Allison Butler Transcript
SPEAKERS
Omkari Williams, Allison Butler
Omkari Williams 00:20
Hello, and welcome to Stepping Into Truth, the podcast where I talk with people about how we all get free. I'm your host Omkari Williams, and I'm very happy that you're here with me today. One of the reasons, as I often say, that I love doing this podcast is that I get to speak with people who are making a difference in their corner of the world; people who saw a problem and decided to do what they can to make things right. One of those people is Allison Butler. Allison Butler is a senior lecturer and director of the media literacy certificate program in the Department of Communication at UMass Amherst. She is the author of Educating Media Literacy: The Need for Critical Media Literacy and Teacher Education. She is the co-author of the open source text, Critical Media Literacy and Civic Learning: Interactive Explorations for Students and Teachers. She's also co-authored the new book, The Media and Me: A Guide to Critical Media Literacy for Young People. And it is my great pleasure to welcome Allison to the podcast. Hi, Allison, how are you?
Allison Butler 01:30
I'm good. Thank you. How are you?
Omkari Williams 01:32
I am doing really well. I have to say that of all the subjects that I have thought of that there are to study, I honestly never thought about critical media literacy. I've always chosen my sources of news with some care, but I never really went beyond that. And I think that subject is now more important than ever, because media is so much a part of our lives. And that having a more thoughtful understanding of how it works is really important. And I do want to mention something before we dive in. This book was technically written for young people. But I have to say that I found myself saying, "Oh, I didn't know that" or "I hadn't thought about that that way", so many times. So I think that the book has relevance even for those of us who are way past young. So thank you for that.
Allison Butler 02:23
You're welcome.
Omkari Williams 02:26
So I want to start with a quote from your book. And it's this, "Critical media literacy focuses on the role of power in shaping the production, distribution and interpretation of media". And the thing that struck me in there were the words the role of power. So I'd love to start by having you first give us your definition of media and media literacy, and then talk us through what you mean by that quote.
Allison Butler 02:53
Sure, sure, happy to start there. So media is a plural term, right. I mean, if you think of medium as singular media are then the multiples. It's the traditional stuff, radio, TV, film, it's books, it's magazines, it's billboards that we pass on the highway. I think these days in the 21st century, and particularly all the changes that are happening with digital technology. It can be tempting to box media into just social media, or what's in the headlines these days AI and chat GPT. But I think part of our work in this book, and certainly I know part of my work, is to remind us all that media are a lot bigger than what's brand new, a lot bigger than what's trendy. And oftentimes, although these brand new things do have new and different things that they bring to the table, we're also sometimes doing some pretty old fashioned stuff with them. So we tried to be really generous with our definition of media and then working with that, for our understanding and our definition of critical media literacy does get into that quote of the role of power, right?
Allison Butler 04:03
The sort of definition of media literacy in the United States is the ability to access, analyze and produce a variety of media. And that definition comes to us from the early 1990s. Produce media in the early 1990s was a lot different than what it means today, right?
Omkari Williams 04:20
Yes.
Allison Butler 04:22
The work then, and the very cool work then, was putting camcorders in the hands of young people. The idea that you had a video camera that fit on your shoulder, was considered sophisticated, was mobile. And the idea of the work behind young people creating media was that through creating media, they might therefore better understand how media are made. I would say that definition still sticks. Although we're probably not using camcorders. We very well could be recording from our smartphones right? But It still stands the ability to access, analyze and produce. And then our work and critical media literacy adding on that is gets to that question of power, right? There's a lot going on in our media content. There's a lot going on on the screen. And there's a lot that we watch, that we read, that we listen to. But critical media literacy is asking us to sort of take a step back from the content and look behind the scenes. How did it get there? We are, obviously and somewhat easily intrigued by what's on the screen, no doubt, that's our entertainment, that's our information.
