McLuhan’s thesis that our newelectronic media have shifted the message can be recursively applied to itselfto suggest that these new media are also enabling us to develop new types of
for - language innovation - digital media - Indyweb
McLuhan’s thesis that our newelectronic media have shifted the message can be recursively applied to itselfto suggest that these new media are also enabling us to develop new types of
for - language innovation - digital media - Indyweb
I thought it was bad growing up during the “just Google it” age, but as society always manages to outdo itself, the current “just use ChatGPT” mindset is so much worse. At least with Google, there was a semblance of effort: sifting through search results, evaluating sources, and piecing together information to paraphrase for your paper that was due in the next hour. Now, the expectation is instant answers with zero context, no critical thinking, and a growing dependency on AI to do the heavy lifting. It’s not just a shortcut—it’s an exit ramp off the highway of media literacy.
In my book Technology’s Child: Digital Media’s Role in the Ages and Stages of Growing Up, I explore how the design of platforms and the way people engage with those designs helps to shape the cultures that emerge on different social media platforms. I propose three layers for understanding this process.
Will members-only, perhaps subscription-based ‘online communities’ reemerge instead of ‘post and we’ll sell your data’ forms of social media? I hope so, but at this point a giant investment would be needed to counter the mega-billions of companies like Facebook!
The big tech companies, left to their own devices (so to speak), have already had a net negative effect on societies worldwide. At the moment, the three big threats these companies pose – aggressive surveillance, arbitrary suppression of content (the censorship problem), and the subtle manipulation of thoughts, behaviors, votes, purchases, attitudes and beliefs – are unchecked worldwide
specific uses of the technology help develop what we call “relational confidence,” or the confidence that one has a close enough relationship to a colleague to ask and get needed knowledge. With greater relational confidence, knowledge sharing is more successful.
A project of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media https://rrchnm.org/portfolio-item/tropy/
Structures and Transformations of the Vocabulary of the Egyptian Language: Text and Knowledge Culture in Ancient Egypt. “Altägyptisches Wörterbuch: Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften 1999,” 2007. https://web.archive.org/web/20180627163317/https://aaew.bbaw.de/wbhome/Broschuere/index.html.
I want to insist on an amateur internet; a garage internet; a public library internet; a kitchen table internet.
Social media should be comprised of people from end to end. Corporate interests inserted into the process can only serve to dehumanize the system.
Robin Sloan is in the same camp as Greg McVerry and I.
https://www.iamabook.online/
Meanwhile, the share of teens who say they use Facebook, a dominant social media platform among teens in the Center’s 2014-15 survey, has plummeted from 71% then to 32% today.
This is a tremendously important shift. I can remember 5-7 years ago when the Facebook is for old people talk was starting that data still bore out the reality that teens said they did not use it but were still on it constantly.
That is no longer true.
I bet with the advent of computers and the digitalizing of reference material there was a spike in the amount of verbatum quotes that are used instead of summarizing the thought into your own words.
It's a reasonable assumption that with the rise of digital contexts and the ease of cut and paste that people excerpting or quoting material are more likely to excerpt and quote longer passages because it is now easier to do.
Has anyone done research on showing that this is the case?
Alessio Antonini (Open University)
Dr Alessio Antonini is a Research Associate at the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), Open University, and a member of KMi's Intelligent Systems and Data Science group. Before joining KMi, he was a post-doc researcher in Urban Computing at the University of Turin, Italy. His research is on Human-Data Interaction (HDI) in applicative context of Civic Technologies, Smart City and Digital Humanities (DH) applications, in which contributed with more than 30 peer-reviewed papers. Transdisciplinary problems emerging from real-life scenarios are the focus of his research, approached through interdisciplinary collaborations, ranging from urban planning, philosophy, law, humanities, history and geography. He has extensive experience in EU and national projects, leading activities and work-packages in 14 projects. With more than ten years of professional practice, he as broad experience in leading R&D projects.
Select bibliography:
https://briansunter.com/graph/#/page/logseq-social
Brian Sunter (twitter) using Logseq as a social network platform.
What simple standards exist here? Could this more broadly and potentially be used to connect personal wikis, digital gardens, zettelkasten, etc?
Note that in this thread Dave Winer asks about how it can be tied into other standardized pieces to interconnect?
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>How can I hook my outlines into your net if I’m not running Logseq?
