March 28, 2023
Visual Literacy Is the New Reading Level, and Most Adults Are Behind
A librarian running media literacy workshops told me the most common reaction in the room is not confusion. It is embarrassment. Adults who read confidently and critically for decades are discovering they cannot reliably tell a real photo from a generated one, and they feel foolish about it in a way that surprises them. That reaction points at something worth naming directly. Reading, as a skill, got centuries of institutional investment: schools, libraries, standardized tests, an entire cultural infrastructure built around teaching people to interrogate a written sentence before trusting it. Images never got the equivalent infrastructure, mostly because a