Allison Butler 05:34
But it didn't ever just happen, right? It got planned, got carefully produced. Decisions were made about who was going to be in that text, how it was going to be written, etcetera. So our work really wants to look behind the scenes at how it got to us, how it gets to us as everyday people. And that's where we look at the ownership, production and distribution of media. Because we absolutely have the opportunity to watch read and listen to a lot of stuff, right? I don't think any of us are going to run out. But a lot of stuff got said no to. Right. Why? So that's part of the power is who's making these decisions? Another part of critical media literacy is that that I said before that sort of taking a step back, one thing we want to emphasize in the book, and one thing we want to emphasize in all of our work is to be critical is not to dislike, but really it's to take that step back and try and look at our texts, as multi dimensional objects. To take a little bit of distance from them both emotionally and intellectually and try to understand them in an inquisitive way. It absolutely doesn't mean dislike, it's to ask questions of our texts.
Omkari Williams 06:50
I think that that is extremely important, because we hear the word critical. And all we immediately think of is someone saying something is bad. And that's not the case here. It's just turning a more discerning eye on to what we're looking at. And you said something there that really struck me. And that was, "what is being said no to?". Because I don't think we think about that very much. I don't think we think about Oh, if I'm seeing this that means they said no to probably 100 things behind the scenes that are not never going to come across my screen or my newspaper, or whatever the particular type of media were engaged with is. I think that that's an incredibly important part because it brings up representation or the lack thereof.
Allison Butler 07:44
Yes.
Omkari Williams 07:45
And I think most of us now understand that lack of representation is harmful in that it erases whole groups of people from view and it makes it much easier to stereotype people. But it's more than that, in the broadest terms, representation shapes our view of the world.
Allison Butler 08:02
Yes.
Omkari Williams 08:03
Would you talk about that, and what your research led you to understand about this foundational piece of the whole discussion
Allison Butler 08:11
Sure. I mean, when that idea of sort of what gets said no to, I'll give a couple of examples of media that, folks might be surprised, weren't thought of positively at the beginning. So if you think about the Marvel comic series, and Black Panther, in particular, the first one, not the second one, although that one is important for conversation to the first Black Panther movie, which is going to focus on the people of Wakanda. Therefore it is going to be a primarily Black cast was questioned about whether or not there would be audiences for it. In the 21st century, whether or not there will be audiences for a primarily Black cast. You look at the production of the Black Panther, it's primarily Black cast, primarily Black production, writers, directors, producers, etc. It made billions. It broke box office records, and suddenly the folks behind the scenes are like, oh, so there is an audience for that. Right? So it's eye rollingly frustrating. But there was the opportunity for that to potentially not get made.
Allison Butler 09:15
Now we fast forward in time to the second Black Panther. And there's no question that that's going to get made. And what that has since been credited with is bringing people back to the movie theaters, kind of bringing people out of the slump, especially as stuff is getting released now in the theaters, and streaming simultaneously. And understandably, for COVID, it was absolutely safer to stay home for a while and maybe a movie theater isn't where we wanted to be. But again, we see this text with it's incredibly rich and complex, racial and ethnic and gender representations. And one of the first ways that it gets framed is Oh, look how much money it made. And it's like, whoa, wait a minute. Yes. And there's another story to be told here, there are other things to be thought about what does it mean that we're looking at women of color in power? What does it mean that we're looking at Black and brown people being forced to fight each other because of systemic racism and systemic classism? And we can just dive into this.
