- Happy 25th year, blogging. You’ve grown up, but social media is still having a brawl (The Guardian) — "The furore over social media and its impact on democracy has obscured the fact that the blogosphere not only continues to exist, but also to fulfil many of the functions of a functioning public sphere. And it’s massive. One source, for example, estimates that more than 409 million people view more than 20bn blog pages each month and that users post 70m new posts and 77m new comments each month. Another source claims that of the 1.7 bn websites in the world, about 500m are blogs. And Wordpress.com alone hosts blogs in 120 languages, 71% of them in English."
- Emmanuel Macron Wants to Scan Your Face (The Washington Post) — "President Emmanuel Macron’s administration is set to be the first in Europe to use facial recognition when providing citizens with a secure digital identity for accessing more than 500 public services online... The roll-out is tainted by opposition from France’s data regulator, which argues the electronic ID breaches European Union rules on consent – one of the building blocks of the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation laws – by forcing everyone signing up to the service to use the facial recognition, whether they like it or not."
- This is your phone on feminism (The Conversationalist) — "Our devices are basically gaslighting us. They tell us they work for and care about us, and if we just treat them right then we can learn to trust them. But all the evidence shows the opposite is true. This cognitive dissonance confuses and paralyses us. And look around. Everyone has a smartphone. So it’s probably not so bad, and anyway, that’s just how things work. Right?"
- Google’s auto-delete tools are practically worthless for privacy (Fast Company) — "In reality, these auto-delete tools accomplish little for users, even as they generate positive PR for Google. Experts say that by the time three months rolls around, Google has already extracted nearly all the potential value from users’ data, and from an advertising standpoint, data becomes practically worthless when it’s more than a few months old."
- Audrey Watters (Uses This) — "For me, the ideal set-up is much less about the hardware or software I am using. It's about the ideas that I'm thinking through and whether or not I can sort them out and shape them up in ways that make for a good piece of writing. Ideally, that does require some comfort -- a space for sustained concentration. (I know better than to require an ideal set up in order to write. I'd never get anything done.)"
- Computer Files Are Going Extinct (OneZero) — "Files are skeuomorphic. That’s a fancy word that just means they’re a digital concept that mirrors a physical item. A Word document, for example, is like a piece of paper, sitting on your desk(top). A JPEG is like a painting, and so on. They each have a little icon that looks like the physical thing they represent. A pile of paper, a picture frame, a manila folder. It’s kind of charming really."
- Why Technologists Fail to Think of Moderation as a Virtue and Other Stories About AI (The LA Review of Books) — "Speculative fiction about AI can move us to think outside the well-trodden clichés — especially when it considers how technologies concretely impact human lives — through the influence of supersized mediators, like governments and corporations."
- Inside Mozilla’s 18-month effort to market without Facebook (Digiday) — "The decision to focus on data privacy in marketing the Mozilla brand came from research conducted by the company four years ago into the rise of consumers who make values-based decisions on not only what they purchase but where they spend their time."
- Core human values not eyeballs (Cubic Garden) — "Theres so much more to do, but the aims are high and important for not just the BBC, but all public service entities around the world. Measuring the impact and quality on peoples lives beyond the shallow meaningless metrics for public service is critical."
- The radical combination of degrowth and basic income (openDemocracy) — "One of the things you hear whenever you talk about degrowth is that, if the economy doesn't grow, people are going to be without jobs, people will go hungry, and no one wants that. Rich countries might be able to afford slowing down their economies, but not poorer ones. You hear this argument mostly in countries from the Global South, like my own. This misses the point. Degrowth is a critique of our dependency on work. This idea that people have to work to stay alive, and thus the economy needs to keep growing for the sake of keeping people working."
- The hypersane are among us, if only we are prepared to look (Aeon) — "It is not just that the ‘sane’ are irrational but that they lack scope and range, as though they’ve grown into the prisoners of their arbitrary lives, locked up in their own dark and narrow subjectivity. Unable to take leave of their selves, they hardly look around them, barely see beauty and possibility, rarely contemplate the bigger picture – and all, ultimately, for fear of losing their selves, of breaking down, of going mad, using one form of extreme subjectivity to defend against another, as life – mysterious, magical life – slips through their fingers."
- "The Tragedy of the Commons": how ecofascism was smuggled into mainstream thought (BoingBoing) — "We are reaching a "peak indifference" tipping point in the climate debate, where it's no longer possible to deny the reality of the climate crisis. I think that many of us assumed that when that happened, we'd see a surge of support for climate justice, the diversion of resources from wealth extraction for the super-rich to climate remediation and defense centered on the public good. But that expectation overestimated the extent to which climate denial was motivated by mere greed."
- What Would It Take to Shut Down the Entire Internet? (Gizmodo) "One imaginative stumbling block, in playing out the implications of [this] scenario, was how something like that could happen in the first place. And so—without advocating any of the methods described below, or strongly suggesting that hundreds or thousands of like-minded heroes band together to take this sucker down once and for all—...we’ve asked a number of cybersecurity experts how exactly one would go about shutting down the entire internet."
- Earning, spending, saving: The currency of influence in open source (Opensource.com) — "Even though you can't buy it, influence behaves like a form of virtual currency in an open source community: a scarce resource, always needed, but also always in short supply. One must earn it through contributions to an open source project or community. In contrast to monetary currency, however, influence is not transferable. You must earn it for yourself. You can neither give nor receive it as a gift."
- The Art of Topophilia: 7 Ways to Love the Place You Live (Art of Manliness) — "It’s not only possible to kindle this kind of topophilic love affair with “sexier” places chock full of well-hyped advantages, but also with so-called undesirable communities that aren’t on the cultural radar. Just as people who may initially appear lowly and unappealing, but have warm and welcoming personalities, come to seem more attractive the more we get to know them, so too can sleepier, less vaunted locales."
- A Like Can’t Go Anywhere, But a Compliment Can Go a Long Way (Frank Chimero) — "Passive positivity isn’t enough; active positivity is needed to counterbalance whatever sort of collective conversations and attention we point at social media. Otherwise, we are left with the skewed, inaccurate, and dangerous nature of what’s been built: an environment where most positivity is small, vague, and immobile, and negativity is large, precise, and spreadable."
- EU recognises "right to repair" in push to make appliances last longer (Dezeen) — "Not included in the EU right to repair rules are devices such as smart phones and laptops, whose irreplaceable batteries and performance-hampering software updates are most often accused of encouraging throwaway culture."
- I'm a Psychotherapist Who Sets 30-Day Challenges Instead of Long-Term Goals. Here's Why (Inc.) — "Studies show our brains view time according to either "now deadlines" or "someday deadlines." And "now deadlines" often fall within this calendar month."
- I Quit Social Media for a Year and Nothing Magical Happened (Josh C. Simmons) — "A lot of social media related aspects of my life are different now – I’m not sure they’re better, they’re just different, but I can confidently say that I prefer this normal to last year’s. There’s a bit of rain with all of the sunshine. I don’t see myself ever going back to social media. I don’t see the point of it, and after leaving for a while, and getting a good outside look, it seems like an abusive relationship – millions of workers generating data for tech-giants to crunch through and make money off of. I think that we tend to forget how we were getting along pretty well before social media – not everything was idyllic and better, but it was fine."
- Face recognition, bad people and bad data (Benedict Evans) — "My favourite example of what can go wrong here comes from a project for recognising cancer in photos of skin. The obvious problem is that you might not have an appropriate distribution of samples of skin in different tones. But another problem that can arise is that dermatologists tend to put rulers in the photo of cancer, for scale - so if all the examples of ‘cancer’ have a ruler and all the examples of ‘not-cancer’ do not, that might be a lot more statistically prominent than those small blemishes. You inadvertently built a ruler-recogniser instead of a cancer-recogniser."
- Would the Internet Be Healthier Without 'Like' Counts? (WIRED) — "Online, value is quantifiable. The worth of a person, idea, movement, meme, or tweet is often based on a tally of actions: likes, retweets, shares, followers, views, replies, claps, and swipes-up, among others. Each is an individual action. Together, though, they take on outsized meaning. A YouTube video with 100,000 views seems more valuable than one with 10, even though views—like nearly every form of online engagement—can be easily bought. It’s a paradoxical love affair. And it’s far from an accident."
