If you’ve ever caught a ball, you’re a physicist. You might not be trained in it, but your intuitive sense of where the ball is going to land requires having a theory about gravity.
And if you’ve ever taken aspirin for a headache, you’ve articulated a theory about medicine.
Studying physics is unlikely to make you a better baseball player, but understanding economics will probably make you a better investor.
How are your theories working out for you?
Everyone who votes (or chooses not to) has a theory of politics. And when those theories don’t square up with what’s happening, it might benefit us to look into why. Defaulting to intuitive theory making is fine, as long as the theories pay off.
Every time you read, post, listen or engage with media, you’re engaging in media theory. Assertions about why you focus your attention in one place instead of another. Theories about how accurate the insights you’re getting are, or the benefits you’ll get from being informed in this place instead of that one.
The culture we live in always feels normal, but it’s a new normal, almost completely different from the one our parents lived in. A lot of the normal is in media. Where we get our news, what gets put on our agenda, how the noise turns into information and how the information changes our affect…
Don’t surrender agency too easily. Articulating a theory of media and being choosy about how we spend our focus and our trust helps us thrive.