Allison Butler 10:17
So when we're looking at representation through a critical media lens, we are looking at what is there in front of us, no doubt. But this is a case where the absence of data is data, who's not there, whose story isn't being told? How are stories being told? And then how are they not being told what's missing, is also really rich data. And again, that critical space of representation is often looked at, understandably so as what's on the screen. But what's on the screen got there by writers and producers and directors, who are those folks? There was a show that ran for a long time, it was a Canadian show that was then put onto American streaming services called Kim's Convenience. It was about a Korean family, Korean immigrant family in Toronto running a corner store. And it was a primarily Asian cast dealt with a lot of issues of Korean and other immigration. I think one of the greatest things about this show was that they talked a lot about Korean food, and never explained it. So your presumably white audience is seeing Korean food with no explanation, you're gonna have to figure this out, right? You're gonna you white audience, we're gonna maybe have to do a little bit of research. But one of the reasons why that show was ultimately cancelled, was because some of the Korean writers in the writers room said there's not enough Korean behind the scenes. There are not enough Korean writers in this room. What does it mean for a Korean immigrant story to be told by white writers. So we want to be looking at representation beyond just what's on the screen beyond just with what we're looking at, and also understand how it got there.
Omkari Williams 11:58
I think that that also just takes us right back to the whole point on power. Because Black Panther is the perfect example. The people with power, in their minds, they were taking a risk on this film. Whereas the people, the Black director, the Black writers, all of the people behind the scenes on this production, they knew what they had on their hands. They knew that there was an audience for this and that it was very likely going to be huge. And the fight to get it made is also about power and who has it and who doesn't. And also just how fluid power is because after Black Panther, all of those people were able to write their own ticket.
Allison Butler 12:41
Exactly.
Omkari Williams 12:41
So that's a really interesting dynamic that we're in the midst of addressing here. Some piece of that, that I'd like to talk with you about is media ownership. Because, again, it's all about power. It's like, who owns the few entities that are actually controlling media makes a big difference in what we're going to see, read, hear, etc. And, obviously, it's problematic that it's such a small number of entities that control things, because it's human nature, we're going to promote stories, ideas, beliefs that align with our own and our own experiences, no matter how lacking an objective fact some of those beliefs may be. So talk about where we are right now with media ownership. And where do you see that going over the next, say, 10 years and how that's going to impact us?
Allison Butler 13:38
Well, I mean, if history has taught us anything, ownership is going to get increasingly concentrated. And I think when we're looking at legacy media, or maybe even what we might call traditional broadcast media, that's a scary spot right now, given the fact that social media, digital media, web based media all seem to be on the rise. That could change. Who knows? That could change if you look, I mean, some of the headlines lately in terms of your your question about 10 years from now is we've been seeing a lot of headlines about some of these giant corporations, Microsoft, Google, Meta laying off 1000s of people, I don't know necessarily what that means. I'm not going to sort of try and read the tea leaves as a declarative statement there. But it does mean that something is shifting. Something is absolutely shifting. I think the conundrum for those of us as everyday users of media is it's hard to see ownership. And quite frankly, sometimes it's boring to see ownership. It's more fun to watch stuff, right? It's more fun to read and to listen to.
And if you are somebody with cable television, or anybody with the internet, as I said before, you can't run out. Like you're not going to be done with the internet, and you might not care about 500 of the 600 cable channels you have but how could you not think of that as choice? The work that we're doing in critical media literacy is to kind of climb that ladder a little bit and say, actually, when you look at those hundreds, if not 1000s, of channels, when you look at the infinite, it feels like, numbers of websites. When you step back from that, you see that it's a really small quantity of owners. And so what might feel like choice really isn't. If I'm watching a certain channel, I'm certainly not watching another channel. But I might be watching the same owner, my eyeballs my time, could be going to the exact same corporate owner, right? I mean, it's the same thing we do in the supermarket. If we're choosing one brand of snack over another, we might be choosing the same brand in different packaging.
Omkari Williams 15:45
That is a really good point.
Allison Butler 15:47
And if we're looking at the Internet, we're looking at corporate landlords, right? I mean, I could be all high and mighty. And trust me, I have been, I don't use Amazon, right. I buy stuff online from independent companies. I don't necessarily know that I do try personally, I do try and do my research. But Amazon, Meta, Google, they're all huge digital landlords. So even if I decide not to go to Amazon, that other bookstore that I'm going to, do I know who owns it? It very well could be that owned by Amazon, right? And Amazon has very little shame. I have a colleague who wrote a book critiquing Amazon, it's a critique of the corporate structure of Amazon. It's not kind, and you can buy it on Amazon. Because even if they're getting critiqued, they're getting the money. So we're also thinking about the fact that it's not just corporations. I mean, obviously, it's corporations in big buildings. But it's not just these big buildings that are broadcasting to us. It's also these big companies that are owning this digital space.
