Reading is what?
I have said often, albeit a bit flippantly, that reading comprehension is at an all time low. On one hand we can get a chuckle in here and there and kiki about a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor. On the other, there is something quite serious about our declining abilities to take in, process, and understand what is presented to us.
Literacy rates are falling across the United States and people are generally spending less time with books. Whether you want to identify the issue as a failure to integrate AI as a tool rather than a shortcut to comprehension, or that post-lockdown (but still in the throws of COVID) infections have stymied our cognitive abilities, or that for decades a fraction of politically cannibalistic and/or religious zealots have worked to defund education across the country and legislate away our abilities to encounter words and their meanings, the truth remains – people cannot read.
An undereducated populace is easier to control. Education has long been a battleground for the politically powerful, bigots, white supremacists, and colonizers. At times these categories are a circle, but increasingly, as people try to live in a country that, more often than not, actually wants us to die after extracting short-term profit from our bodies, they resort to inventing new ways to subjugate another group they can view as beneath them. People will pass the buck of violence in hopes that they will somehow be spared the destruction of their families, communities, bodies, minds but putting a spotlight on someone else.
By buying into the systems of power that alienate us from ourselves and communities, people hope that they can prove their allegiance to the state and thus be paid for selling out others. Payment that, in a country has seen the exponential increase of the wealth gap, has become necessary to simply keep breathing. The fear and anger at this reality is projected onto the more marginalized in an attempt to feel better about being a victim of capitalism. People get to feel in control. And control can sometimes feel like you have a choice.
We’re in that stage of capitalism in which we have to subscribe to being alive and we cannot individually opt-out without fear of death.
In order to maintain the facade that such strategies of deflection and misdirection are actually protective against violence, the people of a country that exploits them must never learn enough to understand the connections of our struggles. Connection and empathy are the foundations for coalition and coalition is the path toward freedom. Dismantling this is, and remains, a central focus of state violence.
The defunding of education, the termination of teaching professionals, the banning of kinds of knowledge, all work in conjunction with the speed of propaganda. We see headlines and take them at face value. We see videos and cannot pause to consider if they are real, doctored, out-of-context, or invented. We look at an image and have already decided what it means without understanding the literal things in the image because we rely on shortcuts.
Often we feel things when we encounter information, either in text, audio, or visually, but often cannot describe what is making them feel that way. This is on purpose. If information can trigger an emotion that leads to an unconscious response, we as the consumer of that information are subject to whatever whim those presenting that information want. The speed at which the world moves often pushes us to jump toward “whataboutism” or to seek refuge in an in-group producing echo chambers wherein we assume we already know what we are seeing, reading, hearing because of the terms set by that group we belong to.
This is where things like “not all” discourse or all lives matter gain traction, not because they are patently false beliefs but because we are trying to explain why we feel defensive, threatened, or fearful, without actually understanding what specifically is triggering those feelings or where they come from.
Yes, there is nuance to any and every situation. But before we can even get to a place where nuance or a grey area is possible, we have to understand and be honest about what specifically we are seeing, hearing, and/or feeling.
When I taught undergraduates I would have them do a 3:1 observation for our readings. I’ve adapted this practice over the years but it originally was a rift off an exercise an acting professor at UIUC shared with his students. The goal is to become aware of the thing we are engaging with before filling our minds with criticism, rebuttals, or judgment. It goes as follows:
Name three things that are present in this text/image/video/audio. Be as specific as possible and no detail is too small.
Students will share one of their three, either with the entire class or a small group.
List one thing that is missing, that if it was present would change your understanding of this text/image/video/audio.
Students will share again with a partner.
Then, in one sentence, write out what this text is trying to tell you. This does not have to match what you saw or shared with your partner.
This is a form of bottom-up processing. It is an opportunity to slow down and actually notice the information we are taking in and what it brings forth in our minds before it gets swallowed by someone else’s argument.
I share this because reading, truly seeing what is in front of us before assigning a judgement or value, is the work of struggle. Judgment is easy in some ways because it is shorthand. It eases our overstimulated brains by assigning meaning to things without need for our engagement.
But we have to learn how to be in struggle. With ourselves, with each other.
Reading then is a form of resistance. It resists capitulation to facism that materially is transforming what words mean and how we can access information. It resists the political strategy of flooding that hopes to short circuit our brains through an onslaught of increasingly unhinged and shocking headlines. It resists by holding steadfast to a reality that is under siege. It resists by refusing to allow media conglomerates to decide what the truth is. It resists by regulating our nervous systems that are being intentionally supercharged by slowing us down and sitting with what is in front of us. It resists by demanding we have conviction and do the actual work of understanding. It resists by understanding that people can change their minds when presented with new information. And that is actually a good thing. To not just aspire to know things but actually acknowledge where we are deficient in our understanding, where we lack the skills, and do the work of learning. It is this work that is necessary to actually get to the “other times” many of us desire so fervently in this moment. It is to do the work it takes to wrestle back information, its content and circulation from those who wish us dead.
As information is literally removed or redefined for the purpose of psychological assault on our sense of reality and threat to our lives, learning to read teaches us how to know what is right in front of us and how we might, together, survive.
As always, thank you for being here.
We’ve been here before [runtime : ~ 20m]
