jducoeur

Hmm. I actually disagree about the literacy point, on a couple of grounds.

First, while I agree that text gives you access to far more and better information than video today, it isn't clear that that's going to hold true for more than a few more years. We're heading into the *true* Video Age now, where the old enormous barriers to entry are mostly gone. So I think it's plausible that you'll be able to be as well-informed by video as by text, quite soon now. (And so writing literacy into as central a precept as democracy seems short-sighted.)

Second, it kind of misses the point. True political literacy is a matter of critical thinking: not where you get your news, but the ability to *think* about it intelligently.

There exist *no* news sources that are truly unbiased -- the better ones don't pretend to be. (That's why The Economist remains my favorite: they're very upfront about their political bias, so their readers can take it into account.) Text is just as prone to bias as video: it just feels more reputable because it's text. What we really need is an electorate that's capable of taking diverse input and *understanding* it. But that's probably untestable; certainly, it's not a straightforward test. That's what I was alluding to when I said that we'd wind up with a civil war over the test.

So basically, I think a literacy test is beside the point. Even if you could do it perfectly, it's not testing the right thing...