From knotted cords to the internet, each medium has lowered the cost of spreading information. In the digital age, knowledge arrives by short video, Q&A and livestream, and audiences meet more valuable information and more new knowledge than any generation before — while also meeting more noise.
The numbers say how big the shift is: 1.011 billion internet users, 888 million watching short video, 638 million watching livestreams.
How knowledge travels now
The new forms are working. A viral short-video series followed a crab that lost eight legs and both claws to a shark tank, documented its molt and recovery, and taught its audience crustacean biology along the way — and, viewers said, something about persistence. Q&A platforms put a junior accountant one search away from a veteran’s answer to the questions nobody at the office answers. Livestreamed book events let a seven-year-old ask a scientist’s son whether dreams of flying to Mars can come true.
The logic has moved from aggregating content to connecting intelligence, and from structured formal text to unstructured informal text. Creators range from ordinary people to academics to professional institutions, and the format rewards anything engaging, plain and practical.
The catch
Lower barriers cut both ways. Product placement erodes trust in knowledge content; personal-experience content can be simply wrong; institutional content can be too dense; and the chase for relevance makes output formulaic. Young users who grew up with these tools are fluent with technology and weak on self-regulation, and long fragments-only reading raises the worry of the information cocoon — plenty of inputs, little depth.
What literacy means here
Media literacy is the ability to judge what arrives: where knowledge and information come from, what they are worth, and how to use them. Knowledge popularisation is the foundation, but knowledge and literacy are not the same thing — literacy sets in when knowledge becomes the ability to understand society and act in it.
The practical advice runs in two directions. Platforms should carry fragmented knowledge in designed structures, so curiosity can deepen into study. Audiences should know what they are looking for, read past the feed, and build the habits of verification and research — and, ideally, move from audience to creator, because producing content teaches the methods faster than consuming it.
Republished for information. The original text has not been independently verified and does not necessarily reflect our views.
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