of AI?
Generative AI can now summarize articles, create images, imitate voices, generate video, write headlines, and produce confident explanations.
That creates several new questions:
Is this media authentic?
Was AI used to alter it?
Does the summary match the original source?
Are the citations real?
What information was supplied to the model?
What information did the model invent?
Who is responsible for the final claim?
AI should not be treated as an independent source simply because its answer sounds polished.
UNESCO’s current media- and information-literacy guidance emphasizes understanding the social context of AI, critically engaging with AI systems, and applying existing literacy principles to new technologies. (UNESCO)
A Practical Framework for AI-Generated Information
When an AI system provides a factual answer:
Ask it to identify its sources.
Open the original sources yourself.
Confirm that the sources say what the AI claims.
Check dates and publication context.
Separate verified facts from interpretation.
Never assume a citation is real without opening it.
Use authoritative sources for medical, legal, financial, or political claims.
Treat confident language as style—not proof.
Skepticism Is Not Cynicism
Jamie distinguishes skepticism from cynicism.
A skeptic asks:
How do I know this?
A cynic assumes:
Nothing can be trusted.
Cynicism can make people just as vulnerable as blind trust. When someone believes every institution lies, they may accept whichever alternative source confirms their existing beliefs.
Healthy skepticism requires evidence, patience, and a willingness to change one’s mind.
The Network Issues Media-Literacy Checklist
Before sharing a post, article, video, clip, or AI answer, ask:
Source: Who originally created it?
Purpose: What does the creator want me to believe or do?
Evidence: What supports the claim?
Context: What happened before and after?
Ownership: Who funds or controls the source?
Distribution: Why did the algorithm show this to me?
Framing: What words, images, or clips shape my reaction?
Confirmation: Has it been independently verified?
Creation: Was it edited, sponsored, clipped, or generated with AI?
Action: What happens if I share, buy, vote, or react?
Key Takeaways
Media literacy is more than technical skill.
Traditional questions about authorship, ownership, evidence, and bias still matter.
Algorithms determine which messages receive attention.
A clip is an edited representation, not the full context.
Rumors often borrow the appearance of legitimate journalism.
Memes can carry ideology and identity without making an explicit argument.
AI-generated explanations should be independently verified.
Lateral reading is more effective than evaluating an unfamiliar source only from its own website.
Responsible creators must consider how their clips and headlines change meaning.
Slowing down is one of the most effective responses to misinformation.
Questions Answered in This Episode
What is media literacy?
Media literacy is the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act using media responsibly.
Why is media literacy important?
It helps people evaluate information, recognize persuasion, understand ownership and incentives, and make better civic and consumer decisions.
What is lateral reading?
Lateral reading means leaving an unfamiliar page and opening other sources to investigate who is behind it and whether it is credible.
How do algorithms affect media literacy?
Algorithms personalize and rank content based partly on user behavior, meaning visibility is not the same as accuracy or importance.
What is context collapse?
Context collapse occurs when media reaches an audience without the original cultural, conversational, historical, or platform context needed to interpret it.
How should people evaluate AI-generated information?
Verify its claims through original, authoritative sources and never assume that polished language or a supplied citation proves accuracy.
Is clipping unethical?
No. Clipping is a normal content practice. It becomes misleading when it removes essential context or misrepresents the original speaker.
About the Hosts
Jamie Cohen
Jamie Cohen is a media scholar, professor, writer, and expert on internet culture, online extremism, memes, media literacy, and the manosphere.
Website: jamesncohen.com
Substack: New Media Homework
Destinee Day
Destinee Day is a marketing strategist and founder of Rudy & Company. Her work focuses on branding, digital strategy, communications, online influence, and responsible marketing.
Website: rudyandcompany.com
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Jamie (00:01.772)
Hello, how are you?
Destinee Day (00:03.794)
Doing fine, how are you?
Jamie (00:05.656)
Doing well, thank you. I'd wanna spend some time today talking about something that's a little bit more broad, but more close to like what we have studied and what I study in particular and part of what I teach in my classes. So something a little less attached to the immediate.
news and more along the lines of media literacies in general and digital media literacies and how we should understand the changing world of the media environments and why media literacy in its traditional context may not be working as well in our hyper mediated present. So I would love to talk about with you because you and I have both have a background in studying media. I think you went to journalism school, right? And I went to TV school.
Destinee Day (00:47.144)
It's.
Jamie (00:49.614)
And so we were trained in traditional media in a world where both our jobs probably wouldn't be the same anymore. So what we learned isn't exactly applicable, but I think it's important for us to talk about it because in the general discussion space online and elsewhere, I think people are still struggling with the changes that are happening in media that have happened so rapidly since the pandemic stay at home period that.
we should just talk about it because what we've talked about for the last several episodes, we've basically been going on with the assumption that people know this, but I do think that we should give at least a little bit of a primer of where we come from. Let's give some background. I'll just really quick, I graduated as a TV major at a school in Long Island and I became a TV producer and I manipulated people on reality TV. So I learned media literacy backward. And where did you go? Where's your?
studies.
Destinee Day (01:47.514)
So I went to journalism school and then I didn't actually pivoted out of the journalism program because that was as 24 hour news networks were really going for it. And I pivoted into film and television. And so like you, I worked as a story producer on a reality TV show for a little bit, did some onset editing and then ended up in
marketing, is essentially like being a story producer, but for product. So.