Omkari Williams 16:55
Yeah. And I also try to avoid buying things from Amazon. And I try to avoid Meta, but good luck with that, right? Like, how much time do you really want to spend doing that, given that time is a limited resource. So it becomes really easy to just fall into the trap of this is here, and I'm not going to pay attention. And I think while most of the time, that's benign there are circumstances where it is not benign. And it would be really important to know who's behind the curtain. And what, what are we actually supporting here?
Omkari Williams 17:36
I'm going to change gears a little bit. One of the things you write about in the book that I thought was really interesting was, as we all know, we're in the midst of this reckoning around issues of race in this country right now. And you point out that there was a long history of antiBlackness, in newspapers, even in newspapers in the so called free north. And I think that that's something that's really important now, because, as you said, ownership is more concentrated, the owner, newspapers are dying, left and right, and the few that are still around, the ownership is definitely more concentrated. So would you talk about what we should be paying attention to, in terms of that particular form of media so that we're not just continuing this well established pattern of blindly supporting when maybe a little more critical thinking would be an order?
Allison Butler 18:38
Yeah, I think there's pretending we all have all the time in the day, which none of us do, of course, but pretending we do, then read a variety of stuff. Right, read the press, read the counter, read the position, read the counter position, read a big national newspaper, read a local newspaper. Oh, my goodness, we've already run out of time in the day. But I think that's the sort of vibe that I would say to go for it is to think carefully. I mean, think about it, maybe even on an economic level, on a labor issue level, this is how you're spending your time. Your time is is finite, right? None of us, it's the easiest thing to talk about how we just don't have enough hours in the day. And I'm not going to sit here and disagree with that.
But then maybe think about how we want to spend those hours. How do I want to spend my time? This is work, right? We're doing some work when we're trying to learn about the world around us. So what kind of work do we want to do? Look, I subscribe to The New York Times. I used to live in New York City. It was my local paper for a number of years. When I moved to Massachusetts, I kept my subscription because it was just kind of easy. It wasn't a difficult subscription to keep. I think the New York Times does a lot of important work at the same time. I think it makes a lot of mistakes, and it makes a lot of choices. So what I also want to do is make sure that I'm reading other stuff as well, right?
Allison Butler 20:01
I recognize also that a lot of what I do is digital. Some of that is timing choice, do I really need this much paper in my life? I have no problem reading the daily newspaper, I like to do that. But do I need to have that much paper coming down my driveway? It feels a little irresponsible these days. So okay, if I'm going to do this digitally, I also need to recognize that if I'm reading the New York Times, or the Washington Post, or the Boston Globe, or whatever, I'm building a message in my digital footprint that says, here's what I value. So part of the work that I try and do is also if I read something in the Times that I either agree with too quickly or disagree with too quickly. Hey, wait a minute, I got to see what else is being said about that. So I try and go and read some of the OPPO press. Who else is what's the other side saying about this?
Allison Butler 20:49
And then there's a little bit of a pause with that too. What do I have access to? So much of our digital stuff is behind a paywall. So when we talk about people being misinformed or uninformed, sometimes that's because access costs money.
Omkari Williams 21:04
Yeah.
Allison Butler 21:05
And what if you just don't have that disposable income? So what I'm also saying is, within that space of knowing that there's some stuff that unless I'm willing to shell out cash, or credit or whatever, I might not have access to that information. So what role do I play in being informed or under informed for legit economic reasons? And I think it's also really important, whenever possible to look at your local news, what is happening in my community? What can I learn about my community? And how can I support my community, because it's all going to grow from our local spaces, everything is going to come from our local spaces. But then we also have to, and this is, this is, everything I'm saying right now is so unfair to time. But we have to slow down. And we have to think, we have to learn.
