Critical literacy and churnalism
June 15, 2013 Leave a comment
market 1 (Photo credit: tim caynes)
Anybody who’s interested in starting an online business could not but notice the interest in internet marketing – specifically through the so-called ‘social media’ (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn and the like). Yes, we all know that in cyberspace, no-one can hear you scream – but can they hear you market? Interesting conundrum.
What I find amusing, in my wry and cynical way, is the huge emphasis on ‘content marketing’, and this is, I believe, of direct interest to information professionals. Do a Google search for ‘content marketing’ and be prepared to be astonished – not so much by the number of hits you get, as the enormous range of differing opinions of what people think it is. The most popular use of the term seems to suggest that it is little more than the fluff surrounding product promotion. For example, if your product is dog shampoo, you will write anything at all about dogs, and keeping them clean and flea- and mud-free. Never mind that the content is trivial, repetitive, and extremely badly written, as long as it scores on the Google hit charts and that people are directed to your site. And buy your dog shampoo.
Now, as has been extensively discussed on this blog previously, ‘content’ – i.e. the stuff contained in a document such as a web page or book or film or vinyl record – is what I call ‘information’: the idea somebody has had, expressed and recorded in shared symbolic codes (language, writing, music, mathematics). Extending this, it would appear that the newest trend in the digital world – in particular, the commercial part of it (and sometimes it’s hard to know what isn’t commercial) – is marketing ideas.
Yawn. So what else is new? Information professionals – and educators of all stripes – have been ‘marketing’ ideas for a long time. Indeed, they do more than that: they select, arrange, organise, curate, store, protect and make available ideas, from any source. Why? Not to sell ‘products’ as such, but to enable people to better understand their lives and the context in which they live: specifically, perhaps, to help them make better decisions by developing critical thinking skills and so sorting out the wheat from the chaff. As previously mentioned, information professionals have a social responsibility and thus, it should follow, do not have ulterior motives.
‘Content marketing’ as it is practised seeks to achieve something quite different: manipulation. From syndicated (and biased) news reports repeated endlessly no matter which newspaper you read (so it seems, anyway), to badly written ebooks written by people deficient in intelligence, erudition, maturity, insight and grammatical skills, to billions of blogs, probably written by the same people. And they all repeat each other. In fact, there is even software which will ‘rewrite’ the same thing in many different ways so that the same ‘content’ (I hesitate to call it ‘information’ because it may not even contain an idea) can be published many times. You can also get – and for free, quite often – a collection of ready-written blog articles to suit whatever it is that you wish to publicise – home-schooling, gluten-free recipes, sportscars, adventure holidays – you name it, someone has supplied a load of bumpf for you to re-use. I visited some freelance sites a while ago, and found that the majority of bidders for jobs requiring writing and editing skills for English content did not have English as their home language and/or couldn’t write their application without glaring grammatical errors. No wonder so much stuff published on the internet is virtually unreadable.
So much for the ‘information explosion’. Most comments on this issue focus on one of two phenomena: the huge increase in scientific and scholarly publications, or the easily accessible media now available – including, of course, the internet, as well as the traditional magazines, radio, television and newspapers. While the vast amount of scholarly information now available does stretch the resources and imaginations of information professionals, the general public seldom has interest in or direct access to such information. So many of us turn to Google, and are satisfied with whatever answer we find that seems vaguely relevant amongst the first 10 or so hits. But the biggest ‘information’ explosion has come from every Joe Blow now thinking he knows something worth sharing. Or even, knowing that they have nothing of interest to share, but sharing it anyway. This disease appears to be contagious, gathering up common citizens, students, retirees, the unemployed, as well as people who should know better, such as journalists. In the frenzy of making their digital mark, an awful lot is being badly said about nothing at all. And this is what will, in all probability, appear in those first 10 hits.
This presents a real challenge to information professionals. Critical thinking skills are seriously in decline, and many individuals seem to be unable to distinguish between ‘content’ that is being marketed, and reliable ‘information’. Citizens of the world, most of whom are able to vote, are being sucked into a vortex of ignorance and stupidity – in this, the ‘Information Age’. If this continues, the meaning of ‘cultural memory institutions’ will evaporate, as their contents will simply not be understood, or worse, regarded as irrelevant to daily life. All of those ideas which our forebears had, and recorded, that have shaped how we live today, will be invisible, as good as useless.
It’s not just ‘access’ that we should be concerned with – that”s easy enough, and becoming easier as information objects (‘documents’) are being digitised and networked. And it’s ‘reading’ either. We shouldn’t be asking what people read. We should try to understand what our users understand and learn from what they read, and become teachers of critical literacy.
Related articles
- Churnalism.com: The Lazy Content Writer’s Biggest Enemy (epiphanysearch.co.uk)
- Content Marketing vs. SEO: The Truth Behind A Ridiculous Debate (understandingecommerce.com)
- Six Do’s and Don’ts for Better Content Marketing (staples.com)
- Churnalism: Shedding sunlight on plagiarism and lazy PR (vancouverobserver.com)
- Content Marketing: The Most Misused Marketing Term (business2community.com)
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