Reading Blog #1

I thought that Avgerinou's article was slightly frightening as some of the skills that constitute Visual Literacy are ones that I don't see in a lot of people online (which includes myself sometimes), yet it was compelling in a sense that it made me reconsider how much thought I really put into decephering visual language. I myself am a product of what she calls the "Net Generation" (29) and because I have been raised with mostly visual media, sometimes I find it is easy to just go off with my assumptions about what is false and what is true or what I think a certain account is trying to convey with a posted image. This is not a the vast majority of internet users. Because we are now operating in a web that prioritizes connection to other people as opposed to information, I think that we often operate on certain biases for what people or organizations we choose to interact with. We subscribe to personalities, ideas, and sometimes even lifestyles perpetuated by people we don't even know sometimes. I find this to be highly troubling as we've already seen some ramifications of this lack of digital and visual literacy apparent in children (recently multiple accounts of young, preteen kids have appeared on tik tok and instagram parroting "hustler" mentality nonsense from the likes of Andrew Tate). I think that Avgerinou is right that we should push to increase our education opportunities regarding visual language and we should all push to make VL a common theme amongst the internet.

I know this article wasn't necessarily about what I wrote about, but reading what is expected of people to be competent with visual language was honestly staggering and I wanted to express my desire for increasing education to meet this demand.