- Are Platforms Commons? (On The Horizon) — "[W]hat if ecosystems were constructed so that they were governed by the participants, rather by the hypercapitalist strivings of the platform owners — such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook — or the heavy-handed regulators? Is there a middle ground where the needs of the end user and those building, marketing, and shipping products and services can be balanced, and a fair share of the profits are distributed not just through common carrier laws but by the shared economics of a commons, and where the platform orchestrator gets a fair share, as well?"
- Depression and anxiety threatened to kill my career. So I came clean about it (The Guardian) — "To my surprise, far from rejecting me, students stayed after class to tell me how sorry they were. They left condolence cards in my mailbox and sent emails to let me know they were praying for my family. They stopped by my office to check on me. Up to that point, I’d been so caught up in my despair that it never occurred to me that I might be worthy of concern and support. Being accepted despite my flaws touched me in ways that are hard to express."
- Absolute scale corrupts absolutely (apenwarr) — "Here's what we've lost sight of, in a world where everything is Internet scale: most interactions should not be Internet scale. Most instances of most programs should be restricted to a small set of obviously trusted people. All those people, in all those foreign countries, should not be invited to read Equifax's PII database in Argentina, no matter how stupid the password was. They shouldn't even be able to connect to the database. They shouldn't be able to see that it exists. It shouldn't, in short, be on the Internet."
- The Automation Charade (Logic magazine) — "The problem is that the emphasis on technological factors alone, as though “disruptive innovation” comes from nowhere or is as natural as a cool breeze, casts an air of blameless inevitability over something that has deep roots in class conflict. The phrase “robots are taking our jobs” gives technology agency it doesn’t (yet?) possess, whereas “capitalists are making targeted investments in robots designed to weaken and replace human workers so they can get even richer” is less catchy but more accurate."
- The ambitious plan to reinvent how websites get their names (MIT Technology Review) — "The system would be based on blockchain technology, meaning it would be software that runs on a widely distributed network of computers. In theory, it would have no single point of failure and depend on no human-run organization that could be corrupted or co-opted."
- O whatever God or whatever ancestor that wins in the next life (The Main Event) — "And it begins to dawn on you that the stories were all myths and the epics were all narrated by the villains and the history books were written to rewrite the histories and that so much of what you thought defined excellence merely concealed grift."
- A Famous Argument Against Free Will Has Been Debunked (The Atlantic) — "In other words, people’s subjective experience of a decision—what Libet’s study seemed to suggest was just an illusion—appeared to match the actual moment their brains showed them making a decision."
- Find the best aggregators
- Get summaries
- Cut the redundancy!
- Unsubscribe to as many things as possible
- Recognise that gossip and celebrity entertainment are black holes
- Pick the categories you want for a balanced perspective, and include some from OUTSIDE your main field of interest
- Be a LOT more realistic about what you're likely to get to, and throw the rest out.
- In any thing you need to learn, find a person who can tell you what is:
- Need to know
- Should know
- Nice to know
- Edge case, only if it applies to you specifically
- Useless
- List all of the perceived benefits
- List all of the perceived drawbacks
- List all of the ways that the people making the free app can make money
- One step ahead: how walking opens new horizons (The Guardian) — "Walking provides just enough diversion to occupy the conscious mind, but sets our subconscious free to roam. Trivial thoughts mingle with important ones, memories sharpen, ideas and insights drift to the surface."
- A Philosophy of Walking (Frédéric Gros) — "a bestseller in France, leading thinker Frédéric Gros charts the many different ways we get from A to B—the pilgrimage, the promenade, the protest march, the nature ramble—and reveals what they say about us."
- What 10,000 Steps Will Really Get You (The Atlantic) — "While basic guidelines can be helpful when they’re accurate, human health is far too complicated to be reduced to a long chain of numerical imperatives. For some people, these rules can even do more harm than good."
- What Happened After My 13-Year-Old Son Joined the Alt-Right (Washingtonian) — "I began to see how white supremacists have been benefiting from what the writer Carole Cadwalladr has called the “circular knowledge economy”—how search algorithms feed an internet so ravenous for content that facts are optional."
- What’s the ‘new normal’ for parents and teens online? Common Sense Media launches UK research (Parenting for a Digital Future) — "Yet notwithstanding the huge resources going into the widespread digitisation of everything from schooling to government to the workplace... parents are often unsupported by others – society, community, family, tech companies – in facing the digital world."
- The UK is attempting a radical redesign of the internet (The Verge) — "unlike in the United States, where seemingly all talk of new restrictions on tech companies fizzles into nothingness, Commonwealth countries appear to be quite serious about regulation"
- Reward your “enemies” when they agree with you, exhibit good behavior, or come around on an issue. Otherwise they have no incentive to ever meet you halfway.
- Accept it when people apologize. People should be allowed to work through ideas and opinions online. And that can result in some messy outcomes. Be forgiving.
- Sometimes people have differing opinions because they considered something you didn’t.
- Take a second.
- There's always more to the story. You probably don't know the full context of whatever you're reading or watching.
- If an online space makes more money the more time you spend on it, use sparingly.
- Judge people on their actions, not their words. Don’t get outraged over what people said. Get outraged at what they actually do.
- Try to give people the benefit of the doubt, be charitable in how you read people’s ideas.
- Don’t treat one bad actor as representative of whatever group or demographic they belong to.
- Create the kind of communities and ideas you want people to talk about.
- Sometimes, there are bad actors that don’t play by the rules. They should be shunned, castigated, and banned.
- You don’t always have the moral high ground. You are not always right.
- Block and mute quickly. Worry about the bubbles that creates later.
- There but for the grace of God go you.
- Approach #1: The Slow Social Media Philosophy
- Approach #2: Own Your Own Domain
Social studying
I see a lot of music on Spotify and plenty of YouTube video related to studying. I didn’t realise the rabbit hole went much deeper.
The Study Web is a constellation of digital spaces and online communities—across YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Discord, and Twitter—largely built by students for students. Videos under the #StudyTok hashtag have been viewed over half a billion times. One Discord server, Study Together, has over 120 thousand members. Study Web extends far past study groups composed of classmates, institution specific associations, or poorly designed retro forums discussing entrance requirements for professional programs. It includes but transcends Studyblrs on Tumblr that emerged in 2014 and eclipses various Reddit and Facebook study groups or inspirational images shared across Pinterest and Instagram. Populated mostly by Gen Z and the youngest of millennials, Study Web is the internet most of us don’t see, and it’s become a lifeline for students from junior high to college.Source: Caught in the Study Web - Cybernaut - Every
Most don't talk or act according to who they are, but as they are obliged to
✨ The World’s Oldest Story? Astronomers Say Global Myths About ‘Seven Sisters’ Stars May Reach Back 100,000 Years — "Why are the Australian Aboriginal stories so similar to the Greek ones? Anthropologists used to think Europeans might have brought the Greek story to Australia, where it was adapted by Aboriginal people for their own purposes. But the Aboriginal stories seem to be much, much older than European contact. And there was little contact between most Australian Aboriginal cultures and the rest of the world for at least 50,000 years. So why do they share the same stories?"
🚶♂️ The joy of steps: 20 ways to give purpose to your daily walk — "We need to gallivant around outside in daylight so that our circadian rhythms can regulate sleep and alertness. (Yes, even when the sky is resolutely leaden, it is still technically daylight.) Walking warms you up, too; when you get back indoors, it will feel positively tropical."
🔐 How Law Enforcement Gets Around Your Smartphone's Encryption — "Cryptographers at Johns Hopkins University used publicly available documentation from Apple and Google as well as their own analysis to assess the robustness of Android and iOS encryption. They also studied more than a decade's worth of reports about which of these mobile security features law enforcement and criminals have previously bypassed, or can currently, using special hacking tools."
🚫 Misinformation dropped dramatically the week after Twitter banned Trump and some allies — "The findings, from Jan. 9 through Friday, highlight how falsehoods flow across social media sites — reinforcing and amplifying each other — and offer an early indication of how concerted actions against misinformation can make a difference."