Jamie (02:21.036)
That is what it is. Yeah. You have, you're creating the narrative for somebody to make a consumer choice. So I didn't know. I mean, to be clear, I mean, you and I are professionals. have careers. I'm now a faculty, tenured faculty member. You're a marketing genius and we're in a place where we
know things but when I was a student I was pretty stupid. I didn't know what media literacy was at all. That's why learning it sideways was not great but when I started when I went back to grad school I was studying cultural studies and I met my buddy Paul who
Pomi Aliti is my mentor who basically was like, hey, you know, when you're teaching your students about digital media, this is back when was like YouTube was just a new thing and Twitter was just emerging. He goes, you're technically doing media literacy. And I was like, what? And I started going to conferences about traditional media literacy, especially conferences like Namely, the National Association of Media Literacy Educators. And that really changed my outlook on all the pedagogy I've done ever since.
I reframe it, of course, through digital media literacies, which includes the tool use, which is the browser, the cell phone, and so forth. And then, of course, my book that just came out last year, Critical Internet Literacies, which is a deep dive further than what we'll talk about today. Maybe we'll touch on the nuances of critical internet literacies, but it is a little bit different than media literacy. Now, when I learned it, I learned it in the traditional way. And I'd like to hear if this is similar to what you learned.
The traditional structure of media literacy is like a five part structure. It's really like they give this little map of how media literacies work. It's mistaken. Media literacy is often mistaken for media skills. And that's because a lot of people think of like media literacy as literacy, which is reading and writing. But that's a skill. Those are skills. We're not born. No human is born with the ability to read or write. Okay, that is where we're born with the ability to communicate.
Jamie (04:23.03)
And so we have to be trained. How do you read? How do you convert thoughts into text? Which is like a crazy, when you think about that, it's like kind of crazy. But that type of thing is, that's a skill set that can be learned and unlearned. If you were a heavy GPT user, you could unlearn it. But there is, that skill set is actually something that has to be like practiced and writing is different than typing, you know? So it is something that like requires upkeep.
Traditional media literacy, like the actual media literacy, is about access, making sure you can get access to the information itself, analyzing, which is being able to interpret meaning that comes from things, evaluating, which is very traditional. evaluating is like, who is the author? What is the publication? What's its bias? What's all these things in there? And that's usually where media literacy converts to now the literacy's part of writing, which is creating, like being able to
If you own enough of that knowledge, you could then create media. And then acting, which is the most important part of media literacy. So traditional media literacy and all media literacies rely on the increase of agency, which is your ability to be a better actor in this world, whether that's civic actor or consumer choice. It's just if you are good, if you have more media literacies, you make better choices. That makes you a better actor, makes you a better
have more agency of yourself. So if you're good at media literacy and all those steps that came before it, you can make better choices, which in theory sounds great. Unfortunately, it doesn't really give what's a bad choice. So we are now inundated with a world of rabbit holes where making a choice doesn't always mean the outcome is a positive action. So what I'd like to talk about today is where the limitations of traditional media literacy come across.
modern content, content that you and I do, content that you and I interact with or research. And what we can do or what takeaways we can offer that people can then start incorporating into their skill set and to their literacies so that they understand what they're looking at better, not perfect, but better than what it would have been if they just come across a piece of media and how we could see it. So I guess the best thing I could explain, the best pivot I could talk about first to
Jamie (06:42.03)
to tee up what we're gonna talk about is the pandemic changed how people interacted with media. Before it, we could still make an argument that traditional media landscapes, print, newspapers had a certain way of saying what they were saying. We go all the way back to Marshall McLuhan who would say the medium is the message, which is a very media literacy basis thing, which is, you know.
If it's in a newspaper, it must be news. If it's on TV, it must be television. And so that no longer happens because this guy, George W. Bush, he created this act in 2006 called the End of TV Act. And in 2009, this other guy, Barack Obama, turned off television, like turned it off. It's crazy to think about. like midnight on Sunday, I think it was August of 2009, it just went and it was over.
Television ended. And what that meant was that the traditional broadcast model of television ceased to exist in the analog sense. A new model was replacing it, digital television. But once everything's digital, pretty much all of your media comes into your house via either a fiber optic cable or a coaxial cable. There's no more TV. It's digital media that's being translated from genre origins. So McLuhan did like a nice barrel roll in his grave. And then that was it. Now we're here.
so I would just like to talk to you about like media we see and media we make and like how we could better, better read that.
Destinee Day (08:15.376)
Yeah, I mean, I learned something very similar in journalism school and it was set up. I was taught it in a classroom, but it was very much set up as you will not see ABC News covering Disney roller coaster failure, right? Because you have to understand the structure of Disney owns ABC News, Disney owns ESPN, Disney owns these things. they are, is unlikely they will ever say anything negative about the parent company.
And so that's very much how I was taught media literacy was who owns what, what reporters working for what thing and what they've said about it. And that was how I was taught media literacy, which you're right, is a very old school mentality.
Jamie (09:04.238)
Yeah, it is. So that's interesting, too. I was you were very lucky because I was not taught that. But that's I do teach that. But that is something that I was I took mass 101 mass media 101, which is like the foundational course in college, where it's like, look at this. And it was right after 9 11, like right after. So it was like that semester. So do you remember the big shift that was happened that that semester? Do you remember what changed on TV?
Destinee Day (09:33.512)
This is gonna sound really annoying and I just apologize. I was in like third grade when that happened.
Jamie (09:39.278)
My bad. Here's our age gap.
Destinee Day (09:44.456)
I do remember the world pre-9-11 and post-9-11. So I am old enough to remember the difference. I just was in my classroom in that setting.
Jamie (09:54.991)
So the big difference, yeah, it was weird. It was a weird time because like where I went to school, we not only watched it, but we had to like deal with it. It was, it was not, not great. Um, the, um, the ticker on the bottom of the screen appeared. It was used to be like only during breaking news events would be like the bottom of scrolly, you know, and then nine 11 introduced that as like a permanent feature of television was like immediate news was at the bottom and like TV was on top of it. Um,
Destinee Day (10:23.879)
Yeah.