— dave.rss (@davewiner) June 13, 2022
The historian in me always wants to look back at how this sort of media control has played out historically, so thinking about examples like William Randolph Hearst, Henry Luce, David Sarnoff, Axel Springer, Kerry Packer, or Rupert Murdoch across newspapers, radio, television, etc. might be interesting. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_proprietor
Tim Wu's The Master Switch is pretty accessible in this area.
On the intercultural front, the language (very careful public relations and "corporate speak") used in this leaked audio file of the most recent Twitter All Hands phone call might be fascinating and an interesting primary source for some of the questions you might be looking at on such an assignment. https://peertube.dk/w/2q8cdKR1mTCW7RyMQhcBEx
Who are the multiple audiences (acknowledged and unacknowledged) being addressed? (esp. as they address leaks of information in the call.)
We have to endlessly scroll and parse a ton of images and headlines before we can find something interesting to read.
The randomness of interesting tidbits in a social media scroll help to put us in a state of flow. We get small hits of dopamine from finding interesting posts to fill in the gaps of the boring bits in between and suddenly find we've lost the day. As a result an endless scroll of varying quality might have the effect of making one feel productive when in fact a reasonably large proportion of your time is spent on useless and uninteresting content.
This effect may be put even further out when it's done algorithmically and the dopamine hits become more frequent. Potentially worse than this, the depth of the insight found in most social feeds is very shallow and rarely ever deep. One is almost never invited to delve further to find new insights.
How might a social media stream of content be leveraged to help people read more interesting and complex content? Could putting Jacques Derrida's texts into a social media-like framing create this? Then one could reply to the text by sentence or paragraph with their own notes. This is similar to the user interface of Hypothes.is, but Hypothes.is has a more traditional reading interface compared to the social media space. What if one interspersed multiple authors in short threads? What other methods might work to "trick" the human mind into having more fun and finding flow in their deeper and more engaged reading states?
Link this to the idea of fun in Sönke Ahrens' How to Take Smart Notes.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1514938507407421440.html
A former Redditor's perspective on Musk's purchase offer of Twitter. Sounds like he gets many parts right, but doesn't address the specific toxicity of social media's part in amplifying it all using metrics and algorighms which encourage the fringes to fight. Simply turning off algorithms and tamping down on amplifying marginal content would make it all vastly more human.
Health Nerd. (2021, August 29). Fascinating stuff, a whole thread of people saying weird shit about me (and a poem that I’ve said many times was idiotic in hindsight) [Tweet]. @GidMK. https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1431828103416877058
Schreiber, M. (2022, March 4). ‘Bot holiday’: Covid disinformation down as social media pivot to Ukraine. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/mar/04/bot-holiday-covid-misinformation-ukraine-social-media
So while we are indeed “being digital,” the actual forms of this “being” come from software.
For philosophical works on the properties of ‘the Digital’, see Stéphane Vial’s Being and the Screen, MIT Press, 2019 (official translation from the original book in French published in 2013).
Dame Adjin-Tettey, T. (2022). Combating fake news, disinformation, and misinformation: Experimental evidence for media literacy education. Cogent Arts & Humanities, 9(1), 2037229. https://doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2022.2037229
Democracy in the age of social media. (n.d.). EXPeditions - Meet the World’s Best Minds. Retrieved February 5, 2022, from https://www.joinexpeditions.com/exps/43
Aligning editorial mission and business model is critical.
One of the most complex questions in journalism in the past decade or more is how can one best align editorial mission with the business model? This is particularly difficult because the traditional business model(s) have been shifting in the move to online.
Budak, C., Soroka, S., Singh, L., Bailey, M., Bode, L., Chawla, N., Davis-Kean, P., Choudhury, M. D., Veaux, R. D., Hahn, U., Jensen, B., Ladd, J., Mneimneh, Z., Pasek, J., Raghunathan, T., Ryan, R., Smith, N. A., Stohr, K., & Traugott, M. (2021). Modeling Considerations for Quantitative Social Science Research Using Social Media Data. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/3e2ux
Study: Digital literacy doesn’t stop the spread of misinformation. (n.d.). MIT Sloan. Retrieved January 12, 2022, from https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/study-digital-literacy-doesnt-stop-spread-misinformation
She thinks the companies themselves are behind this, trying to manipulate their users into having certain opinions and points of view.
The irony is that this is, itself, somewhat a conspiracy theory.
Though, I think a nuanced understanding may be closer:
About 7 in 10 Americans think their phone or other devices are listening in on them in ways they did not agree to.
I'm enough of a tinfoil hat wearer to this this might be true. Especially since my google home talks to me entirely too much when I'm not talking to it.