😲 The Ethics of Emotion in AI Systems (Research Summary) — "There will always be a gap between the emotions modelled and the experience of EAI systems. Addressing this gap also implies recognizing the implicit norms and values integrated into these systems in ways that cannot always be foreseen by the original designers. With EAI, it is not just a matter of deciding between the right emotional models and proxy variables, but what the responses collected signify in terms of human beings’ inner feelings, judgments, and future actions."
Quotation-as-title by Baltasar Gracián. Image from top-linked post.
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other
🙆 How I talk to the victims of conspiracy theories
🔒 The Github youtube-dl Takedown Isn't Just a Problem of American Law
🖥️ The Raspberry Pi 400 - Teardown and Review
🐧 As a former social media analyst, I'm quitting Twitter
Quotation-as-title by Eric Hoffer. Image from top-linked post.
One nation under Zuck
This image, from Grayson Perry, is incredible. As he points out in the accompanying article, he's chosen the US due to an upcoming series of his, but geographically this could be anywhere, as culture wars these days happen mainly online.
I've added the emphasis in the quotation below:
When we experience a background hum of unfocused emotion, be it anxiety, sadness, fear, anger, we unconsciously look for something to attach it to. Social media is brilliant at supplying us with issues to which attach our free-floating feelings. We often look for nice, preformed boxes into which we can dump our inchoate feelings, we crave certainty. Social media constantly offers up neat solutions for our messy feelings, whether it be God, guns, Greta or gender identity.
In a battle-torn landscape governed by zeroes and ones, nuance, compromise and empathy are the first casualties. If I were to sum up the online culture war in one word it would be “diaphobia”, a term coined by the psychiatrist RD Laing meaning “fear of being influenced by other people”, the opposite of dialogue. Our ever-present underlying historical and enculturated emotions will nudge us to cherrypick and polish the nuggets of information that support a stance that may have been in our bodies from childhood. Once we have taken sides, the algorithms will supply us with a stream of content to entrench and confirm our beliefs.
Grayson Perry, Be it on God, guns or Greta, social media offers neat solutions for our messy feelings (The Guardian)
Saturday spinnings
As usual, I'm taking a month off Thought Shrapnel duties during the month of August. So this is my last post for a few weeks.
In the meantime, consider deactivating your Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts. See how it makes you feel, and perhaps I'll run into you on the Fediverse? (start here)
I Am a Model and I Know That Artificial Intelligence Will Eventually Take My Job
There are major issues of transparency and authenticity here because the beliefs and opinions don’t actually belong to the digital models, they belong to the models’ creators. And if the creators can’t actually identify with the experiences and groups that these models claim to belong to (i.e., person of color, LGBTQ, etc.), then do they have the right to actually speak on those issues? Or is this a new form of robot cultural appropriation, one in which digital creators are dressing up in experiences that aren’t theirs?
Sinead Bovell (Vogue)
This is an incredible article that looks at machine learning and AI through the lens of an industry I hadn't thought of as being on the brink of being massively disrupted by technology.
How Capitalism Drives Cancel Culture
It is strange that “cancel culture” has become a project of the left, which spent the 20th century fighting against capricious firings of “troublesome” employees. A lack of due process does not become a moral good just because you sometimes agree with its targets. We all, I hope, want to see sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination decrease. But we should be aware of the economic incentives here, particularly given the speed of social media, which can send a video viral, and see onlookers demand a response, before the basic facts have been established. Afraid of the reputational damage that can be incurred in minutes, companies are behaving in ways that range from thoughtless and uncaring to sadistic.
[...]
If you care about progressive causes, then woke capitalism is not your friend. It is actively impeding the cause, siphoning off energy, and deluding us into thinking that change is happening faster and deeper than it really is. When people talk about the “excesses of the left”—a phenomenon that blights the electoral prospects of progressive parties by alienating swing voters—in many cases they’re talking about the jumpy overreactions of corporations that aren’t left-wing at all.
Helen Lewis (The Atlantic)
Cancel culture is problematic, and mainly because of the unequal power structures involved. This is an important read. See also this article by Albert Wenger which has some suggestions towards the end in this regard.
How to Stay Productive When the World Is on Fire
The goal of productivity is to get the things you have to get done finished so you can spend more time on the things you want to do. Don’t fall into the busy trap, where you judge your self-worth by how productive you are or how much you’ve contributed to your company or manager. We’re all just trying to keep our heads above water. I hope these tips will help you do the same.
Alan Henry (WIRED)
As I wrote yesterday on my personal blog, I have a bit of an issue with perfectionism. So this reminder, along with the other great advice in the article, was a timely reminder.
Why you should be thanking your employees more often
If you treat somebody with disdain, of course, you give that person a psychological incentive to diminish your opinion and to want you to be less powerful. Inversely, if you demonstrate understanding and appreciation of someone’s contribution, you create a psychological incentive in the individual to give greater weight to your opinion. And that person will want to strengthen the weight of your opinion in the eyes of others. Appreciation and gratitude breed appreciation and gratitude.
Bruce Tulgan (Fast Company)
Creating a productive, psychologically safe, and emotionally intelligent environment means thanking people for the work they do. That means for their day-to-day activities, not just when they put in a herculean effort. A paycheck is not thanks enough for the work we do and the value we provide.
Nostalgia reimagined
More interesting still is that nostalgia can bring to mind time-periods we didn’t directly experience. In the film Midnight in Paris (2011), Gil is overwhelmed by nostalgic thoughts about 1920s Paris – which he, a modern-day screenwriter, hasn’t experienced – yet his feelings are nothing short of nostalgic. Indeed, feeling nostalgic for a time one didn’t actually live through appears to be a common phenomenon if all the chatrooms, Facebook pages and websites dedicated to it are anything to go by. In fact, a new word has been coined to capture this precise variant of nostalgia – anemoia, defined by the Urban Dictionary and the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows as ‘nostalgia for a time you’ve never known’.
How can we make sense of the fact that people feel nostalgia not only for past experiences but also for generic time periods? My suggestion, inspired by recent evidence from cognitive psychology and neuroscience, is that the variety of nostalgia’s objects is explained by the fact that its cognitive component is not an autobiographical memory, but a mental simulation – an imagination, if you will – of which episodic recollections are a sub-class.
Nigel Warburton (Aeon)
In the UK at least, shows like Downton Abbey and Call The Midwife are popular. My view of this is that, as this article would seem to support, it's a kind of nostalgia for a time that was imagined to be better.
There's a sinister side to this, as well. This kind of nostalgia seems to be particularly prevalent among more conservative-leaning (white) people harking back to a time of greater divisions in society along race and class lines. I think it's rather disturbing.
The World Is Noisy. These Groups Want to Restore the Quiet
Quiet Parks International (QPI) is a nonprofit working to establish certification for quiet parks to raise awareness of and preserve quiet places. The fledgling organization—whose members include audio engineers, scientists, environmentalists, and musicians—has identified at least 262 sites worldwide, including 30 in the US, that it believes are quiet or could become so with management changes....
QPI has no regulatory authority, but like the International Dark Sky Association’s Dark Sky Parks initiative, the nonprofit believes its certification—granted only after a detailed, three-day sound analysis—can encourage public support of preservation efforts and provide guidelines for protection. “The places that are quiet today … are basically leftovers—places that are out of the way,” Quiet Parks cofounder Gordon Hempton says.
Jenny Morber (WIRED)
I live in a part of the world close to both a designated Dark Sky Park and mountains into which I can escape. Light and noise pollution threaten both of them, so I'm glad to hear of these efforts.
Header image by Uillian Vargas
Saturday signalings
I've been head-down doing lots of work this week, and then it's been Bank Holiday weekend, so my reading has been pretty much whatever my social media feeds have thrown up!
There's broadly three sections here, though: stuff about the way we think, about technology, and about ways of working. Enjoy!
How Clocks Changed Humanity Forever, Making Us Masters and Slaves of Time
The article with the above embedded video is from five years ago, but someone shared it on my Twitter timeline and it reminded me of something. When I taught my History students about the Industrial Revolution it blew their minds that different parts of the country could be, effectively, on different 'timezones' until the dawn of the railways.
It just goes to show how true it is that first we shape our tools, and then they shape us.