Jamie (10:25.006)
Which was interesting because like 9-11, not to say, I mean, it was an incident of a day, but the ticker basically started creating this mode of media representation where you were kind of waiting for new news to emerge. That fall was a pretty intense time attached to 9-11, but not part of 9-11 was the anthrax attacks that came out. then,
Three months later, an airplane actually crash landed in Brooklyn on November 11th of that year. And people forget that, yeah, literally in Park Slope, think, a plane literally crashed. And so the fall was a very busy time. But I think the ticker has changed. That changed a lot of the way that media literacy operated, because now there was a sense of, so you would know this from going to journalism school. There became this quote that started going around, which was, it's better to be right than be first.
because every, yeah, and so everybody was like, speed became part of media, like, and that shifted the way that people wanted it. And obviously today when like there is no right, there's just everything's first. It has changed the way that we interact with media in general, but that ticker I think is part of that. And so media literacy and it's like what you were just mentioning, like that traditional one is really important because like, I've asked students about,
Destinee Day (11:20.359)
Yes.
Jamie (11:47.673)
corporatized media and like what they report on. And I've done it probably somewhat unethically, but this is a podcast and I can't really be caught in trouble for this. But I do a semester where I would not teach corporate media and then a semester where I would teach corporate media and ask the students and see how the outcomes would be, they're questions of whether or not there should be corporate influence on media. And it was so interesting because when you teach corporate media,
They don't want it. They don't want corporate infusion. They want ABC to report on an accident at Disney. And then when you don't teach it, they're just like, well, they can report on whatever they want. This is how reporting works. so part of media literacy, the access point, isn't there's a point before having access to the media, which is access to people like us who could actually talk to people and explain this. we have to foundationally, traditional media literacy lacks its like.
Who's going to do this work? Who's going to do the work for that? Jumping ahead, of course. So the pandemic.
put everybody online simultaneously and there was no digital literacies. First off, there's no book for the internet. There's no rules. There's no like, here's how you use this technology, which in our previous episodes, you could hear us ranting about like why this has led to like cases and problems and acts and legislation that people don't understand and why most of the bills about the internet come from the 1990s. But when we were all thrust online to use the internet simultaneously,
Nobody had like, nobody was like handed, there was no government like, here's a media literacy guide to what you're about to see because now you're about to expose all media simultaneously in a form that you're not really used to. So do you feel like a shift like you in your industry is like when you watched it, did everything change for you about that time? Or was it like, time's also very messed up for me. I can't really like put a timeline on things anymore. But that was about where everything shifted for me.
Destinee Day (13:45.032)
We're in April now and I mentally I'm still in February, right? That's just like my mind time versus the reality timeline. But I think it felt less.
Destinee Day (14:05.32)
It felt like suddenly we were on the internet kind of walking and then a ton of people showed up at the same time and now it's a stampede. I don't necessarily know if from my point of view the content changed, but suddenly everybody was there and on. It felt like...
Jamie (14:19.149)
Yes.
Destinee Day (14:32.004)
everything was a social media emergency. So to like speed that up from 9-11, right, we were also a global pandemic. We were also dealing with all the George Floyd situations over here in the United States. That was causing a lot of news and, you know, it impacted a lot of what corporate messaging was going around. It was just a crazy time where it felt like
maybe what would have happened in three years happened in a matter of months. And so that's how it felt to me.
Jamie (15:07.458)
Yes.
Mm hmm. Now I agree with that completely. You're 100 % right. It feels like a time slip almost. Like everything was like very cumulative at the exact same moment. And to note what you just said about the corporate influence, the BLM protests of 2020 did in a different way than the movements had operated pre pandemic period. It changed the way the discussions happened. And this is also not just BLM, but the Me Too movement that happened the years before.
The ad industry and media industry has responded to that and they actually made that part of it, which is in many ways a long lasting good part, but in many ways a very strange role in which the media itself has almost been controlled a little bit differently. It's like messaging itself has to be like, it wasn't as free flowing. So now we have this influence of culture on media itself, which is beyond the idea of corporate and money. So that was a distinct shift. You're absolutely right.
Destinee Day (16:08.594)
I mean, I think part of it too, if we take into consideration this, how time has sped up, I have not been back into an office since six years ago when I walked out of our previous place of employment. I've been remote ever since and I didn't know it. I didn't prepare for it. That wasn't something I was planning for. It just is a fact.
And now we're six years out of it and I've never, I haven't been back to an office.
Jamie (16:39.63)
That is absolutely wild. That is, I mean, yeah, that's not just you either. Remote work has became kind of normalized. And even in our industry, the weirdest part was that we have friends who like have setups at home or they edit Avid, which when we went to school, like Avid, you could not, that was an office job. You cannot bring an Avid home, you know? And now they just VPN to an Avid that's at work and they just edit, you know? And that's in real time. Do you remember VPNs in real time with a lag?
Destinee Day (17:07.634)
Yes. Yes, because I tried to set it up at our previous place of employment. My partner and I had tried to set it up. We would have to remote into our desk. We would have our laptop and we would remote into the desktop that was sitting in our office. And there was like a two to three second lag on that thing. And that's what we thought remote work was.
Jamie (17:09.57)
You'd like trying to make something, it would just like take forever?
Jamie (17:16.92)
Yeah.
Destinee Day (17:36.444)
But we're getting off topic. We're getting off topic.