Only 10 percent say Facebook has a positive impact on society, while 56 percent say it has a negative impact and 33 percent say its impact is neither positive nor negative. Even among those who use Facebook daily, more than three times as many say the social network has a negative rather than a positive impact.
Here's the rub. Only 1 out of 10 Americans surveyed think Facebook is a good idea.
Over half of Americans surveyed actually think Facebook is bad for them and society as a whole. And yet, the general sense is now that life is impossible without it.
How does the church respond to this? Do we tell people to get off or "use in moderation?"
Facebook froze as anti-vaccine comments swarmed users. (n.d.). MSN. Retrieved November 12, 2021, from https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/science/facebook-froze-as-anti-vaccine-comments-swarmed-users/ar-AAPY06U
Kale, S. (2021, November 11). Chakras, crystals and conspiracy theories: How the wellness industry turned its back on Covid science. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/11/injecting-poison-will-never-make-you-healthy-how-the-wellness-industry-turned-its-back-on-covid-science
Wiseman, E. (2021, October 17). The dark side of wellness: The overlap between spiritual thinking and far-right conspiracies. The Observer. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/oct/17/eva-wiseman-conspirituality-the-dark-side-of-wellness-how-it-all-got-so-toxic
ffost guides to research devote a few pages to methods of note takingW but they lag behind thenew technologiesi seeW for exampleW xacques parzun and venry tY uraffW The ́odern ResearcherS]gcei postonW ]gg‘TY
Might be interesting to look at this reference to see what she's referring to specifically.
It would be interesting to see how note taking is changing with even newer digital tools like Hypothes.is, Diigo, Twitter, Readwise, etc.
Perhaps the growth of digital gardens in public may be a place for study as well? Though one would need to be wary of the idea of performative note taking as these are often done specifically in public as opposed to private as is more common in the past.
Ciaunica, A., McEllin, L., Kiverstein, J., Gallese, V., Hohwy, J., & Wozniak, M. (2021). Zoomed out? Depersonalization is Related to Increased Digital Media Use During the COVID-19 Pandemic Lockdown [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/8jver
Sirlin, N., Epstein, Z., Arechar, A. A., & Rand, D. (2021). Digital literacy and susceptibility to misinformation. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/7rb2m
I like the differentiation that Jared has made here on his homepage with categories for "fast" and "slow".
It's reminiscent of the system 1 (fast) and system2 (slow) ideas behind Kahneman and Tversky's work in behavioral economics. (See Thinking, Fast and Slow)
It's also interesting in light of this tweet which came up recently:
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>I very much miss the back and forth with blog posts responding to blog posts, a slow moving argument where we had time to think.
— Rachel Andrew (@rachelandrew) August 22, 2017
Because the Tweet was shared out of context several years later, someone (accidentally?) replied to it as if it were contemporaneous. When called out for not watching the date of the post, their reply was "you do slow web your way…" #
This gets one thinking. Perhaps it would help more people's contextual thinking if more sites specifically labeled their posts as fast and slow (or gave a 1-10 rating?). Sometimes the length of a response is an indicator of the thought put into it, thought not always as there's also the oft-quoted aphorism: "If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter".
The ease of use of the UI on Twitter seems to broadly make it a platform for "fast" posting which can often cause ruffled feathers, sour feelings, anger, and poor communication.
What if there were posting UIs (or micropub clients) that would hold onto your responses for a few hours, days, or even a week and then remind you about them after that time had past to see if they were still worth posting? This is a feature based on Abraham Lincoln's idea of a "hot letter" or angry letter, which he advised people to write often, but never send.
Where is the social media service for hot posts that save all your vituperation, but don't show them to anyone? Or which maybe posts them anonymously?
The opposite of some of this are the partially baked or even fully thought out posts that one hears about anecdotally, but which the authors say they felt weren't finish and thus didn't publish them. Wouldn't it be better to hit publish on these than those nasty quick replies? How can we create UI for this?
I saw a sitcom a few years ago where a girl admonished her friend (an oblivious boy) for liking really old Instagram posts of a girl he was interested in. She said that deep-liking old photos was an obvious and overt sign of flirting.
If this is the case then there's obviously a social standard of sorts for this, so why not hold your tongue in the meanwhile, and come up with something more thought out to send your digital love to someone instead of providing a (knee-)jerk reaction?
Of course now I can't help but think of the annotations I've been making in my copy of Lucretius' On the Nature of Things. Do you suppose that Lucretius knows I'm in love?