'Allostatic Load' is the Psychological Reason for Our Pandemic Brain Fog
“Uncertainty is one of the biggest elements that contributes to our experience of stress,” said Lynn Bufka, the senior director of Practice, Research, and Policy at the American Psychological Association. “Part of what we try to do to function in our society is to have some structure, some predictability. When we have those kinds of things, life feels more manageable, because you don’t have to put the energy into figuring those things out.”
Emily Baron Cadloff (VICE)
A short but useful article on why despite having grand plans, it's difficult to get anything done in our current situation. We can't even plan holidays at the moment.
Most of the Mind Can’t Tell Fact from Fiction
The industrialized world is so full of human faces, like in ads, that we forget that it’s just ink, or pixels on a computer screen. Every time our ancestors saw something that looked like a human face, it probably was one. As a result, we didn’t evolve to distinguish reality from representation. The same perceptual machinery interprets both.
Jim Davies (Nautilus)
A useful reminder that our brain contains several systems, some of which are paleolithic.
Not even wrong: ways to predict tech
The Wright Flier could only go 200 meters, and the Rocket Belt could only fly for 21 seconds. But the Flier was a breakthrough of principle. There was no reason why it couldn't get much better, very quickly, and Blériot flew across the English Channel just six years later. There was a very clear and obvious path to make it better. Conversely, the Rocket Belt flew for 21 seconds because it used almost a litre of fuel per second - to fly like this for half a hour you’d need almost two tonnes of fuel, and you can’t carry that on your back. There was no roadmap to make it better without changing the laws of physics. We don’t just know that now - we knew it in 1962.
Benedict Evans
A useful post about figuring out whether something will happen or be successful. The question is "what would have to change?"
Grandmother ordered to delete Facebook photos under GDPR
The case went to court after the woman refused to delete photographs of her grandchildren which she had posted on social media. The mother of the children had asked several times for the pictures to be deleted.
The GDPR does not apply to the "purely personal" or "household" processing of data. However, that exemption did not apply because posting photographs on social media made them available to a wider audience, the ruling said.
"With Facebook, it cannot be ruled out that placed photos may be distributed and may end up in the hands of third parties," it said.
The woman must remove the photos or pay a fine of €50 (£45) for every day that she fails to comply with the order, up to a maximum fine of €1,000.
BBC News
I think this is entirely reasonable, and I'm hoping we'll see more of this until people stop thinking they can sharing the personally identifiable information of others whenever and however they like.
Developing new digital skills – is training always the answer?
Think ESKiMO:
- Environment (E) – are the reasons its not happening outside of the control of the people you identified in Step 1? Do they have the resources, the tools, the funding? Do their normal objectives mean that they have to prioritise other things? Does the prevailing organisational culture work against achieving the goals?
- Skills (S) – Are they aware of the tasks they need to do and enabled to do them?
- Knowledge (K) – is the knowledge they need available to them? It could either be information they have to carry around in their heads, or just be available in a place they know about.
- Motivation (Mo) – Do they have the will to carry it out?
The last three (S,K, Mo) work a little bit like the fire triangle from that online fire safety training you probably had to do this year. All three need to be present for new practice to happen and to be sustainable.
Chris Thomson (Jisc)
In this post, Chris Thomson, who I used to work with at Jisc, challenges the notion that training is about getting people to do what you want. Instead, this ESKiMO approach asks why they're not already doing it.
Leave Scrum to Rugby, I Like Getting Stuff Done
Within Scrum, estimates have a primary purpose – to figure out how much work the team can accomplish in a given sprint. If I were to grant that Sprints were a good idea (which I obviously don’t believe) then the description of estimates in the official Scrum guide wouldn’t be a problem.
The problem is that estimates in practice are a bastardization of reality. The Scrum guide is vague on the topic so managers take matters into their own hands.
Lane Wagner (Qvault)
I'm a product manager, and I find it incredible that people assume that 'agile' is the same as 'Scrum'. If you're trying to shoehorn the work you do into a development process then, to my mind, you're doing it wrong.
As with the example below, it's all about something that works for your particular context, while bearing in mind the principles of the agile manifesto.
How I trick my well developed procrastination skills
The downside of all those nice methods and tools is that you have to apply them, which can be of course, postponed as well. Thus, the most important step is to integrate your tool or todo list in your daily routine. Whenever you finish a task, or you’re thinking what to do next, the focus should be on your list. For example, I figured out that I always click on one link in my browser favourites (a news website) or an app on my mobile phone (my email app). Sometimes I clicked hundred times a day, even though, knowing that there can’t be any new emails, as I checked one minute ago. Maybe you also developed such a “useless” habit which should be broken or at least used for something good. So I just replaced the app on my mobile and the link in my browser with my Remember The Milk app which shows me the tasks I have to do today. If you have just a paper-based solution it might be more difficult but try to integrate it in your daily routines, and keep it always in reach. After finishing a task, you should tick it in your system, which also forces you to have a look at the task list again.
Wolfgang Gassler
Some useful pointers in this post, especially at the end about developing and refining your own system that depends on your current context.
The Great Asshole Fallacy
The focus should be on the insistence of excellence, both from yourself and from those around you. The wisdom from experience. The work ethic. The drive. The dedication. The sacrifice. Jordan hits on all of those. And he even implies that not everyone needed the “tough love” to push them. But that’s glossed over for the more powerful mantra. Still, it doesn’t change the fact that not only are there other ways to tease such greatness out of people — different people require different methods.
M.G. Siegler (500ish)
I like basketball, and my son plays, but I haven't yet seen the documentary mentioned in this post. The author discusses Michael Jordan stating that "Winning has a price. And leadership has a price." However, he suggests that this isn't the only way to get to excellence, and I would agree.
Header image by Romain Briaux
Software ate the world, so all the world’s problems get expressed in software
Benedict Evans recently posted his annual 'macro trends' slide deck. It's incredibly insightful, and work of (minimalist) art. This article's title comes from his conclusion, and you can see below which of the 128 slides jumped out at me from deck:
For me, what the deck as a whole does is place some of the issues I've been thinking about in a wider context.
My team is building a federated social network for educators, so I'm particularly tuned-in to conversations about the effect social media is having on society. A post by Harold Jarche where he writes about his experience of Twitter as a rage machine caught my attention, especially the part where he talks about how people are happy to comment based on the 'preview' presented to them in embedded tweets:
Research on the self-perception of knowledge shows how viewing previews without going to the original article gives an inflated sense of understanding on the subject, “audiences who only read article previews are overly confident in their knowledge, especially individuals who are motivated to experience strong emotions and, thus, tend to form strong opinions.” Social media have created a worldwide Dunning-Kruger effect. Our collective self-perception of knowledge acquired through social media is greater than it actually is.
Harold Jarche
I think our experiment with general-purpose social networks is slowly coming to an end, or at least will do over the next decade. What I mean is that, while we'll still have places where you can broadcast anything to anyone, the digital environments we'll spend more time will be what Venkatesh Rao calls the 'cozyweb':
Unlike the main public internet, which runs on the (human) protocol of “users” clicking on links on public pages/apps maintained by “publishers”, the cozyweb works on the (human) protocol of everybody cutting-and-pasting bits of text, images, URLs, and screenshots across live streams. Much of this content is poorly addressable, poorly searchable, and very vulnerable to bitrot. It lives in a high-gatekeeping slum-like space comprising slacks, messaging apps, private groups, storage services like dropbox, and of course, email.
Venkatesh Rao
That's on a personal level. I should imagine organisational spaces will be a bit more organised. Back to Jarche:
We need safe communities to take time for reflection, consideration, and testing out ideas without getting harassed. Professional social networks and communities of practices help us make sense of the world outside the workplace. They also enable each of us to bring to bear much more knowledge and insight that we could do on our own.
Harold Jarche
...or to use Rao's diagram which is so-awful-it's-useful:
Of course, blockchain/crypto could come along and solve all of our problems. Except it won't. Humans are humans (are humans).
Ever since Eli Parisier's TED talk urging us to beware online "filter bubbles" people have been wringing their hands about ensuring we have 'balance' in our networks.
Interestingly, some recent research by the Reuters Institute at Oxford University, paints a slightly different picture. The researcher, Dr Richard Fletcher begins by investigating how people access the news.