Before we even get to the story. Before we even get to the content. Let's think about the medium. Let's think about the authorship, let's think about where this appears either physically or digitally. What pictures are going along with it? I think people do need to read beyond the headlines. But the headline does give some information, not least of which the information that says we at the newspaper have decided we want you to read this. Alright, so we're gonna make it a super exciting headline, and try and think carefully about the structure of what's coming to us. clickbait is clickbait for a reason, it's enticing. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it's informative. And I think maybe one of the absolute first things we need to do is if we're looking at reading the news, or paying attention to current events, make sure that we're paying attention to the news and to current events, not platforms that are sharing the news. So Twitter, for example, there's a lot of research that's being shown that show that people are getting the most of their news, from social media platforms, social media platforms, aren't news outlets. They're a way to share news. There's no doubt about it, but they themselves aren't news outlets. Somebody is sharing a link from a news outlet, go to the news outlet.
Omkari Williams 23:13
Yeah, that is actually a really important piece of it. I mean, as someone who grew up in Manhattan, and grew up with the New York Times, I mean, I didn't know there were comics and newspapers until I was in college. Not even kidding. And I still feel like that didn't really seem fair. But I find it really interesting if I'm on Twitter, to see what comes across my feet. And to recognize how often I'll just take at face value what's coming across my feed because I don't have time to dive in. And I think even just having that awareness will shift how I engage with things because I won't be so quick to say, well, this is actually the case. Because what it often is, is just someone's interpretation of what they read. And my interpretation could be entirely different. And I also think, to get back to the thing you said first in this answer, it's really important to look for other sources. So for me, when I think about where I'm getting news from, I try and source a paper that is directed towards the Black community or the Latinx community or, you know, just that has a different focus, because our news is essentially white centered.
Allison Butler 24:36
Yes.
Omkari Williams 24:36
And paying attention to the places where that means we're only getting this tiny sliver of the story is really important. So I think that as much as anything else, it's not even about how much time do we spend getting news. It's about spending some of that time as you said before thinking about where that news is coming from and are we Getting a really full picture. So, yeah, I mean, it's, it's kind of a lot.
Allison Butler 25:05
I think that that's a huge thing is that as much as I'm going to eyeroll about time in the day, which believe me, I eyeroll about time in the day. Part of what's going on with our current media environment is that it is structured to encourage us to fret and to worry all the time. Back in the days of yore, we would get a newspaper in the morning and a newspaper in the evening. And that's when news happened, or the radio news program was when news happened or the television was on, always early was local news, then a little bit later was national than late later, was global. And that's the only time that news happened. Of course, it's not the only time that news happened. But, but that was our bracket, right? Now, there's nothing that's not 24 hours. So we have to do a little bit of our own work to say, I'm going to read the paper, digitally or otherwise, as if it were a morning paper, or I'm only going to think about it, we have to create to some extent our own boundaries, because the digital technology, the competition for our eyeballs, and our attention is 24/7.
Omkari Williams 26:14
Oh, and it's so fierce. I mean, the number of times if you watch a news station for an hour, the number of times that breaking news comes across, like seriously, this is just ridiculous. At some level, like this is not that big a deal. And it's not breaking and it's not important. And and and the list goes on. But it does grab your attention. And that's all that they care about. Because that translates into dollars.
Allison Butler 26:47
Yep.
Omkari Williams 26:48
So you and I are having this conversation a few days after we observed Dr. King's birthday. And that got me thinking about the power of songs from the Civil Rights era and how Dr. King was this brilliant communicator and well understood that those songs were powerful tools. Would you speak about how critical media literacy applies to the realm of music?
