Our podcast guest Robin Erlich of The Thoughtful Technology Project reminded us that a big part of media literacy is emotional literacy--that is, how do we as individuals respond to the very emotionally intense news that swirls around us and our friends’ reactions to them? The murder of eight people in Atlanta, six of them women of Asian descent, last week, and the trial of Derek Chauvin, the officer who killed George Floyd, this week strongly fit this triggering criteria.
Robin encouraged us to each take a second to pause and think, “how is this making us feel? What reactions and judgments are coming up?” and putting that through our internal lens before engaging. She underscored that there are two sides to the same coin: half the battle is to provide education and foster critical thinking, and the other half is individuals’ responses and the responsibility we bear to ourselves and others to interrogate how this all makes us feel on a deep level