Fletcher draws a distinction between different types of personalisation:
Self-selected personalisation refers to the personalisations that we voluntarily do to ourselves, and this is particularly important when it comes to news use. People have always made decisions in order to personalise their news use. They make decisions about what newspapers to buy, what TV channels to watch, and at the same time which ones they would avoid
Academics call this selective exposure. We know that it's influenced by a range of different things such as people's interest levels in news, their political beliefs and so on. This is something that has pretty much always been true.
Pre-selected personalisation is the personalisation that is done to people, sometimes by algorithms, sometimes without their knowledge. And this relates directly to the idea of filter bubbles because algorithms are possibly making choices on behalf of people and they may not be aware of it.
The reason this distinction is particularly important is because we should avoid comparing pre-selected personalisation and its effects with a world where people do not do any kind of personalisation to themselves. We can't assume that offline, or when people are self-selecting news online, they're doing it in a completely random way. People are always engaging in personalisation to some extent and if we want to understand the extent of pre-selected personalisation, we have to compare it with the realistic alternative, not hypothetical ideals.
Dr Richard Fletcher
Read the article for the details, but the takeaways for me were twofold. First, that we might be blaming social media for wider and deeper divisons within society, and second, that teaching people to search for information (rather than stumble across it via feeds) might be the best strategy:
People who use search engines for news on average use more news sources than people who don't. More importantly, they're more likely to use sources from both the left and the right.
Dr Richard Fletcher
People who rely mainly on self-selection tend to have fairly imbalanced news diets. They either have more right-leaning or more left-leaning sources. People who use search engines tend to have a more even split between the two.
Useful as it is, what I think this research misses out is the 'black box' algorithms that seek to keep people engaged and consuming content. YouTube is the poster child for this. As Jarche comments:
We are left in a state of constant doubt as conspiratorial content becomes easier to access on platforms like YouTube than accessing solid scientific information in a journal, much of which is behind a pay-wall and inaccessible to the general public.
Harold Jarche
This isn't an easy problem to solve.
We might like to pretend that human beings are rational agents, but this isn't actually true. Let's take something like climate change. We're not arguing about the facts here, we're arguing about politics. Adrian Bardon, writing in Fast Company, writes:
In theory, resolving factual disputes should be relatively easy: Just present evidence of a strong expert consensus. This approach succeeds most of the time, when the issue is, say, the atomic weight of hydrogen.
But things don’t work that way when the scientific consensus presents a picture that threatens someone’s ideological worldview. In practice, it turns out that one’s political, religious, or ethnic identity quite effectively predicts one’s willingness to accept expertise on any given politicized issue.
Adrian Bardon
This is pretty obvious when we stop to think about it for a moment; beliefs are bound up with identity, and that's not something that's so easy to change.
In ideologically charged situations, one’s prejudices end up affecting one’s factual beliefs. Insofar as you define yourself in terms of your cultural affiliations, information that threatens your belief system—say, information about the negative effects of industrial production on the environment—can threaten your sense of identity itself. If it’s part of your ideological community’s worldview that unnatural things are unhealthful, factual information about a scientific consensus on vaccine or GM food safety feels like a personal attack.
Adrian Bardon
So how do we change people's minds when they're objectively wrong? Brian Resnick, writing for Vox, suggests the best approach might be 'deep canvassing':
Giving grace. Listening to a political opponent’s concerns. Finding common humanity. In 2020, these seem like radical propositions. But when it comes to changing minds, they work.
[...]
The new research shows that if you want to change someone’s mind, you need to have patience with them, ask them to reflect on their life, and listen. It’s not about calling people out or labeling them fill-in-the-blank-phobic. Which makes it feel like a big departure from a lot of the current political dialogue.
Brian Resnick
This approach, it seems, works:
So it seems there is some hope to fixing the world's problems. It's just that the solutions point towards doing the hard work of talking to people and not just treating them as containers for opinions to shoot down at a distance.
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Friday flowerings
Did you see these things this week?
Image: The why is often invisible via Jessica Hagy's Indexed
People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think
So said Neil Postman (via Jay Springett). Jay is one of a small number of people who's work I find particularly thoughtful and challenging.
Another is Venkatesh Rao, who last week referenced a Twitter thread he posted earlier this year. It's awkward to and quote the pertinent parts of such things, but I'll give it a try:
Megatrend conclusion: if you do not build a second brain or go offline, you will BECOME the second brain.
[...]
Basically, there's no way to actually handle the volume of information and news that all of us appear to be handling right now. Which means we are getting augmented cognition resources from somewhere. The default place is "social" media.
[...]
What those of us who are here are doing is making a deal with the devil (or an angel): in return for being 1-2 years ahead of curve, we play 2nd brain to a shared first brain. We've ceded control of executive attention not to evil companies, but… an emergent oracular brain.
[...]
I called it playing your part in the Global Social Computer in the Cloud (GSCITC).
[...]
Central trade-off in managing your participation in GSCITC is: The more you attempt to consciously curate your participation rather than letting it set your priorities, the less oracular power you get in return.
Venkatesh Rao
He reckons that being fully immersed in the firehose of social media is somewhat like reading the tea leaves or understanding the runes. You have to 'go with the flow'.
Rao uses the example of the very Twitter thread he's making. Constructing it that way versus, for example, writing a blog post or newsletter means he is in full-on 'gonzo mode' versus what he calls (after Henry David Thoreau) 'Waldenponding'.
I have been generally very unimpressed with the work people seem to generate when they go waldenponding to work on supposedly important things. The comparable people who stay more plugged in seem to produce better work.
My kindest reading of people who retreat so far it actually compromises their work is that it is a mental health preservation move because they can't handle the optimum GSCITC immersion for their project. Their work could be improved if they had the stomach for more gonzo-nausea.
My harshest reading is that they're narcissistic snowflakes who overvalue their work simply because they did it.
Venkatesh Rao
Well, perhaps. But as someone who has attempted to drink from that firehouse for over a decade, I think the time comes when you realise something else. Who's setting the agenda here? It's not 'no-one', but neither is it any one person in particular. Rather the whole structure of what can happen within such a network depends on decisions made other than you.
For example, Dan Hon, pointed (in a supporter-only newsletter) to an article by Louise Matsakis in WIRED that explains that the social network TikTok not only doesn't add timestamps to user-generated content, but actively blocks the clock on your smartphone. These design decisions affect what can and can't happen, and also the kinds of things that do end up happening.
Writing in The Guardian, Leah McLaren writes about being part of the last generation to really remember life before the internet.
In this age of uncertainty, predictions have lost value, but here’s an irrefutable one: quite soon, no person on earth will remember what the world was like before the internet. There will be records, of course (stored in the intangibly limitless archive of the cloud), but the actual lived experience of what it was like to think and feel and be human before the emergence of big data will be gone. When that happens, what will be lost?
Leah McLaren
McLaren is evidently a few years older than me, as I've been online since I was about 15. However, I definitely reflect on a regular basis about what being hyper-connected does to my sense of self. She cites a recent study published in the official journal of the World Psychiatric Association. Part of the conclusion of that study reads:
As digital technologies become increasingly integrated with everyday life, the Internet is becoming highly proficient at capturing our attention, while producing a global shift in how people gather information, and connect with one another. In this review, we found emerging support for several hypotheses regarding the pathways through which the Internet is influencing our brains and cognitive processes, particularly with regards to: a) the multi‐faceted stream of incoming information encouraging us to engage in attentional‐switching and “multi‐tasking” , rather than sustained focus; b) the ubiquitous and rapid access to online factual information outcompeting previous transactive systems, and potentially even internal memory processes; c) the online social world paralleling “real world” cognitive processes, and becoming meshed with our offline sociality, introducing the possibility for the special properties of social media to impact on “real life” in unforeseen ways.
Firth, J., et al. (2019). The “online brain”: how the Internet may be changing our cognition. World Psychiatry, 18: 119-129.
In her Guardian article, McLaren cites the main author, Dr Joseph Firth:
“The problem with the internet,” Firth explained, “is that our brains seem to quickly figure out it’s there – and outsource.” This would be fine if we could rely on the internet for information the same way we rely on, say, the British Library. But what happens when we subconsciously outsource a complex cognitive function to an unreliable online world manipulated by capitalist interests and agents of distortion? “What happens to children born in a world where transactive memory is no longer as widely exercised as a cognitive function?” he asked.
