An observation from Siva Vaidhyanathan:
In Holland, “media literacy” is called “media wisdom.” I love that.
The Dutch word is “Mediawijsheid.” The Dutch sometimes use “media literacy” too, to describe strict literacy, but “media wisdom” has a specific slant, similar to (but I think stronger than) the more robust sense we sometimes give literacy:
In the Netherlands media literacy is often called “media wisdom”, which refers to the skills, attitudes and mentality that citizens and organisations need to be aware, critical and active in a highly mediatised world.
Wisdom. What we really mean, what we have always meant, is wisdom.
2 comments
To me thing about ‘wisdom’ is that even though its a very nouny noun, there’s a strong sense of verbness to it, a sort of perfectly still action: wisdom is never on autopilot, even if its intuitive. Literacy, on the other hand, though strongly connected to the real verb of ‘to read’ is more of a property that you either have, don’t have, or are shortly about to have. it’s a checkbox on a demographer’s checklist.There’s also something very mechanical about literacy, wheras wisdom implies a sort of secret sauce, a possibility of ripening.
Oh I like where you’re going with that. Wisdom implies a spectrum, which you should hopefully be advancing over time. Whereas literacy is, like you said, very binary.