The Daily 202: Nearly 30 groups urge Facebook, Instagram, Twitter to take down vaccine disinformation—The Washington Post. (n.d.). Retrieved August 2, 2021, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/07/19/daily-202-nearly-30-groups-urge-facebook-instagram-twitter-take-down-vaccine-disinformation/?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social
Majority of Covid misinformation came from 12 people, report finds | Coronavirus | The Guardian. (n.d.). Retrieved July 19, 2021, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/17/covid-misinformation-conspiracy-theories-ccdh-report?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
The Anti-Vaxx Playbook | Center for Countering Digital Hate. (n.d.). Retrieved June 26, 2021, from https://www.counterhate.com/playbook
Though its format can be copied and manipulated, HTML doesn’t make that easy.
In fact, HTML makes it very easy (true for the reasons that lead Mark to write that it can be copied and manipulated). It's contemporary authoring systems and the typical author-as-publisher and the choices they make that are what makes this difficult.
The future of rich media lies in striving to be more like dead media (or at least mining it for insights by better understanding it through thoughtful study), rather than the misguided attempts we've been living inside.
(This is something that I've done a 180 on in the last year or so.)
Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: ‘Understanding Digital Racism After COVID-19’ with Professor Lisa Nakamura. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar. (n.d.). Zoom Video. Retrieved 6 March 2021, from https://oii.zoom.us/webinar/register/2216016571338/WN_TrfmBBp-Rrm_ASHWL5e6nA
Fukuyama, Barak Richman and Francis. “How to Quiet the Megaphones of Facebook, Google and Twitter.” Wall Street Journal, February 12, 2021, sec. Life. https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-quiet-the-megaphones-of-facebook-google-and-twitter-11613068856.
Toff, B. J., Badrinathan, S., Mont’Alverne, C., Arguedas, A. R., Fletcher, R., & Nielsen, R. K. (2020). What we think we know and what we want to know: Perspectives on trust in news in a changing world. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. https://experts.umn.edu/en/publications/what-we-think-we-know-and-what-we-want-to-know-perspectives-on-tr
Fischer, Sean, Kokil Jaidka, and Yphtach Lelkes. ‘Auditing Local News Presence on Google News’. Nature Human Behaviour, 21 September 2020, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-00954-0.
Starominski-Uehara, M. (2020). Powering Social Media Footage: Simple Guide for the Most Vulnerable to Make Emergency Visible [Preprint]. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/gefhv
Mark Zuckerberg & Thierry Breton: Towards a post COVID-19 Digital Deal between tech and governments? (2020, May 18). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZfi6WkIfgU&feature=youtu.be
Starominski-Uehara, M. (2020). Powering Social Media Footage: Simple Guide for the Most Vulnerable to Make Emergency Visible [Preprint]. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/ek6tz
Midgley, C., Thai, S., Lockwood, P., Kovacheff, C., & Page-Gould, E. (2020). When Every Day is a High School Reunion: Social Media Comparisons and Self-Esteem [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/zmy29
Brashier, N. M., & Schacter, D. L. (2020). Aging in an Era of Fake News. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 0963721420915872. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721420915872
Bode, L., & Vraga, E. (2020 May 7). Analysis | Americans are fighting coronavirus misinformation on social media. Washington Post.https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/07/americans-are-fighting-coronavirus-misinformation-social-media/
Edelmann, A., Wolff, T., Montagne, D., & Bail, C. A. (2020). Computational Social Science and Sociology. Annual Review of Sociology, 46(1), annurev-soc-121919-054621. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-121919-054621
The Associated Press (2020, May 8). UN Chief Says Pandemic Is Unleashing a “Tsunami of Hate.” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/05/08/world/ap-un-virus-outbreak-hate-speech.html
Cellini, N., Canale, N., Mioni, G., & Costa, S. (2020, April 11). Changes in sleep pattern, sense of time, and digital media use during COVID-19 lockdown in Italy. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/284mr
Vilella, S., Paolotti, D., Ruffo, G. et al. News and the city: understanding online press consumption patterns through mobile data. EPJ Data Sci. 9, 10 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-020-00228-9
Hamilton, J. L., Nesi, J., & Choukas-Bradley, S. (2020, April 29). Teens and social media during the COVID-19 pandemic: Staying socially connected while physically distant. Retrieved from psyarxiv.com/5stx4
Jarynowski, A., Wójta-Kempa, M., & Belik, V. (2020, April 22). TRENDS IN PERCEPTION OF COVID-19 IN POLISH INTERNET. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dr3gm
Picturing Health. Films about coronavirus (COVID-19). picturinghealth.org/coronavirus-films/
ecognize the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media, whether by individuals or in collaboration, and cre-ate procedures for evaluating these forms of scholarship
Also key.
societies without trust come to bad ends.
combat prescriptive approaches to grammar, mechanics, and usage.
what is this?
