DL 321

Becoming Indistractable

Welcome back, all. Here is Digitally Literate, issue #321.

I posted the following this week:

🔖 Key Takeaways

📚 This Week’s Highlights

The most widely recognized word on the planet started as a language fad in the 1830s. This video explores the fascinating history of “OK.”
Why this matters: Understanding cultural phenomena helps us appreciate how language evolves.

2. The end of the metaverse, hopefully

Meta, the company that owns Facebook, had a very bad week. The company, on an earnings call, reported that it had lost users for the first time in its history. The market then responded. The company’s valuation dropped $232 billion, the biggest 24-hour drop in the stock market’s history.

There are a lot of reasons for this. Meta is betting big on the metaverse, which may be years off. A lot of the content shared on the social network is also mostly misinformation, right-wing outrage, and long videos that lead users to ultimately view an ad.

Why this matters: The narrative shift highlights user dissatisfaction and the risks of overreliance on disruptive tech trends.

Nir Eyal’s guide to becoming “Indistractable” includes:

Why this matters: Attention is a finite resource. Allocating it wisely is key to thriving in the digital age.

A major reason why Big Tech firms have achieved such scale and become the gatekeepers to entire markets is that they have been able to obscure most of their financial and operating data. There are obvious steps that regulators can take to close the reporting loopholes that the industry has been exploiting.

In a new report, researchers and scholars from the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose argue that just as environmental, social, and governance reporting is essential to help navigate climate change, enhanced 10-K reporting is necessary to reveal the nature and extent of Big Tech’s market dominance. A 10-K is a comprehensive report filed annually by a publicly-traded company about its financial performance and is required by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The report contains much more detail than a company's annual report, which is sent to its shareholders before an annual meeting to elect company directors.

Only through this transparency can we see if these giants owe their continued growth to value creation or to value extraction.
Why this matters: Transparency is essential for accountability and equitable innovation.

Hamish Johnson shares strategies to reduce screen time, including app removal, parental controls, and leveraging simple tools like dumbphones and paper journals.

Want to keep your iPhone or Android? Here is how to win the fight for your attention.

(..) ( l: ) ( .-. ) ( :l ) (..)

Why this matters: Reclaiming control over digital habits fosters focus and intentionality.

Bryan Alexander discusses the implications of web3 for higher education in his Future Trends Forum series.
Why this matters: Distributed ledger technologies may reshape how education and digital economies intersect.

🛠️ DO: Overcome Languishing

If you feel restless or emotionally empty, you may be “languishing.” Shift from languishing to flourishing by:

  1. Performing acts of kindness for others.
  2. Contributing to the greater good.
  3. Prioritizing meaningful connections.

To understand how to reduce languishing, it’s important to understand the difference between languishers and flourishers (people who experience high levels of mental health). Languishers are more self-oriented – wanting to find their own meaning and improve their own happiness. Flourishers, on the other hand, are more focused on others and contributing to the greater good. This can be in any form, such as performing acts of kindness for others (such as making someone a cup, helping a colleague at work, or even volunteering.

Learn more here.

🌟 Closing Reflection

“Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.”
— Morpheus

Reflect and Engage

Thank you for reading Digitally Literate. Stay tuned for more insights and discussions. Connect with me at hello@digitallyliterate.net or explore Newsletter Index for all past issues.

However hard we strive, it is logical that we can only be as happy as our minds are at peace.