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I took a semiotics course in college where the professor asked the question "is the fish aware of the water it swims in?" A rephrasing of an Einstein quote but

I took a semiotics course in college where the professor asked the question "is the fish aware of the water it swims in?" A rephrasing of an Einstein quote but one that I think 12 year olds need to be aware of when they get smart phones. Advertising sprang right out of the Nazi propaganda ideology and has been a force manipulating children long before these phones. Media literacy is a subject kids need to be learning right along with reading clocks and handwriting. The problem can be more benign too. My kids lose track of time diving down rabbit holes all day. They have no critical ignoring skills and are using time better spent on experiences taking multi-page "do you have autism" tests that serve them 10 plus ads per page, tempting them to waste even more time.

wolverine876 3y ago
> Media literacy is a subject kids need to be learning right along with reading clocks and handwriting. Agreed. It's done in some places. > semiotics course Such topics are sneered at now, but post-modernism was built as a response, in a sense, to WWII propaganda. It's the propagandists who are threatened by it, and somehow seem to have benefitted from - if not pushed - everyone unilaterally disarming. Also: I looked into the origin of that quote and as far as I know, it's attributed to many different people (the version I heard: 'I don't know who discovered water, but it wasn't a fish.'). Advertising is sometimes attributed to the The Commitee on Public Information (or the 'Creel Committee'), a US government group that produced propaganda for WWI, pre-Nazi.