When students are shown quick techniques for judging the veracity of a news source, they will use them. Regardless of their existing beliefs, they will distinguish good sources from bad sources.
Social media is well-understood to be contributing to identity politics, but I’d argue it’s contributing to something deeper: identity paralysis. This condition is one in which we have a forced awareness of how everything we say and do — even the seemingly inconsequential, like the shoes we wear, or the airline we fly — reflects on us.
This relates to another article on gender dysphoria in teens.
Among the noteworthy patterns Littman found in the survey data: 21 percent of parents reported their child had one or more friends become transgender-identified at around the same time; 20 percent reported an increase in their child’s social media use around the same time as experiencing gender dysphoria symptoms; and 45 percent reported both.
Is rapid-onset gender dysphoria a response—if only partially—to the identity paralysis borne out of an age of pervasive social media?
A powerful media and information literacy project from UNESCO
never mind that fake news is neither new (forgery, quackery, and conspiracy theorizing are not recent inventions) nor exclusively right-leaning. The new form it has taken in readily sharable social media, however, has made it easy for conventional media to excuse themselves from responsibility for how the election was covered.
"Fake news" was a small factor, compared to mainstream media treating Trump as a legitimate candidate, and sensationalizing hacked emails that contained nothing significant.
‘Books,’ declared Thomas Edison in 1913, ‘will soon be ob-solete in the public schools. Scholars will be instructed through the eye. It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture. Our school system will be completely changed inside of ten years.’57
Thomas Edison. Love his quotes
Did Media Literacy Backfire?
Media literacy asks people to raise questions and be wary of information that they’re receiving. People are. Unfortunately, that’s exactly why we’re talking past one another.
...
Addressing so-called fake news is going to require a lot more than labeling. It’s going to require a cultural change about how we make sense of information, whom we trust, and how we understand our own role in grappling with information.
The Web has become an insidious propaganda tool. To fight it, digital literacy education must rise beyond technical proficiency to include wisdom.
I worry that the industry has no idea how much research already goes on, or how vital it is to fund.
Maybe my fears are unfounded, but the stakes are high. Startups are the very tip of the iceberg, floating by virtue of work that was done by other people long ago. If people forget we need to fund research now, we’re going to feel it decades later and not know why. Imagine where we’d be without the government-funded research of the 60s!
-- Vi Hart
eleVR is a research team that experiments with immersive media, particularly virtual and augmented reality.
They are NOT a startup.
Q&A session with Alan Kay, June 2016.
"The BBC Domesday Project was a pair of interactive videodiscs made by the BBC in London to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday Book and published in November 1986. It was one of the major interactive projects of its time, and it was undertaken on a scale not seen since."
"In 1983, a BBC Television producer named Peter Armstrong wondered if it would be possible to harness the Domesday philosophy to modern Britain. With the large user base of microcomputers in British schools (helped by a government subsidy) it was feasible to ask schools around the UK to survey their areas to produce a database of how Britain looked to the British in 1986."
"...the original Domesday book is still readable after (at the time) 925 years while our 15 year old one is not ... unless you have the original computer/videodisc system and it still works of course."
"The first visible manifestation of a reappearance of the BBC Domesday Project was achieved in a project called CAMiLEON, which was a research project that investigated emulation as a digital preservation strategy and was based at the Universities of Michigan and Leeds. [CAMiLEON web site ... with supreme irony this is now only available via the internet archive]"
None of us, students and faculty included, have really figured out how to live, learn, and work in the emerging digital media-cognitive ecology. So it is certainly true that we can struggle to accomplish various purposes with technologies pulling us in different directions
What could educators do to better prepare students to interact with digital media that leverages tech to go far beyond what paper and pen affords (tools, skills, etc.)?
What Amber explained was exactly what I’d feared: through the Apple Music subscription, which I had, Apple now deletes files from its users’ computers. When I signed up for Apple Music, iTunes evaluated my massive collection of Mp3s and WAV files, scanned Apple’s database for what it considered matches, then removed the original files from my internal hard drive. REMOVED them. Deleted.
Strengthen standards and curricula for digital media literacy and coordinate digital media literacy and civic education.