Jamie (17:36.578)
and that's the...
yeah, sorry. I'm sorry. But I don't think we are because it changed the way, in other words, since the 2020s, everything's different. Everything's different from work to media flows to the way media is even made. And I think the thing that most people misunderstand today about media literacy is that everything...
is kind of like what we're doing too, which is like kind of a hub and spoke model, which means that there isn't just one part of media anymore, where it's like you go and get a newspaper and it's, that's it. You're holding the news and you read it top to bottom and you walk away and that's the news. That piece of news also includes all of its social media, includes its Instagram posts, includes its reels, includes the carousels, includes an influencer participating in the discourse. It includes somebody making a
a sub stack that responds to it includes us doing this right now. That's one piece of media is now all pieces of media simultaneously. And so it is, it may be made by corporate industry, which is like, we've hired a handful of social media teammates who break this media up into parts. Or it could be like, we've written this specifically so that it gets taken apart by its audience and gets analyzed, bringing more traffic directly to our site. And that's like, yeah.
Destinee Day (18:52.156)
You're describing I do for a living right there.
Jamie (18:55.584)
And there's a book by, is it Ben Smith, Name Traffic, which is the story of Buzzfeed, where they talk about Jonah Peretti's model of bringing people in via clickbait. And like Etan Sparks' history of DOS.com from the early 2010s, where it was like the invention of clickbait, which changed the algorithm. That's a whole other part that the math that runs the internet now has a way of being manipulated by the media as well.
So this is, media is great that it's a plural term, you know, but now instead of saying like media is, you could literally say media are, you know, like it is, it very much is everything all at once. So how does traditional media literacy like operate in this space when it does that? let's start with like, let's do two examples. So when do you come across something where you have to incorporate media literacy into like,
operational discussions. Like when do you come across in like a concrete way?
Destinee Day (19:58.6)
Are you talking about like times that I have to be like, I know this is incorrect and this is not a fa-
Jamie (20:03.798)
Yes, yeah, when you're aware that media has, because again, you come from like a more privileged space of like knowledge of this, because when you make media, we have the rare skill of like being like, not only can we read this better, but if we wanted to, we could be the bad guy. So we have a unique skill of like not do it, hopefully, hopefully, not being the bad guy. Like we're more likely to help somebody read it better.
Destinee Day (20:30.618)
Yeah, well, our nightly discussions are proof of that. Okay, so if anyone knows anything about me, they'll know that I am obsessed with F1. Max Verstappen, right there. And this happens all the time, and this is a probably daily discussion in my house, where my husband has come across a piece of social media online related to F1.
And he's like, did you see this? Did you see this? And it is entirely a rumor. And I have to have the conversation with him where I'm like, okay, how do I explain to you that based on how the username is laid out, that I know that this is not an accurate piece of data? do I, like, I can't, I have a hard time explaining to him. I know based on how the thumbnail looks that this is.
Jamie (21:26.926)
Mmm.
Destinee Day (21:29.892)
a rumor, this is spam, this is a piece of media designed as clickbait that is untrue and has no basis in fact, right? It is there to fuel engagement for the platform, for the profile. That's it. And it's yeah, you can, the PR side of me, yeah, there are people that leak information and there's that, there is that side of things. I am aware that I know that, but
Jamie (21:58.307)
Mm-hmm.
Destinee Day (22:00.028)
Typically how things like that are done are not through these accounts. If someone is ever leaking an information, is probably a source close to Max Verstappen says, it's probably Max Verstappen's team that's saying it. I don't know if very many people know that as a strategy, that's a real thing that is happening. So I try to go through and say like, hey, because
the username just doesn't make sense. this is you need to take this with a grain of salt. Or I keep saying like unfollow that. Stop reset your algorithm now because you can do that on Instagram. I'm like stop consuming it because then the more that you consume of that, the more it shows you because it reads how long you're on a post, right? There's so much data that they're collecting that then the algorithm says, hey, you liked this.
Jamie (22:39.052)
Mm-hmm.
Jamie (22:43.374)
you
Destinee Day (23:00.508)
Let me give you more of this. And then that's how you wind up, know, flat-earthing it.
Jamie (23:02.562)
Mm-hmm.
Jamie (23:07.022)
I mean, it's a long slide. But at the end of that slide could be like a rabbit hole. You're right. how did you... So the way that media model works is very similar to any rumor mill type of thing, which is both for the team, the team to get more attention, but also for like their stock to go up, which is like their ability to get like the branding, the...
Destinee Day (23:08.984)
Okay.
Jamie (23:33.913)
partnerships, the sponsors and everything. It's the same thing as, I mean, there's literally a magazine called MacRumors and MacRumors is designed for leaks for them to move the stock, either move the stock up and down or create hype. And that's like when you're race cars, you need hype, you need an audience, you need people to be there. And the more hype that exists,
the more exciting it is for the audience and the more reward they get from watching it. then again, then what you're just saying too is then the media isn't just media, we're the media. It includes the audience because if it extends outward into the environment, it's immersive, that's immersive media. So just a rumor from a.
bullshit site that's like trying to make stuff up to bring clicks to them solely includes the environment around them that's outside of it. And then they may not be a bad actor where they're intending you going down to like a rabbit hole, but they're a related content that does the same job could be doing that because you're it's all hype, like the hype around conspiracy isn't exempt from like the hype of that type of attention economy. Like that's that's what attention economies are.
Destinee Day (24:43.154)
Right? Yes.
Jamie (24:44.247)
Yeah.
So then, when you're, I would like to hear a little bit about your process then. So now as a responsible media creator, you're aware of these systems, right? So when you have to create media for your clients, for me, for you, and you're doing things with the awareness of how it works, what is the process? Can you explain what you do when you figure these media out?
