Justin Pot

One of the most profound lessons you can learn about media literacy is that it isn’t enough to talk about the content—you need to talk about the medium. People far smarter than me have written books and dissertations about this, but let’s start with an example that’s easy to grasp: the differences between the Lord of the Rings books and the movies.

I’m in the middle of re-reading these books for the first time in decades, time during which I’ve seen the movies several times. There are so many details in the books that aren’t present in the movies. The most famous example is Tom Bombadil, an ancient creature who is seemingly unconcerned with what’s happening in the outside world. He’s the only character in the books to wear the One Ring and be completely unaffected—he basically laughs and then gets back to his gardening. 

While reading the book, Tom Bombadil serves several purposes. He introduces you to the idea that there are all kinds of forces at play in the world, and some of them aren’t involved in the conflict at all. He leaves the characters, and the reader, feeling comforted and a little bit unsettled. 

But he also temporarily puts a stop to all forward momentum in the story. That can be interesting in a book, where you as the reader have time to reflect on what’s happening and put it into context on your own. Film doesn’t give you the kind of time you need to do that. Films are built on momentum—on one scene leading to the next, all constantly building toward a climax. Tom stopped that momentum and, as such, needed to be removed from the script even though his feathered cap, yellow boots and bright blue eyes would have been an engaging visual. Instead the hobbits go from the Shire to Bree in an on-screen instant. Film, built around visuals, requires constant forward momentum in order to capture the imagination.

Media theorists like Marshall McLuhan argue that this isn’t simply a choice that directors make—it’s something that’s baked into the medium of film itself. “The medium is the message,” the most famous quote attributed to McLuhan, is pointing at this truth—that the design of a medium itself shapes what can be said using it and, to a point, is a statement in itself. 

Understanding how film works, and how that function differs from the way a novel works, can help you see why Tom Bombadil was left out of the movies. But it can also give you critical insights about the world. A TV newscast, for example, must cover a news story differently than a newspaper article or podcast does, and you can generally work out why if you think about how the different mediums work. A TV newscast needs to keep your attention at all costs. You can’t put it down and come back later, or re-read a sentence you didn’t catch the first time. The visual imagery and on-screen text are essential to accomplishing that task. Fewer words will be used to tell the same story, and in most cases there will be more appeals to emotion. 

Paying attention to these media differences can help you think critically about what you’re taking in and, potentially, make it just a little bit easier to understand the world. This sort of media literacy is vital right now, so I’m going to spend a little more time on it for the next few weeks. First I’ll try to unpack what message is implicit to social media and how that got us into the mess we’re in now. Then, after that, I’ll talk a bit about how I use AI in my work (sparingly) and how my understanding of the way it works as a medium shapes that. I hope you’ll join me.

Tom Bombadil Fan Art by GoldeenHerself

Stuff I Wrote

• Get the macOS Finder to do just about anything by typing natural language commands  WIRED I think this is a pretty cool use of AI. 
• This site lets you browse Instagram without an account Lifehacker At some point I’m going to set up my browser to do stuff like this automatically and I will never need to open a website owned by Meta ever again. 
• Don’t fall for these 4 cybersecurity myths  PopSci I’m having so much fun writing these myth articles—here’s the latest one. 

Stuff You Should Read

• Compression culture is making you stupid and uninteresting Maalvika/learning-loving and meaning-making I’m not going to summarize this because that would completely defeat the point—just read it. 
• The ladder is burning Matthew Hughes/What We Lost Entry level jobs are a thing of the past and it’s only going to get worse. 
• My school banned phones for the year. Here’s what happened. Gilbert Schuerch/After Babel One teacher’s story about how much easier it is to teach when students no longer have the most compelling entertainment device in history in their pockets.