Allison Butler 27:15
I mean, part of you know, as as this book is written, with the intention of young readers, although certainly a lot of the feedback that we've gotten is that it's appropriate for all sorts of readers. Right. But one of the things that we thought about in the media that we wanted to address, specifically for young readers, although again, not exclusively, is music. I mean, I certainly was the teenager who music, both created and or solved all of my problems. But that one song with those lyrics that afternoon, man, did that figure some stuff out? Right. So music absolutely speaks to us. I don't know enough about neuroscience. But I know that music does good things to our brains. I know, there's research out there that shows that music can help with grief. Certainly when we're looking at the history of systemic structural racism in this country, as well as others, we know that music was a valuable form of communication, when slaves were not allowed to communicate with each other in ways that the slave owner understood as communication. So we're not here again, we're not here to take away your love for Taylor Swift, or, or your willingness to wait in the digital line at Ticketmaster for days on end to get tickets to see her. But instead, it's that critical approach, right?
Allison Butler 28:40
So that's not taking away the power of the Spice Girls. At least for a number of years. I had a lot of young women in my classes that were like, "We used to dress up for Halloween or we would have parties". Great. Who am I to argue that? What we're talking about with this isn't a black and white, good/bad, yes/no. It's that all this is in fact, even the Spice Girls, so much more complicated than maybe at an initial first glance, I'm not saying there can't be co-authors, there's certainly plenty of male writers who have addressed female issues and female writers who have addressed male issues. But if we just let it slide by us, we miss that complexity. So to your point, with Martin Luther King, and the music of the civil rights movement, and his ability to speak so directly to such a great variety of people. Let's complicate that. Let's look at that and say what was happening. Nobody gets out and does public speaking, just like off the cuff, right? It's a careful process of production, it's probably stressing over word choices that the average audience member might not care about the difference between the two. But that matter for the message. And so that's part of our work with music, too, is how can we understand the multiple ways that music speaks to us, us being adults, us being teenagers, us being political folks, us being looking out for just a little bit of fun? And understand that it too, is produced? And how can we learn about that, too? I think it's amazing. I love the greater complexity of it. I feel like I learned so much more. I was that teenager that would copiously write down the lyrics to songs so that I could better understand them. Because that's how the world made sense to me. And so isn't that some of what we're doing is sense-making.
Allison Butler 28:40
I've done an activity in my class in the past where we've looked at the arc of girl culture and girl power culture through songs, and I'll play them like the Spice Girls. And this was considered right what was it like the summer of '98, so most of my students have totally aged out of this, but like, was the girl power anthem. Okay, great. We listen to the song. And then we look at the lyrics and we say, there's lines in this song. They're like, "what do you want? What I really, really want..." what she never finishes the sentence. "I'll tell you what I want what I really, really want. Tell me what you want, what you really, really want". And then it moves on. It's like, wait a minute, tell me. So here's this girl power anthem where the young women singing this song don't even get the opportunity to finish a sentence. Where's the power in that? And then you look again with the behind the scenes and the song was written by dudes. The Spice Girls are credited as writers, but the girl power anthem for the summer was written by dudes.
Omkari Williams 31:34
I love that because music is so powerful. And it is a way we make sense of things. It's a way in which people we will likely never meet articulate common struggles. And it is so important. We are almost out of time. So I have a couple of questions I have to get into the first one is, what haven't I asked you that it's important for people to know.
Allison Butler 32:01
Boy, sorry, I could keep on keeping on, so let's see what haven't, you asked me? Well, I would say that we've talked a lot about the book. And what maybe we should also talk about is that this isn't a book that's meant to be onerous for any readers dip in and dip out. You're interested in music, read some of the stuff that we write about music, you're not interested in other stuff then don't. It's not designed. I mean, it's a book, it's a traditional print book, which means it's in chapter order, and all that kind of good stuff. Sure, that's important. And that's valuable. But a lot of our motivation for this was to invite readers to pick in and out what they were interested in. So you don't have to read it cover to cover, you're not going to be a lesser person by just picking out the parts that you're interested in. Use it as a guide to help you just figure out the world. It's an entry point to learning a little bit more about the world, we're hoping that this is going to become ratty dog eared copies with notes, and post it notes, and, you know, highlights and stuff like that as people move through time. And as they start to think differently. So let the book work for you let the book speak to you with what you need to be learning or what you want to be learning. And it's going to be there. Whenever you're ready to pick up the next idea.
