The Ghibli crisis is just the beginning
As I’ve argued many times, including just last week appending ‘literacy’ to a word is an attempt at control. It’s a power move, either intentionally or unintentionally. So, for example, with the work that I’ve been kicking off around AI Literacy recently with the BBC, it’s interesting to see the way that, for example, Big Tech wants to define it compared to, say, academics.
In this post, Jay Springett introduces the term ‘context literacy’ but doesn’t really define what it means. I don’t doubt that what he identifies in the post isn’t a set of important skills and competencies, but is it a ‘literacy’? Is it a way of metaphorically ‘reading’ and ‘writing’? Or is it just a way of understanding and making sense of the world?
I definitely agree that we’re in the midst of another culture war that, perhaps more than ever before, is predicated on a lack of shared context. I’ve started watching the Contrapoints video I shared recently about conspiracism, which I think is very closely related to this.
The Ghibli crisis is just the beginning. Focusing on the outputs alone misses the point.
So how do we respond?
We must recognise that revolution is not over. We are in the Information Age.
We must cultivate context literacy and we must maintain a distinction between the infrastructure and the experience, between machine and meaning.
We are living through a moment that future historians may describe as a cultural rupture. A context war. How this plays out will shape new definitions of truth, authorship, creativity, and trust, perhaps for centuries to come.
The question is not whether this will happen.
It already is.
Source: thejaymo