After receiving the link from several friends, PMB has had the pleasure of viewing this, a depressing but hilarious blog that archives Facebook responses to articles from The Onion from people who are apparently taking the Onion articles as real news. The most prevalent example is a series of Facebook posts calling for Americans to repent, lamenting the fake Onion headline 'Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billon Abortionplex' (one of these includes a further lamentation over the comic material in the Onion article: 'They will give pedicures to the moms after their abortion! Federally funded and all! So sad!!!!').
Most of the people PMB comes across--people who are generally very educated, well informed, and operate with high levels of literacy--react the same way to the (it must be said again) absolutely hilarious inability of the Facebook posters to comprehend that The Onion is a comic publication for entertainment purposes, and its 'news' is not real news, but satirical fiction about news. We tend to laugh at first, and then, after a little reflection, deem this misapprehension a very sad phenomenon. We think it's generally sad that there are 'stupid people' out there; that, in the abstract sense, 'people are stupid.' We might blame failed education systems, or the peurility of popular culture, or socioeconomic disparity, or, crudely, some 'inherent' inequality of aptitude among humans. In any case, there's something depressing about the fact that these people didn't get the joke.
What not getting the joke boils down to in this case, however, is not necessarily individual aptitude, pop culture, or lack of educational opportunity, but rather a misplaced educational focus, along with a horrifically dated understanding of what literacy really means in the 21st-century, industrialized world.
It's not that we're not aware of multiple layers and types of literacy. That someone could read an Onion article as a serious news peice shows potential deficits in several of these layers and types. Assuming a baseline ability to read--to undestand an alphabet, to have a sizeable vocabulary, and to make reasonably accurate meaning of the symbols on the page--it would also take some degree of cultural literacy to make it easy to properly comprehend the Onion article: it would certainly help to know what The Onion is, what kind of articles it produces, what kind of audience it writes for, etc. As a subset of this kind of cultural literacy, it would certainly aid comprehension to have some political literacy--to know that, for example, Planned Parenthood has recently been under attack by conservative politicians. This would give helpful context to what might appear to be exaggerations of actual claims made recently by politicians in the actual news. And to gain some sense of what constitutes exaggeration, or hyperbole, or metaphor, or satirical tone, a certain level of (for lack of a better term) 'literary' literacy is necessary for good comprehension.
One would think that such an awkward phrase as 'literary literacy' is silly and redundant, but, in fact, attention to literary devices and effects--subtle ways of producing meaning--has lately been minimized in favor of information design and information management skills that align more ostensibly with the needs and features of the so-called Information Age. Here again is a prime site for the divergence of information from meaning, the consequences of which produce the kinds of hilarious but also sad misapprehensions featured on the 'Literally Unbelievable' blog.
The point here is that, after the vast, vast majority of people in the developed and industrialized world gained literacy in its most basic, narrow, and traditional sense--the baseline-functional ability to read and write--we've begun to take literacy for granted. We've lost track of what a meaningful, up-tp-date definition of literacy would be for our present situation. And we've failed one another in so doing. PMB (and the majority of his readers) loves to have a good laugh, from a position of extreme educational privilege, at these 'idiots' who really think that Kansas is building a multi-billion-dollar abortion megaplex where women can get pedicures after their abortions, but we should consider that these kinds of misreadings are far more widespread, and occur in more serious contexts (Obama is a secret muslim who faked his US birth certificate; the Qur'an says women should be covered from head to toe) than we'd like to admit.
We love to obsess over technological advancement and pretend like our societies, filled with people who can read and write, have evolved beyond the need for serious consideration of literacy, rhetoric, etc. We like to claim that such advancements have democratized information and education. But we'll struggle in myriad ways until we update our understanding of what it means to be literate, and shape our curricula accordingly. Because, strange as it may sound, true literacy today remains a relatively elite prerogative.