Leah McLaren
I think this is the problem, isn't it? I've got no issue with having an 'outboard brain' where I store things that I want to look up instead of remember. It's also insanely useful to have a method by which the world can join together in a form of 'hive mind'.
What is problematic is when this 'hive mind' (in the form of social media) is controlled by people and organisations whose interests are orthogonal to our own.
In that situation, there are three things we can do. The first is to seek out forms of nascent 'hive mind'-like spaces which are not controlled by people focused on the problematic concept of 'shareholder value'. Like Mastodon, for example, and other decentralised social networks.
The second is to spend time finding out the voices to which you want to pay particular attention. The chances are that they won't only write down their thoughts via social networks. They are likely to have newsletters, blogs, and even podcasts.
Third, an apologies for the metaphor, but with such massive information consumption the chances are that we can become 'constipated'. So if we don't want that to happen, if we don't want to go on an 'information diet', then we need to ensure a better throughput. One of the best things I've done is have a disciplined approach to writing (here on Thought Shrapnel, and elsewhere) about the things I've read and found interesting. That's one way to extract the nutrients.
I'd love your thoughts on this. Do you agree with the above? What strategies do you have in place?
Friday flexitarianism
Check these links out and tell me which one you like best:
Image by Yung-sen Wu (via The Atlantic)
Friday fermentations
I boiled the internet and this was what remained:
The best place to be is somewhere else?
So said Albarran Cabrera, except I added a cheeky question mark.
I have a theory. Not a grand, unifying theory of everything, but a theory nonetheless. I reckon that, despite common wisdom attributing the decline of comments on blogs to social media, it's at least also because of something else.
Here's an obvious point: there's more people online now than there were ten years ago. As a result, there's more stuff being produced and shared and, because of that, there's more to miss out on. This is known as the Fear Of Missing Out (or FOMO).
While I don't think anyone realistically thinks it's possible to keep up with everything produced online every day, I think people do have an expectation that they can keep up with what their online friends are doing and thinking. As the number of people we're following in different places grows and grows, we don't have much time to share meaningfully. Hence the rise of the retweet button.
Back in 2006, in the mists of internet time, Kathy Sierra wrote a great post entitled The myth of "keeping up". Remember that this was before people were really using social networks such as Twitter. She talks about what we're experiencing as 'information anxiety' and has some tips to combat it, which I think are still relevant:
The interesting thing is that, done well, social media can actually be a massive force for good. It used to be set up for that, coming on the back of RSS. Now, it's set up to drag you into arguments about politics and the kind of "black holes" of gossip and celebrity entertainment that Kathy mentions.
One of the problems is that we have a cult of 'busy' which people mis-attribute to a Protestant work ethic instead of rapacious late-stage capitalism. I've recently finished 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by Jonathan Crary where he makes this startlingly obvious, but nevertheless profound point:
Because one’s bank account and one’s friendships can now be managed through identical machinic operations and gestures, there is a growing homogenization of what used to be entirely unrelated areas of experience.
Jonathan Crary
...and:
[S]ince no moment, place, or situation now exists in which one can not shop, consume, or exploit networked resources, there is a relentless incursion of the non-time of 24/7 into every aspect of social or personal life.
Jonathan Crary
In other words, you're busy because of your smartphone, the apps you decide to install upon it, and the notifications that you then receive.
The solution to FOMO is to know who you are, what you care about, and the difference you're trying to make in the world. As Gandhi famously said:
Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
Mahatma Gandhi
I've recently fallen into the trap of replying to work emails on my days off. It's a slippery slope, as it sets up an expectation.
The same goes with social media, of course, except that it's even more insidious, as an 'action' can just be liking or retweeting. It leads to slacktivism instead of making actual, meaningful change in the world.
People joke about life admin but one of those life admin tasks might be to write down (yes! with a pen and paper!) the things you're trying to achieve with the 'free' apps that you've got installed. If you were being thorough, or teaching kids how to do this, perhaps you'd:
Tim Ferriss recently reposted an interview he did with Seth Godin back in 2016 about how he (Seth) manages his life. It's an object lesson in focus, and leading an intentional life without overly-quantifying it. I can't help but think it's all about focus. Oh, and he doesn't use social media, other than auto-posting from his blog to Twitter.
For me, at least, because I spend so much time surrounded by technology, the decisions I make about tech are decisions I make about life. A couple of months ago I wrote a post entitled Change your launcher, change your life where I explained that even just changing how you access apps can make a material difference to your life.
So, to come full circle, the best place to be is actually where you are right now, not somewhere else. If you're fully present in the situation (Tim Ferriss suggests taking three breaths), then ask yourself some hard questions about what success looks like for you, and perhaps whether what you say, what you think, and what you do are in harmony.
Only thoughts conceived while walking have any value
Philosopher and intrepid walker Friedrich Nietzsche is well known for today's quotation-as-title. Fellow philosopher Immanuel Kant was a keen walker, too, along with Henry David Thoreau. There's just something about big walks and big thoughts.
I spent a good part of yesterday walking about 30km because I woke wanting to see the sea. It has a calming effect on me, and my wife was at work with the car. Forty-thousand steps later, I'd not only succeeded in my mission and taken the photo that accompanies this post, but managed to think about all kinds of things that definitely wouldn't have entered my mind had I stayed at home.
I want to focus the majority of this article on a single piece of writing by Craig Mod, whose walk across Japan I followed by SMS. Instead of sharing the details of his 620 mile, six-week trek via social media, he instead updated a server which then sent text messages (with photographs, so technically MMS) to everyone who'd signed up to receive them. Readers could reply, but he didn't receive these until he'd finished the walk and they'd been automatically curated into a book and sent to him.
Writing in WIRED, Mod talks of his "glorious, almost-disconnected walk" which was part experiment, part protest:
I have configured servers, written code, built web pages, helped design products used by millions of people. I am firmly in the camp that believes technology is generally bending the world in a positive direction. Yet, for me, Twitter foments neurosis, Facebook sadness, Google News a sense of foreboding. Instagram turns me covetous. All of them make me want to do it—whatever “it” may be—for the likes, the comments. I can’t help but feel that I am the worst version of myself, being performative on a very short, very depressing timeline. A timeline of seconds.
[...]
So, a month ago, when I started walking, I decided to conduct an experiment. Maybe even a protest. I wanted to test hypotheses. Our smartphones are incredible machines, and to throw them away entirely feels foolhardy. The idea was not to totally disconnect, but to test rational, metered uses of technology. I wanted to experience the walk as the walk, in all of its inevitably boring walkiness. To bask in serendipitous surrealism, not just as steps between reloading my streams. I wanted to experience time.
Craig Mod
I love this, it's so inspiring. The most number of consecutive days I've walked is only two, so I can't even really imagine what it must be like to walk for weeks at a time. It's a form of meditation, I suppose, and a way to re-centre oneself.
The longness of an activity is important. Hours or even days don’t really cut it when it comes to long. “Long” begins with weeks. Weeks of day-after-day long walking days, 30- or 40-kilometer days. Days that leave you wilted and aware of all the neglect your joints and muscles have endured during the last decade of sedentary YouTubing.
[...]
In the context of a walk like this, “boredom” is a goal, the antipode of mindless connectivity, constant stimulation, anger and dissatisfaction. I put “boredom” in quotes because the boredom I’m talking about fosters a heightened sense of presence. To be “bored” is to be free of distraction.
Craig Mod
I find that when I walk for any period of time, certain songs start going through my head. Yesterday, for example, my brain put on repeat the song Good Enough by Dodgy from their album Free Peace Sweet. The time before it was We Can Do It from Jamiroquai's latest album Automaton. I'm not sure where it comes from, although the beat does have something to do with my pace.
Walking by oneself seems to do something to the human brain akin to unlocking the subconscious. That's why I'm not alone in calling it a 'meditative' activity. While I enjoy walking with others, the brain seems to start working a different way when you're by yourself being propelled by your own two legs.
It's easy to feel like we're not 'keeping up' with work, with family and friends, and with the news. The truth is, however, that the most important person to 'keep up' with is yourself. Having a strong sense of self, I believe, is the best way to live a life with meaning.
