The Literacy Crisis by Michael Burns

I woke up pretty early this morning, so I thought I would watch a video by Michael Burns. He has recently worked on a lot of stuff that I think is useful to think about.

One of the really interesting things this video talks about is the importance of slowing down. He quotes multiple other people who talk about the importance of spending some time thinking about the implications of a text before reacting to it, including The Hipcrime Vocab and Immediacy by Anna Kornbluh.

For me as a literary linguist in training, I think the most interesting part was how this links to the theory of defamiliarisation that came to us from Russian Formalism (particularly from Viktor Šhklovsky's 'Art as Technique') into stylistics.

The idea is that we tend to experience 'habitualisation' or 'automatisation' when we experience the same thing over and over again. The point of literature is to see that thing with fresh eyes. He says something really interesting that I think links to what Burns says in this video and should definitely be added to the discussion:

In studying poetic speech in its phonetic and lexical structure as well as in its characteristic distribution of words and in the characteristic thought structures compounded from the words, we find everywhere the artistic trademark – that is, we find material obviously created to remove the automatism of perception; the author's purpose is to create the vision which results from that deautomatized perception. A work is created "artistically" so that its perception is impeded and the greatest possible effect is produced through the slowness of the perception. As a result of this lingering, the object is perceived not in its extension in space, but, so to speak, in its continuity.

For me, this is really important. Burns touched on how algorithms, AI and other mechanisms are actively changing the way we think; that we're absorbing information rather than mulling it over in our heads. It's made us more malleable and easier to manipulate. I think the more we can break out of that, the better.

This year, I am making a concerted effort to try to think more and blindly consume less. I've not stopped watching video essays or listening to podcasts. In fact, I haven't even stopped watching short-form content completely! But I am being more intentional about what I read and how. I'm bringing more magazines and journals back into my reading, picking up newspapers when I go to the shop and reading that (or The Week, the summary magazine) and just generally trying my best to slow down and think about what I'm doing. Burns's video came out at the perfect time for me to articulate my plans for the next 12 months.

Michael Burns's reading list is excellent! I think there's so much that we can learn from him. I recommend checking it out. It's a bit of a shame that bookshop.org doesn't automatically transfer affiliate links from the American site to the British one if the person who clicked the link because I don't think me buying the book from bookshop.org UK will help him in any way.