Destinee Day (25:16.22)
You never plan a single piece of content without planning, right? The whole thing has to work as an ecosystem. That's the way the system is built. So if you and I have a conversation, I have to be able, right? Let's take this episode for an example, right? Cause I can talk openly about the strategy with this. This is the original piece of content is a long format recording. From this, I'm going to generate
Jamie (25:35.886)
matter.
Destinee Day (25:45.412)
at least four social media posts that are reels. They're video based to get of the clips where we're saying something super interesting or super controversial to get people to tune in. I'm going to probably break it down into a couple carousels worth of quotes so that people scroll through. The point of the carousel is that the algorithm actually shows each carousel page.
If you don't engage with it on page one, it'll show you page two, and it'll show you as many times as it needs you to get engaged. So you do video and reels for reach. You do carousels for engagement. I'm probably going to encourage you to write something about it on your sub stack so that we can redirect everything to a written piece of content.
And we'll probably explore anyone for guest opportunities and refer back to this episode. So nothing that I create is a singular piece of content. has to live multiple levels, multiple platforms, multiple lengths. And I need at least a week and a half worth of content out of it to really make it a successful, original long form post.
Jamie (27:09.358)
And you had a term for this, right? This is like clipping, you called it, right? Like clipping, yeah. And it's, I'm interested that you use that term because the only time that I heard that term used in public was like that Louis Manosphere doc where the dudes at the end were like, well, we're gonna do clipping. We're gonna do what they call clip farming, which.
Destinee Day (27:12.488)
Yeah, yeah, clipping.
Jamie (27:29.83)
I thought was just a negative act, but I just now you're like explaining like clipping is part of the process. You have to clip something. So it's pulled away from its original media. So it leads back. So clips are part of the media then too.
Destinee Day (27:43.536)
Mm-hmm. And different, right? Again, using us as an example, right? In my brain, when I'm clipping, because we are trying to be responsible about it, I'm trying to take clips that would catch somebody's attention, but not mislead them. I try and do a balance of you and me so that the algorithm doesn't think this is...
only a male show or only a female show, right? I try to take a balance to really set up our audience, set up our tone. I try to pull clips that not only highlight your academic experience, but also highlight my real world experience so that it doesn't get labeled by the algorithm as one or the other. There's a ton, as I'm going through and clipping, there's a few things that are going through my mind that
Until you ask me that question, don't realize that I do, but because this has been what I do for a living, I just innately know it and I innately do it.
Jamie (28:47.116)
Yeah. And so that, okay, that brings me to the next part, which is like how the public understands media in that space, because they use terms from the internet. They use terms like this, but they're not exactly clear on what those are. And like, you just mentioned that you're responsible about it, which means that there are irresponsible clippers out there, right? There are people that...
clip for intention of bad work, right? Yeah, okay. that the term the terminology of internet stuff is used as like kind of like catchy. But one of the things that like I'm always like pointing out to people is like, I have to remind people that the internet is not a separate place. It is not a someplace to go when like
Literally, here's an age gap thing. When I was a kid, you would go into the computer room, you know, and you would go play on the computer, you know, and like that was the internet, you would go on the internet. And then when you were done with the internet, you would leave that room. But I think the mentality of older consumers are like that the internet is something you turn off, but not realizing that the internet doesn't stop. When you bring up the algorithm, the algorithm includes like you standing in line at like,
a supermarket and scrolling, you know, but now the data changes because now it's not only doing, you're not only feeding the data back of what you're watching, but it's actually doing locative data. It knows you're at a supermarket, which means that that locative data that Instagram is vacuuming up is changing the way that it understands your purchasing decisions, which means if you watch an out of context clip there, it's different than watching it at home. So the internet is everywhere. We are just on the internet. The other things that...
make it different or like terms that like become popular, know, like brain rot or Riz or, or slop for that matter. Like all these terms become like kitschy cute terms that people can refer to. I'm going to bring up a thing here, but even the term like meme, meme itself is like has changed its meaning. Like as somebody who like used to brag as my branding, my branding was like, I have a PhD in memes, which is just like a branding thing because I have a PhD in
Jamie (30:57.282)
Cultural and media, my gosh, it's out of the frame. I gotta fix that. It's actually, somebody would probably make a note of that eventually if they don't see it. It's cultural, can you see it? It's crooked. How weird is that? That's ridiculous.
Where is it? There it is. It's cultural analysis and theory, which is like what it really is. It's my actual degree. But I studied memes. And when I studied it, I wrote the first peer reviewed paper, co-authored the first peer review paper on Pepe the Frog. And you know what's crazy? Students don't know who Pepe the Frog is today. I know. So the idea of memes is just wild to me that like when I were at a point where memes just represent
Destinee Day (31:32.722)
That is so great.
Jamie (31:43.447)
Mimetic culture and mimetic culture is any type of idea that you can shrink down to something shareable and move on so then it gets mixed up with like brain rot, which is like meeting clips clips. That's what brain rot is. It's clips. It's clips from like Family Guy or CG shows or like ridiculous content and that type of brain rot ends up just being stuff. It's stuff you consume. That's really what it is The problem is how do you introduce?
You and I are experts. Now, how do we translate our esoteric deep knowledge of this to the public who, I would say, generously, 95 % of them know them as words. They don't know what we know about the content. It makes it a little harder for us. And so it's easier to say memes are jokes, or memes are acts, or memes are stuff. Yeah. So.
Destinee Day (32:32.829)
Yeah.
