Media Literacy Preview [TE]

951 words, about 4 minutes to read.

Welcome back to a nonepisode of Trenchant Edges.

I’m your host Stephen and today we’re slingshotting around the distractions to build up momentum.

Before that…

Some Housekeeping:

First: I’m leaving substack. This will hopefully have very little effect on all of you. It’ll still be the same URL, the same emails from me, and so on. This will be my last email through them.

There’s a lot of reasons why but it comes down to using substack makes me feel bad. I don’t like their app. I don’t like their ecosystem. I don’t like the owners politics. I don’t like sharing a platform with Andrew Tate.

No more whinging about it. Buy the ticket and take the ride.

There are some downsides but we’ll deal with them.

Second: About 62 people bought pins or stickers from me 4 years ago who I haven’t heard from.

I have the pins and stickers!

If you’re one of them, please reply to this or send me a message however you can.

Like that!

I’m offering to send pins or refunds as desired.

Let me know.

There will be emails from my more official account over the coming weeks.

Enough preamble.

The Project: Mining the Apocalypse

I’ve been orbiting around a concept for a few years and I finally have a plan on how to tackle it.

Our next few weeks will be spent doing a kind of introduction to media literacy course using Graham Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse series from 2022.

For years I’ve been talking about how you can use fringe content to sharpen your critical thinking skills and I’m going to prove it by using Graham as an example.

This will not be a debunking. Nor will we be considering his character or even facts.

We’re going to take his show apart to see how it works.

Graham Hancock is an excellent storyteller and has very real lessons to teach you about presentation, framing, and biases. Lessons that you can take into any other media experience for the rest of your life.

This comes out of a desire to do such a project on Ancient Aliens almost 15 years ago. But Hancock is a better subject because he’s a lot better at the game than his former colleagues (he did appear in 18 episodes of the show). His project is more coherent.

I’ve got the first episode done but will be hacking it apart to build more of a curriculum over the series.

Some of the subjects we’ll be working through the basics of:

• Aristotelian Rhetoric; Logos/Ethos/Pathos

• Social Psychology; Group dynamics/conformity/ingroup and outgroup

• Persuasion Science; Robert Cialdini’s 6 principles

• Propaganda techniques; loaded language, bandwagon effect, us vs them

• Logical fallacies; No True Scotsman, Fallacy Fallacy

• Framing and Priming

• Narrative/Storytelling frameworks; Transformational marketing, act structure.

• Copywriting; Formulas like AIDA, pain points, social proof

• Epistemology; How do we know what we know?

All of which gets summed up as an eclectic introduction to media literacy.

And because I know a lot of people are sick of Hancock, it’ll be structured so you can just enjoy a nice essay and introduction to a topic that might help you deal with the flood of information our society generates.

It ain’t stopping any time soon. You might as well learn to swim.

The Preview:

“Aristotle wrote that the most effective rhetorical style was a balance of Logos (reason/facts), Pathos (emotion), and Ethos (character). That may have been true in his day but may not hold in mass media. Donald Trump, for example, is something like 15% Logos, 35% Pathos, and 50% Ethos. Everything is about his credibility and character. He has the most character, nobody else has any unless he gives it to them. This is a risky strategy designed to polarize people into total loyalty to him or total animosity to him.

It works because his promise is about making outgroups suffer. If you like that, you’ll ignore an awful lot to get it.

Blair Warren wrote an excellent book called the One Sentence Persuasion Course. It’s about as distilled as you can get persuasion and have it still be practical. You don’t even need the rest of the book. It explains itself.

Here’s the sentence:

People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions, and help them throw rocks at their enemies.

Anyone who consistently does all of those is almost certainly just using people as tools. It’s really hard to do all of them unless you’re trying.

Practical rhetoric usually isn’t about convincing everyone, but creating an ingroup of people who identify with core appeals underlying the specific arguments. Let’s take a completely unrelated example:

In 1981, Republican strategist Lee Atwater gave a famous interview where he was a little too honest about how his party appealed to white racism. Lee remains one of the most influential and successful political operatives in US history.

You start out in 1954 by saying, “N****r, n****r, n****r.” By 1968 you can’t say “n****r”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N****r, n****r.

This was part of the southern strategy which has been core to American politics since the 60s. What he’s doing is forcing people to polarize on an issue he’s selected for the purpose of constructing his desired ingroup: A winning electoral coalition based on white supremacy and letting the rich extract as much wealth from everyone.”

Wrapping Up

Alright, so when is this coming out?

I’d can’t say exactly, because I keep getting dental work added to my week so I’m going to be kinda useless the next few days. Getting a decades worth of dental work done in a year would be… a lot more frustrating if it wasn’t shockingly well covered by medicaid.

Hopefully the migration off substack will be easy. But I’ve tried this before to… let’s say janky results.

We’ll see. Let me know what you think.

-S