getsmartradio-blog

[getsmartradio-blog]

Thanks for your post - Documentary tour- Arresting Knowledge -coming your way soon.

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[getsmartradio-blog]

Kendall isn’t impressed with liars.

[getsmartradio-blog]

Benny gets real about fake news.

[getsmartradio-blog]

Our thirst for truth during these polluted times.

Maybe dirty water is the perfect metaphor for our media crisis.

I just got back from interviewing Senator Bill Dodd, author of SB 135, which is a bill requiring schools to teach media literacy (in California). He’s a good man — authentic, caring. (He also ironically spent 30 + years in the water business.) If this bill passes, kids may be positively affected by 2020 if the process goes smoothly. By then, media will have changed so much; the chips implanted in our heads will circumvent any external training.

Bleak?

After reading Nick Bilton’s article in Vanity Fair about how our voices can be replicated, saying words that are not even our own, I have begun to repack my bag of media literacy tricks with much larger items – the biggest one being skepticism about anything that is NOT source-material. Period.

Even when you and I speak face-to-face, the things spoken between us are deemed opinion until otherwise proven. This in itself does not cause me any cognitive dissonance. As an artist, I deeply value subjectivity and imagination — stuff born from the gut. It’s my oxygen. Storytelling is king. I’ve been making stuff up my entire life.

Art and opinion swim in the same waters. They are free to ‘be’. They are by definition not tethered to fact. They are feelings-based.

So why am I committing 10 hours a day to producing a podcast, road trip, and documentary project driven by the hashtag #FactsMatter?

Because soon, we’ll all be dying of thirst. Farmers, artists, teachers and dog walkers alike. Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink. The water is polluted with misinformation: non-facts. Even for those who don’t yet know it - they will soon start to feel the ill effects. We need a filtration system. Our brains have all the hardware necessary. We ALL just have to operationalize some underutilized parts.

So that's why I'm doing what I'm doing. This cuts across every education level, political party affiliation -- even economic position. There’s something that’s not sitting right for everybody these days. There’s a healthy skepticism that is growing. Our hope is to pair that with a certain level of critical thinking that may even lead to hypervigilance when it comes to making meaning out of new information - that includes news, tweets, ads, and cereal box ingredients.

Skeptics may question how we'll get people to walk into one of our live radio shows this summer – in the middle of July – in let’s say Opelousas, Louisiana. Apathy rules, they say. I say people will be parched by July. I say they'll not only come, but they'll sit on the panels, participate in the discusses and feel emboldened to continue the conversation long after we roll out of town.

I believe in the ripple effect. One drop can lead to a wave of change. Meanwhile, do NOT drink the water. It's full of sh*t.