Jamie (32:36.066)
I want to bring up, I just want to share this piece just really quick because this came out in the New York Times and this doesn't, this won't hold us to like being stuck to like a very specific moment or anything, but this is a very important thing to take into it. Because I really think this is a really good piece to talk about. in the New York Times and it was published on April 6th. So you can see it's a very recent article here. It's written by an author named, so let's do some real media literacy here. It's written by Willie Staley.
who does a fair amount of work on culture. You can see he's a culture writer for the New York Times Magazine. And so a lot of the work you can actually see is like digital media, Netflix, Twitter, the Try Guys. And you can see the reason it is old. Yeah, this is a, when did that? 2022. Yeah, did he take a break? Well, I also, this is the New York Times Magazine. So it's...
Destinee Day (33:18.984)
Try guys, it's whole.
Did you take a leak? How long does it spend on an article?
Jamie (33:31.991)
This writing is a lot different than typical writing, but it is still a magazine that is very popular. I was quoted one time in the New York Times magazine by Rayan Haramachi, who is the editor-in-chief of WIRED now. And that was the most amount of times people recognized my name. So it really does have an uplift. It is a very popular thing. It's really important. So his work here is very important because it has to deliver a certain amount of information.
I became aware of Willy Staley when he wrote How the Manosphere Became Mainstream Entertainment, which inspired my book, How the Manosphere Became Culture. I took it a step further that it's not mainstream entertainment, it's everything. But let's go back to his piece here because he actually introduces the idea of, the AI apocalypse, memes have already nuked our culture. like, okay, media literacy. That is headlines. For those of you don't know, headlines are not written by the author typically, they're written by the editor.
They are designed for what you and I do, which is draw views. Okay. is, they're designed to bring you into the article. is clickbait. They're written. People criticize headlines because it changes the voice. In many cases, the like passive voice versus active voice, changes the way you could actually see a corporate bent. Like let's say ABC were to write about an accident at Disney. It would instead of saying like a ride killed a passenger, it would be like a passenger died at Disney. Like, so it would be a different thing than like.
what the action is.
Destinee Day (35:00.802)
Like, right, like it's kind of, it's written from the, like it's the passenger's fault, it's not Disney's fault.
Jamie (35:06.06)
Right, yeah, so it takes it off of the weight, takes the action away. Like that's sort of like when, yeah, it changes. this is like, memes have already nuked our culture. That's a pretty bold statement. But I just want to do a really quick two or three sentences from this just to like give an example of like what we're talking about here and how hard it is to tell these stories of internet culture when you're dealing with this. First off, this is really a great framing device.
New York Times is just a great if you read the New York Times and you really close read it, it's always important to understand the framing device. First off, the New York Times is the paper of record. That's they call it, which means when you read the New York Times, you're expecting the writers and stuff to be like exceptional. They're also extreme fact checkers. Like I remember my one quote, my one quote, two different editors called me to do fact checking. So it was one quote. And so that's the most amount of quote, the most amount of factual information you could find is probably within
The Grey Lady, which is a nickname for it, which is that it's supposed to be fairly objective. It means it's not directly from the author. So the framing device is usually very good. And here it is. A friend told me a story about her son. He's about nine years old. So it's a frame within a frame. It's Willie Staley's friend's son. So now we're two separate objectives away. Okay. So now we can tell the story. And he talked about the story about, six, seven, which is also funny that this is, they're talking about six, seven now, because that meme is now.
very old. To be clear, before we go further, 6.7 is an absurdist meme. It is not designed to mean much of anything. It's really just a noise, if anything. It's more of like an oral meme. It's like a tick. It would be what I consider like a sound meme or an audio meme. And it's also...
Destinee Day (36:49.426)
How crazy is it that memes went from being a digital visual consumption to now they're an audible part of our, like they're becoming audible.
Jamie (37:02.35)
Right. It isn't just audible, it's actionable. There are really two... memes get mistaken for these two different things, but there's a beginning to all these stories. There's a challenge beginning. So you go all the way back to the cinnamon challenge, which created the viral model of challenges. So there's a challenge that happened on the internet and all challenges are derivative of that. And then there's where audible memes come from, which is what's known as IRL memes, which is the six seven is a derivative of planking or the ice bucket challenge or howling.
or like T-Bowing, you know, these are all viral things that you could participate in so that it would create content. 6.7 isn't content, it is actually an oral meme, like a-u-a-oral, or a meme where it's designed for the ear, it's designed solely so that people have, they know you're on the inside. And in the case of the inside, I mean children, okay? The parents literally ruined the 6.7 meme because they started doing it and children are just like, I don't wanna do this anymore. This article is about this son, this boy's...
devastation at finding out that it means nothing. And I guess as a nine year old, that is pretty devastating, you know, to find out that like you're dealing with like
nothing, you know, I don't know, I don't remember what nine year olds was like, because, you know, I was playing the Ninja Turtles. But like, it was, I'm sure like having like the vacuum of knowledge is like pretty, pretty terrifying, you know, if you think about it. So he goes on and he basically breaks down what the six seven meme is the six seven meme was revelatory because of the immense gap between its symbolic payload, non existence, and its cultural penetration, pretty big.
It worked like a tracer die running through our information ecosystem. That's that's very colorful writing for something that's very stupid It is kind of nice, but what he leads to here is this It's too obvious to say what most most of what people do on social media is copy other people and here what he's actually talking about is memes and this is why media literacy makes it very difficult to use traditional media literacy on new media and I would even
Jamie (39:04.482)
go so far as not even calling it new media anymore. It's just media. You know, it is what it is. This is particularly apparent if you flip over to the highly algorithmic feed, for you on X, Instagram meals, entirety of TikTok. And this is where the media literacy person in me jumps. Like it gets like, it gets a little nuts because for my version of media literacy, when I bring up something like for you on X, I find it somewhat irresponsible not to caveat that with what is X.