Omkari Williams 33:28
I think that's really a great way of approaching it. Because there's so much there, you're basically saying let your interest at this moment guide you and our interests are going to change and evolve. So that's really perfect. Okay, my last question is, what are three things that you think people can do to improve their critical media literacy.
Allison Butler 33:49
So I'm going to cheat a little bit and say four things, one of them just being an overarching. So the meta is recognize that it's not hopeless, I think it's so easy to be super stressed these days, I know I feel it myself. And I've got a pretty good media literacy background, and I can still get overwhelmed. So recognize that it's not hopeless, and recognize that that overwhelm is legit. Within that as the umbrella. Think about your own vocabulary, if we want to start with the self, and the ways in which we can work more carefully think about our own word choices. So every single one of us with an Internet access can go into a site and type in a question or type in information and get 1000s of results back from it. We could also say that we're going to Google something. But if we're looking at trying to more closely examine power, Google doesn't need us using their vocabulary, right? I'm going to search for something. I'm going to look for something I have a question about something. I'm going to take a little bit of ownership over my own vocabulary. And so maybe even just thinking about how do I talk about these corporations, and how do I sort of take for granted that vocabulary. Let's stop taking that for granted a little bit.
Allison Butler 35:03
I think the second thing we could do is, I said this a few times already. So I'll say it again, slow down. Yeah, all of our media these days are so in systemically, structurally invested in us speeding up, scrolling through Instagram, scrolling through, TikTok through Twitter, letting Netflix or Hulu or whatever, just keep streaming this stuff. Take a pause, read the whole thing, look at it. Don't scroll, I recognize that by not scrolling by stopping at something, it actually does also add to our digital footprint. But think about it as a way of trying to more concretely address what's so easy to just fly by us.
And the third thing I would say is, if you're trying to think about spending your time a little bit differently, if you're feeling a little bit overwhelmed, and your primary source of information comes to you from your phone, go in and turn off your notifications. So if our notifications are on stuff pops up to us all the time. And it certainly feels like an obligation to check on that. And I recognize that sometimes we need to do that for work, and so on and so forth. But maybe over the weekends, or maybe when we give ourselves some downtime, turn off the notifications, then you go look for the headline, or you go look for the text message or you go look for whatever and then it's your time and your choice, versus it kind of coming at us. Right? I think about every time a plane lands, and everybody turns their phone off airplane mode, and you could just hear to the airplane Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. I do it too, right? I do it too. And it's like, Whoa, that plane ride was some downtime. There were no notifications coming my way. turn off notifications, give yourself a little break.
Omkari Williams 36:52
I love those. Thank you so much. Honestly, this conversation has been just fantastic. I've really enjoyed it. And I feel like I now know how to move better through the world of media. And in a way that's going to make me more in control of what's happening. So thank you so much, Allison,
Allison Butler 37:12
Thank you so much. I'm glad it was helpful.
Omkari Williams 37:14
Definitely.
Omkari Williams 37:16
As Allison has said, there is so much communication coming at us from our phones, our TVs, radios, computers, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and the list goes on. Being able to suss out what is happening behind the latest breaking news story, why we're hearing this thing and not that thing and how we're hearing it, all of this matters in our understanding of the world we live in. Applying what Allison has been talking about may be a challenge in some aspects, but it's so important. Start by considering where your news comes from what biases are present so that you're not just accepting what you're hearing without thinking about it in a broader context. Media isn't going anywhere, so we need to be smarter about how we engage with it and the power it holds. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back with another episode of stepping into truth very soon. And until then, remember that change starts with story. So keep sharing yours.