When I think back to the creation of that infographic, I wonder whether we had shown the care demanded of the data. Whether we had, in creating this abstraction, re-enacted — however inadvertently — some of the objectification of the slave trade.

Different people have different responses to technology, even on the same platform. Scholars call this phenomenon “differential susceptibility” to media effects among a subgroup of people, and it holds equally for the differential well-being and mental health impacts of social media on young adults.

Current approaches to improving digital well-being also promote tech solutionism, or the presumption that technology can fix social, cultural, and structural problems.

I am committed to tending to this world as a gardener. I am committed to cultivating new shoots, new stories, new hopes, new futures. I do this work with dirt under my nails, with curiosity, reverence and respect.—Georgina Reid

‘Security’ takes manyforms. There is the security of knowing one has a statistically smallerchance of getting shot with an arrow. And then there’s the security ofknowing that there are people in the world who will care deeply if oneis.

When archaeologistsundertake balanced appraisals of hunter-gatherer burials from thePalaeolithic, they find high frequencies of health-related disabilities –but also surprisingly high levels of care until the time of death (andbeyond, since some of these funerals were remarkably lavish).16

Romito 2 is the 10,000-year-old burial of a male with a raregenetic disorder (acromesomelic dysplasia): a severe type ofdwarfism, which in life would have rendered him both anomalous inhis community and unable to participate in the kind of high-altitudehunting that was necessary for their survival. Studies of hispathology show that, despite generally poor levels of health andnutrition, that same community of hunter-gatherers still took pains tosupport this individual through infancy and into early adulthood,granting him the same share of meat as everyone else, andultimately according him a careful, sheltered burial.15

I managed to do half the work. But that’s exactly it: It’s work. It’s designed that way. It requires a thankless amount of mental and emotional energy, just like some relationships.

I realized it was foolish of me to think the internet would ever pause just because I had. The internet is clever, but it’s not always smart. It’s personalized, but not personal. It lures you in with a timeline, then fucks with your concept of time. It doesn’t know or care whether you actually had a miscarriage, got married, moved out, or bought the sneakers. It takes those sneakers and runs with whatever signals you’ve given it, and good luck catching up.

Pinterest doesn’t know when the wedding never happens, or when the baby isn’t born. It doesn’t know you no longer need the nursery. Pinterest doesn’t even know if the vacation you created a collage for has ended. It’s not interested in your temporal experience.This problem was one of the top five complaints of Pinterest users.

Can we occupy technology with love?

the community is both endlessly creative and genuinely interested in solving big issues in meaningful ways. Whether it's their commitment to careful (and caring) community stewardship or their particular strain of techno-ethics, I have been consistently (and pleasantly) surprised at what I've seen during the last twelve months. I don't always see eye-to-eye with their decisions and I don't think that the community is perfect, but it's consistently (and deliberately) striving to be better, and that's a fairly rare thing, online or off.

Will it also help accomplish another goal — communicating to my students that a classroom of learners is, in my mind, a sort of family?

identity theft