Like what is X? And so when you're talking about X, the Elon Musk owned version of Twitter, you're talking about a terrible environment that has very low borders and content moderation and is the place you and I were talking about, which is like the top of the slides bottom where you're falling directly in those rabbit holes. A lot of people who I'm sure lie about F1 are using X to engagement farm, you know, and they're sending people down algorithmic deep dives.
And I'm not saying the New York Times is irresponsible with this. What I'm saying is that it's a surface level interpretation of media that is very, very hard to diagnose. Brain Rot, like 6-7, is literally that. It's not designed for much. To write an entire article on this is an explainer, which is nice. It's basically saying that, yeah, AI is dangerous, but memes are really as infused our culture. And that he's right. But it's also something that I said in 2015.
It's now been 11 years. So it is strange for academics to start seeing work they've been doing in the media literacy space emerge into the mainstream 11 years later. When people like Aidan Walker, who writes How to Do Things with Memes, Ryan Broderick from Garbage Day, Taylor Lorenz of UserMag, these people are deep dives into this stuff. A lot of what we talked about with COSA and like the social media addiction that comes from Taylor Lorenz's work.
They're because they're considered alt media. They're not considered like media literacy spaces of like traditional media things. And I think to do our big takeaway here is that just as media exists, immersively, alt media is part of the media information system. Like what we do is also part of that New York Times article. Your story about F1 is part of the F1 media ecosystem. It's not just one thing. And it's nice that you're like helping
Jamie (41:31.436)
your husband make sure that he's not reading something that is designed specifically for engagement bait. But how do we, I guess let's do here, like what are some good quick pieces of advice that you would give for people to make sure their eyes are open?
Destinee Day (41:45.414)
I mean, I think it's the, what always catches my eye is if it's a username that has like too many periods in it for some reason. You know what I mean?
Jamie (41:57.933)
Yeah, they didn't get there. They got there late.
Destinee Day (42:01.384)
which like is neither here nor there, right? My dog's account has a bunch of underscores in it, but he has the content to back it up. He has a photo that looks super legit, right? It's a glamour shot of him that I had taken, right? My social media is set up in a way that, you know, it reflects my name. It is my photo. Even our social media that I just set up for this show.
I added our faces to it because that legitimizes it, right? You see our face, you know it. It's not an abstract logo that I created in ChatGPT or in Canva, right? It is so hard to verbalize the thumbnail, right? It is so hard. Usually it's too many words.
Jamie (42:33.516)
Peace.
Destinee Day (42:57.67)
Like that's the first thing that if it's too many words, if there's words, first red flag. Because in my point of view, it's, if you put words on an image, the algorithm ranks it lower. I don't know if that's still the case or not. That was very much the case 10 years ago, right? If the copy doesn't look,
Jamie (42:57.674)
interesting.
Destinee Day (43:25.926)
You know, it used to be grammatical errors, right? There wasn't someone editing. There wasn't someone fact checking. If there's no sources in it, right, even F1, when I get a news alert, it is one of the few alerts that I let happen on my phone. A news alert comes through from F1. I know that there's source material in it, which there is. There are people's names attached to it and
said quote and you can you can trace it back if you need to do the the back linking right all of that infrastructure is built into it if it's rumors uh first red flag if it's um you know a quote taken out of context which happens a lot especially with Max Verstappen and nowadays massive rumor mill happening that he's going to retire from the sport because of the new uh 2026 regulations
I think half of that is perpetuated by his team because he is unhappy in this situation.
but you can trace it back to a specific interview that he said where an initial quote was taken out of context. And that has fed months of content now. They're still going. you have to, you have to just be able to, right? I tell my husband, I don't believe it until I see it either on the driver's account or posted from the F1 account or I get a news alert on it, right?
Jamie (44:43.95)
Hmm.
Jamie (45:00.952)
this.
Destinee Day (45:05.14)
the, the paddock very much operates in a rumor mill environment. It's how contracts are done. It's how people switch jobs, right? They feed that beast themselves. so this is a good example to use it in because it very much does exist as a part of the ecosystem, but you have to be able to filter out where that's coming from. And if you can't trace it back to a source, then I disqualify it as.
information and flag it as irresponsible, honestly.
Jamie (45:38.649)
That's, so you said both of mine, which is that if it feels too good to be true, you're right. You I often, you were saying like, it's hard to explain a thumbnail, but like your instincts are built in because you've done this, you've built this, you've spent a decade. But when you see something for the very first time on a feed and it has no other, it's the first time you've seen it, it's not, you can't immediately assume that's real.
Destinee Day (45:40.88)
Yes.
Destinee Day (46:07.4)
Do you watch a lot of standup comedy? There's a, forget the name of the comedian, but he has a bit where he's talking about his mom and AI deep fakes. And he's like, I don't know how to explain to you that I'm just chronically online. I'll try and pull the clip on it, on it, because I think it's hilarious, but it's so true. It's like, I do not know how to explain to you that this clip of a moose running through someone's.
Jamie (46:09.517)
Yeah.
Jamie (46:26.37)
Yeah, please, yeah.
Destinee Day (46:34.854)
house is not real and it's AI, but I only know because I'm like chronically online and probably mentally ill and like.
Jamie (46:44.84)
Right, what's the difference between a broken brain and media literacy? like there's, yeah, right. Because the amount of time, the amount of exposure we've had to content gives us a skillset of.
Destinee Day (46:44.872)
you
Destinee Day (46:51.08)
Yes.