It might sound 'boring' to go for a long walk, but as Alain de Botton notes in The News: a user's manual, getting out of our routine is sometimes exactly what we need:
What we colloquially call 'feeling bored' is just the mind, acting out of a self-preserving reflex, ejecting information it has despaired of knowing where to place.
Alain de Botton
I'm not going to tell you what I thought about during my walk today as, outside of the rich (inner and outer) context in which the thinking took place, whatever I write would probably sound banal.
To me, however, the thoughts I had today will, like all of the thoughts I've had while doing some serious walking, help me organise my future actions. Perhaps that's what Nietzsche meant when he said that only thoughts conceived while walking have any value.
Also check out:
There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless
A quotation from a short story from Jorge Luis Borges' Labyrinths provides the title for today's article. I want to dig into the work of danah boyd and the transcript of a talk she gave recently, entitled Agnotology and Epistemological Fragmentation. It helps us understand what's going on behind the seemingly-benign fascias of social networks and news media outlets.
She explains the title of her talk:
Epistemology is the term that describes how we know what we know. Most people who think about knowledge think about the processes of obtaining it. Ignorance is often assumed to be not-yet-knowledgeable. But what if ignorance is strategically manufactured? What if the tools of knowledge production are perverted to enable ignorance? In 1995, Robert Proctor and Iain Boal coined the term “agnotology” to describe the strategic and purposeful production of ignorance. In an edited volume called Agnotology, Proctor and Londa Schiebinger collect essays detailing how agnotology is achieved. Whether we’re talking about the erasure of history or the undoing of scientific knowledge, agnotology is a tool of oppression by the powerful.
danah boyd
Having already questioned 'media literacy' the way it's currently taught through educational institutions and libraries, boyd explains how the alt-right are streets ahead of educators when it comes to pushing their agenda:
One of the best ways to seed agnotology is to make sure that doubtful and conspiratorial content is easier to reach than scientific material. And then to make sure that what scientific information is available, is undermined. One tactic is to exploit “data voids.” These are areas within a search ecosystem where there’s no relevant data; those who want to manipulate media purposefully exploit these. Breaking news is one example of this.
[...]
Today’s drumbeat happens online. The goal is no longer just to go straight to the news media. It’s to first create a world of content and then to push the term through to the news media at the right time so that people search for that term and receive specific content. Terms like caravan, incel, crisis actor. By exploiting the data void, or the lack of viable information, media manipulators can help fragment knowledge and seed doubt.
danah boyd
Harold Jarche uses McLuhan's tetrads to understand this visually, commenting: "This is an information war. Understanding this is the first step in fighting for democracy."
We can teach children sitting in classrooms all day about checking URLs and the provenance of the source, but how relevant is that when they're using YouTube as their primary search engine? Returning to danah boyd:
YouTube has great scientific videos about the value of vaccination, but countless anti-vaxxers have systematically trained YouTube to make sure that people who watch the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s videos also watch videos asking questions about vaccinations or videos of parents who are talking emotionally about what they believe to be the result of vaccination. They comment on both of these videos, they watch them together, they link them together. This is the structural manipulation of media.
danah boyd
It's not just the new and the novel. Even things that are relatively obvious to those of us who have grown up as adults online are confusing to older generations. As this article by BuzzFeed News reporter Craig Silverman points out, conspiracy-believing retirees have disproportionate influence on our democratic processes:
Older people are also more likely to vote and to be politically active in other ways, such as making political contributions. They are wealthier and therefore wield tremendous economic power and all of the influence that comes with it. With more and more older people going online, and future 65-plus generations already there, the online behavior of older people, as well as their rising power, is incredibly important — yet often ignored.
Craig Silverman
So when David Buckingham asks 'Who needs digital literacy?' I think the answer is everyone. Having been a fan of his earlier work, it saddens me to realise that he hasn't kept up with the networked era:
These days, I find the notion of digital literacy much less useful – and to some extent, positively misleading. The fundamental problem is that the idea is defined by technology itself. It makes little sense to distinguish between texts (or media) on the grounds of whether they are analogue or digital: almost all media (including print media) involve the use of digital technology at some stage or other. Fake news and disinformation operate as much in old, analogue media (like newspapers) as they do online. Meanwhile, news organisations based in old media make extensive and increasing use of online platforms. The boundaries between digital and analogue may still be significant in some situations, but they are becoming ever more blurred.
David Buckingham
Actually, as Howard Rheingold pointed out a number of years ago in Net Smart, and as boyd has done in her own work, networks change everything. You can't seriously compare pre-networked and post-networked cultures in any way other than in contrast.
Buckingham suggests that, seeing as the (UK) National Literacy Trust are on the case, we "don't need to reinvent the wheel". The trouble is that the wheel has already been reinvented, and lots of people either didn't notice, or are acting as though it hasn't been.
There's a related article by Anna Mckie in the THE entitled Teaching intelligence: digital literacy in the ‘alternative facts’ era which, unfortunately, is now behind a paywall. It reports on a special issue of the journal Teaching in Higher Education where the editors have brought together papers on the contribution made by Higher Education to expertise and knowledge in the age of 'alternative facts':
[S]ocial media has changed the dynamic of information in our society, [editor] Professor Harrison added. “We've moved away from the idea of experts who assess information to one where the validity of a statement is based on the likes, retweets and shares it gets, rather than whether the information is valid.”
The first task of universities is to go back to basics and “help students to understand the difference between knowledge and information, and how knowledge is created, which is separate to how information is created”, Professor Harrison said. “Within [each] discipline, what are the skills needed to assess that?”
Many assume that schools or colleges are teaching this, but that is not the case, he added. “Academics should also be wary of the extent to which they themselves understand the new paradigms of knowledge creation,” Professor Harrison warned.
Anna McKie
One of the reasons I decided not to go into academia is that, certain notable exceptions aside, the focus is on explaining rather than changing. Or, to finish with another quotation, this time from Karl Marx, "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it."
Also check out:
Rules for Online Sanity
It’s funny: we tell kids not to be mean to one another, and then immediately jump on social media to call people out and divide ourselves into various camps.
This list by Sean Blanda has been shared in several places, and rightly so. I’ve highlighted what I consider to be the top three.
Oh, and about "creating communities": why not support Thought Shrapnel via Patreon and comment on these posts along with people you already know have something in common?I’ve started thinking about what are the “new rules” for navigating the online world? If you could get everyone to agree (implicitly or explicitly) to a set of rules, what would they be? Below is an early attempt at an “Rules for Online Sanity” list. I’d love to hear what you think I missed.
Source: The Discourse (via Read Write Collect)
Internalising the logic of social media
A few days ago, Twitter posted a photo of an early sketch that founder Jack Dorsey made for the initial user interface. It included settings to inform a user’s followers that they might not respond immediately because they were in the part or busy reading.
A day later, an article in The New Yorker about social media used a stark caption for its header image:
Social-media platforms know what you’re seeing, and they know how you acted in the immediate aftermath of seeing it, and they can decide what you will see next.There's no doubt in my mind that we're like slow-boiled frogs when it comes to creeping dystopia. It's not happening through the totalitarian lens of the 20th century, but instead in a much more problematic way.
One of the more insidious aspects of [social media's business] model is the extent to which we, as social-media users, replicate its logic at the level of our own activity: we perform market analysis of our own utterances, calculating the reaction a particular post will generate and adjusting our output accordingly. Negative emotions like outrage and contempt and anxiety tend to drive significantly more engagement than positive ones.No wonder Twitter's such an angry place these days.
The article quotes James Bridle’s book New Dark Age, a book which is sitting waiting for me on my shelf when I get back home from this work trip.
We find ourselves today connected to vast repositories of knowledge and yet we have not learned to think. In fact, the opposite is true: that which was intended to enlighten the world in practice darkens it. The abundance of information and the plurality of worldviews now accessible to us through the internet are not producing a coherent consensus reality, but one riven by fundamentalist insistence on simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics. It is on this contradiction that the idea of a new dark age turns: an age in which the value we have placed upon knowledge is destroyed by the abundance of that profitable commodity, and in which we look about ourselves in search of new ways to understand the world.This resonates with a quotation I posted to Thought Shrapnel this week from Jon Ronson's So You've Been Publicly Shamed about how we're actually creating a more conservative environment, despite thinking we're all 'non-conformist'.
