For class we read an article by Margaret Kantz on the different ways of reading a text and how texts can mean extremely different things in context.
Surprisingly, I have a decent amount of knowledge in this area because this past fall I took a religion class called Texting God. The class delved into how different people and different cultures read and perceive biblical texts.
We studied all the historical texts that influenced the bible as well as certain texts that were left our or ignored.
The class was fairly interesting and the one thing that it certainly taught me was how to read a text with a skeptical eye. I learned that the bible that we know today and historical texts that we read as fact are a product of their environment.
This class shocked me in a sense because I was used to reading history textbooks and sources as objective and factual sources.
I never took the time to read between the lines in a textbook on America’s treatment of Native Americans or how textbooks treated material around slavery.
This class shocked my world view in a sense. I’ve always known that different news sources use their platforms to report the news differently and they all have a slight bias, but I didn’t think of it ever in terms of how facts could be portrayed differently.
Take for example you read on the Onion something about Donald Trump compared to something you might read on New York Times. Very different right?
But sometimes it’s much more complex than this. How we read news and different texts can completely change the meaning of the texts or facts. In research and in any sort of reading or any sort of citation we must pay attention to where it’s coming from, the slant of the source, the intended audience and it’s original purpose.
In class I found myself saying that a KKK influenced source was a credible source on MLK Jr.’s life! So this is important to learn how to do and how to spot the signs of a credible or non-credible source.
The following video does a very good job of showing how this can happen in advertising:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYy8oBUscmU
By paying attention to these things we can learn more about what is a credible and reliable statistic and what should be questioned.