Jamie (46:58.694)
seeing slop first. I'm also skeptical. So I come with a skeptical heart. And that's why I always tell my students is like, I want you to be skeptical. I don't want you be cynical. Because in the end, what you just said is important. A lot of this is by design. It's designed specifically to create the hype mill, the market itself. That's the same with tech rumors. It's the same with F1 rumors. It's part of the media. It's built into it. It's
It's part of the media for all of media's history too. Like hype mills have like just been part of how media works. It's literally what it is. The other part of it is context, which you said. If you can't contextualize it, and sources are important because like if you're reading political news, you will often hear like the caveat. We asked nine people, they all, we were all offered anonymity, excuse me. They were all offered anonymity to speak off the record.
When they say that, you're like, nine people's a pretty good number. But when you hear like one, you're like, that's just some guy, you know? And like, you could also see, like you could hear like someone close to, like you say, like someone close to Matt Verstappen. Like it's probably someone who's literally close. It's probably a teammate whose designated role is to speak to the press in that role. And like very often you're like people, people close to the vice president in the United States. it's like, that's probably JD Vance. Like it's very often it's those sources are because journalists have a specific access.
to those people. They're not like you or I asking the question. The journalists have to tell the story. They're part of that role too. So they are doing that. But readers often feel like the need for confirmation bias, which is like they want things to be true. So.
That is, if you don't find context for the information, and that's exactly like what I was criticizing with the New York Times piece, which is when you just say the four to you page on X, that is to me is like, X isn't a place children should go to go find anything. It's, if you take a risk of opening that app in public and you're going to be seeing things that like, you could get in trouble just for holding that app. that record that I understand the note of like, it's an algorithmic feed, sure. But it's also a feed that's designed specifically for the role of engagement.
Jamie (49:03.412)
itself. But with that, because platforms are disparate, and there's so many places for news to go and all these clips to emerge, it's media itself has to just basically be brought back. has to be when you're doing media literacy analyses, it has to really be gut, gut checks, slow down, I always say patience, you know, move slower, it doesn't matter how fast things are coming, because now it is post first, get it right second. If it looks too good to be true, it probably is verified by not
not going backward into the author and all those things because that you should know just by not having a by having a weird name and no picture. You should also know that information is rough, but find that same information somewhere else that isn't linked to that piece. If it's independently sourced over and over again, you're like, okay, now they're building a trust on that. And if there's context, meaning it's not just the subject, but actually the tendrils that come off that information, then you start going, now I'm understanding veracity. I'm understanding how news happens.
Destinee Day (50:02.738)
So I wanna know if you think, I think I'm gonna draw an allegory, I'm pretty sure that's the right word to use, and tell me if you agree with it or not. I think.
Clipping did the same thing to media literacy in a digital media environment that opinion shows on 24 hour news networks did to media literacy in a traditional media environment.
Jamie (50:31.438)
Yes, that's more of an analogy. The allegory would be like, the environment itself. But I guess you could use it in both cases here, because the environment of commentary, I guess is what you're talking about, like 24 news. So 24 hour news, there is no 24 hour news. I guess that's the best thing. It's like to report on news 24 hours would be inundation for the viewer and also inundation for the researchers. So there isn't enough.
news to report for 24 hours. And if there was, there would be no, the audience wouldn't be able to get it because it would be too long of a time to ingest it. So what they invented was the commentator. Like they invented the Tucker Carlson's, they invented the John Stewart's, they invented the people that would comment on the media itself. Now the piece that I was analyzing in the New York Times is an ideas piece. That means it is a perspective. It isn't a news part, but it is, so the perspective can be written from a commentary perspective.
it is veracity because it comes from the gray lady, but you're right. And then so clipping itself is that but microscopic, I guess. It takes the big idea of commentary and turns it down into digestible. You eat them. It's just, yeah, I guess you're right. That's a really good way of looking at it, which is that the world of commentary on media becomes the portability of media later on.
when the flows become more portable. I guess that's it. Is that now that we hand hold the device, that's an important part of digital literacies in general. The ergonomics of the device itself. This is why the joke always happens with millennials need the big computer to write an email. It's the ergonomics of the device dictate the media itself too. The verticality of it is because it's ergonomically in your hand is vertical, which means the clipping requires that shape, form and time. Because when you're staying in line,
you're gonna wanna consume five clips, not just one, because you need to have the attention span for real life around you too. So you're watching is meta commentary. So your allegory is right, because really it's meta commentary on the idea of commentary itself. so it's, yeah, it's all the way down that spiral. Yeah, so it is, so media literacy becomes harder because now it's more micro than mac, it's micro in a macro world, you know, and.
Jamie (52:50.41)
It really requires us to do a lot of extra reading. And again, my big takeaway here is we gotta slow down. If you really wanna know information, just, when you see something, enjoy it. Don't let media literacy be your burden, but also understand you have to do some interpretation. You're responsible for that type of media too.
Destinee Day (53:14.716)
Yeah, I agree. Well, I think that's it for today.
Jamie (53:20.716)
Yeah, that was fun. That was a good one. I like this. This is something I'm working on. I'm really excited to consistently work on updating and working with Media Literacy, especially in the age of AI and memes, because we have to do the work. And you and I doing the show, I'm very proud of us doing this too, because we're doing the contextual evidence of stuff that is usually left to be interpreted by the audience. And we're doing an additional layer of interpretation for people too.
Destinee Day (53:48.06)
Well, and I feel like this episode's very important, especially because as we move into the age of AI, literacies and these frameworks are important because people are experiencing brain rot with overuse of AI. hear it from a ton of people across a ton of different industries. It's very hard. So we have to teach it. We have to know about it in an updated context that reflects the current world that we're experiencing. So.
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