To be alive and online in our time is to feel at once incensed and stultified by the onrush of information, helpless against the rising tide of bad news and worse opinions. Nobody understands anything: not the global economy governed by the unknowable whims of algorithms, not our increasingly volatile and fragile political systems, not the implications of the impending climate catastrophe that forms the backdrop of it all. We have created a world that defies our capacity to understand it—though not, of course, the capacity of a small number of people to profit from it. Deleting your social-media accounts might be a means of making it more bearable, and even of maintaining your sanity. But one way or another, the world being what it is, we are going to have to learn to live in it.Last week, at the ALT conference, those in the audience were asked by the speaker to 'stand up' if they felt imposter syndrome. I didn't get to my feet, but it wasn't an act of arrogance or hubris. I may have no idea what I'm doing, but I'm pretty sure no-one else does either.
Source: The New Yorker
On living in public
In this post, Austin Kleon, backpedaling a little from the approach he seemed to promote in Show Your Work!, talks about the problems we all face with ‘living in public’.
It seems ridiculous to say, but 2013, the year I wrote the book, was a simpler time. Social media seemed much more benign to me. Back then, the worst I felt social media did was waste your time. Now, the worst social media does is cripple democracy and ruin your soul.Kleon quotes Warren Ellis, who writes one of my favourite newsletters (his blog is pretty good, too):
You don’t have to live in public on the internet if you don’t want to. Even if you’re a public figure, or micro-famous like me. I don’t follow anyone on my public Instagram account. No shade on those who follow me there, I’m glad you give me your time – but I need to be in my own space to get my shit done. You want a “hack” for handling the internet? Create private social media accounts, follow who you want and sit back and let your bespoke media channels flow to you. These are tools, not requirements. Don’t let them make you miserable. Tune them until they bring you pleasure.In May 2017, after being on Twitter over a decade, I deleted my Twitter history, and now delete tweets on a weekly basis. Now, I hang out on a social network that I co-own called social.coop and which is powered by a federated, decentralised service called Mastodon.
I still publish my work, including Thought Shrapnel posts, to Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. It’s just not where I spend most of my time. On balance, I’m happier for it.
Source: Austin Kleon
On living in public
In this post, Austin Kleon, backpedaling a little from the approach he seemed to promote in Show Your Work!, talks about the problems we all face with ‘living in public’.
It seems ridiculous to say, but 2013, the year I wrote the book, was a simpler time. Social media seemed much more benign to me. Back then, the worst I felt social media did was waste your time. Now, the worst social media does is cripple democracy and ruin your soul.Kleon quotes Warren Ellis, who writes one of my favourite newsletters (his blog is pretty good, too):
You don’t have to live in public on the internet if you don’t want to. Even if you’re a public figure, or micro-famous like me. I don’t follow anyone on my public Instagram account. No shade on those who follow me there, I’m glad you give me your time – but I need to be in my own space to get my shit done. You want a “hack” for handling the internet? Create private social media accounts, follow who you want and sit back and let your bespoke media channels flow to you. These are tools, not requirements. Don’t let them make you miserable. Tune them until they bring you pleasure.In May 2017, after being on Twitter over a decade, I deleted my Twitter history, and now delete tweets on a weekly basis. Now, I hang out on a social network that I co-own called social.coop and which is powered by a federated, decentralised service called Mastodon.
I still publish my work, including Thought Shrapnel posts, to Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. It’s just not where I spend most of my time. On balance, I’m happier for it.
Source: Austin Kleon
The death of the newsfeed (is much exaggerated)
Benedict Evans is a venture capitalist who focuses on technology companies. He’s a smart guy with some important insights, and I thought his recent post about the ‘death of the newsfeed’ on social networks was particularly useful.
He points out that it’s pretty inevitable that the average person will, over the course of a few years, add a few hundred ‘friends’ to their connections on any given social network. Let’s say you’re connected with 300 people, and they all share five things each day. That’s 1,500 things you’ll be bombarded with, unless the social network does something about it.
So we end up with algorithmic feeds, which is an attempt by social networks to ensure that you see the stuff that you deem important. It is, of course, an almost impossible mission.This overload means it now makes little sense to ask for the ‘chronological feed’ back. If you have 1,500 or 3,000 items a day, then the chronological feed is actually just the items you can be bothered to scroll through before giving up, which can only be 10% or 20% of what’s actually there. This will be sorted by no logical order at all except whether your friends happened to post them within the last hour. It’s not so much chronological in any useful sense as a random sample, where the randomizer is simply whatever time you yourself happen to open the app. ’What did any of the 300 people that I friended in the last 5 years post between 16:32 and 17:03?’ Meanwhile, giving us detailed manual controls and filters makes little more sense - the entire history of the tech industry tells us that actual normal people would never use them, even if they worked. People don't file.
Evans then goes on to raise the problem of what you want to see may be different from what your friends want you to see. So people solve the problem of algorithmic feeds not showing them what they really want by using messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram to interact individually with people or small groups.[T]here are a bunch of problems around getting the algorithmic newsfeed sample ‘right’, most of which have been discussed at length in the last few years. There are lots of incentives for people (Russians, game developers) to try to manipulate the feed. Using signals of what people seem to want to see risks over-fitting, circularity and filter bubbles. People’s desires change, and they get bored of things, so Facebook has to keep changing the mix to try to reflect that, and this has made it an unreliable partner for everyone from Zynga to newspapers. Facebook has to make subjective judgements about what it seems that people want, and about what metrics seem to capture that, and none of this is static or even in in principle perfectible. Facebook surfs user behaviour.
The problem with that, though?
So, to Evans mind (and I'm tempted to agree with him) we're in a never-ending spiral. The only way I can see out of it is user education, particularly around owning one's own data and IndieWeb approaches.The catch is that though these systems look like they reduce sharing overload, you really want group chats. And lots of groups. And when you have 10 WhatsApp groups with 50 people in each, then people will share to them pretty freely. And then you think ‘maybe there should be a screen with a feed of the new posts in all of my groups. You could call it a ‘news feed’. And maybe it should get some intelligence, to show the posts you care about most...
Source: Benedict Evans
Social internet vs social media
It’s good to see Cal Newport, whose book Deep Work I found unexpectedly great last year, add a bit more nuance to his position on social media:
The young progressives grew up in a time when platform monopolies like Facebook were so dominant that they seemed inextricably intertwined into the fabric of the internet. To criticize social media, therefore, was to criticize the internet’s general ability to do useful things like connect people, spread information, and support activism and expression.Newport has started talking about the difference between ‘social media’ and the ‘social internet’:The older progressives, however, remember the internet before the platform monopolies. They were concerned to observe a small number of companies attempt to consolidate much of the internet into their for-profit, walled gardens.
To them, social media is not the internet. It was instead a force that was co-opting the internet — including the powerful capabilities listed above — in ways that would almost certainly lead to trouble.
The social internet describes the general ways in which the global communication network and open protocols known as “the internet” enable good things like connecting people, spreading information, and supporting expression and activism.If you’d asked people in 2005, they would have said that there was no way that people would leave MySpace in favour of a different platform.Social media, by contrast, describes the attempt to privatize these capabilities by large companies within the newly emerged algorithmic attention economy, a particularly virulent strain of the attention sector that leverages personal data and sophisticated algorithms to ruthlessly siphon users’ cognitive capital.
People like Facebook. But if you could offer them a similar alternative that stripped away the most unsavory elements of Zuckerberg’s empire (perhaps funded by a Wikipedia-style nonprofit collective, or a modest subscription fee), many would happily jump ship.Indeed.
Following up with another this post this week, Newport writes:
My argument is that you can embrace the social internet without having to become a “gadget” inside the algorithmic attention economy machinations of the social media conglomerates. As noted previously, I think this is the right answer for those who are fed up with the dehumanizing aspects of social media, but are reluctant to give up altogether on the potential of the internet to bring people together.He suggests several ways for this to happen:
What I don’t see being discussed is that as we collectively mature in our use of social media is that we’re likely to use different networks for different purposes. Facebook, LinkedIn, and the like try to force us into a single online identity. It’s OK to look and act differently when you’re around different people in different environments.
Source: Cal Newport (On Social Media and Its Discontents / Beyond #DeleteFacebook: More Thoughts on Embracing the Social Internet Over Social Media)