The kids will be alright?!?!
Digitally Lit #216 – 9/28/2019
Hi all, my name is Ian O’Byrne and welcome to issue #216 of Digitally Literate.
Thank you for stopping by. Please subscribe if you would like this to show up in your email inbox.
Feel free to send along links, notes, and news you think I should include in this work. I had a great email discussion with Bryan Alexander about apprenticeships, education, and what the future may hold. You can support Bryan and his work on Patreon, or better yet…bring him in for a workshop.
This week I posted the following:
- Blogging as Open Scholarship Practice – My thoughts about blogging in my scholarship, and the challenges and opportunities as I strive to embed these practices in my everyday work.
Greta Thunberg sings Swedish Death Metal (2:05)
On Monday, 16-year-old Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg lost it at the United Nations, calling out world leaders for parading her around and asking for her words of hope rather than actually do anything about the dying planet around them.
Now, a YouTuber has set Greta’s tirade to death metal, and the result proves just how hardcore the teenage activist truly is.
Why is Greta Thunberg so triggering for certain men?
As detailed in last week’s issue, the Global Climate Strike brought the attention of the planet to our growing threat. Greta Thunberg, a 16 year old Swedish environmentalist was one of the most prominent voices in this initiative.
As Thunberg spoke out, the criticism, rage, and threats leveled against her have been astonishing.
In The Irish Times, Jennifer O’Connell posits that this might be caused by the inability of some to consider the consequences of our choices. Instead of working to address these challenges, some choose to threaten, shame, and bully this young adult.
Why is Greta Thunberg so triggering? Because of what she represents. In an age when democracy is under assault, she hints at the emergence of a new kind of power, a convergence of youth, popular protest and irrefutable science. And for her loudest detractors, she also represents something else: the sight of their impending obsolescence hurtling towards them.
How the Climate Kids are short-circuiting right-wing media
The kids aren’t just all right — they’re scrambling the brains of their political enemies.
In some of my recent research, I’ve been looking at the tools and practices of digital activists as they connect online, and thinking about how they conduct this work while balancing their offline livelihood. As part of this, I’ve been thinking/writing about what this means for our youth as they engage in these (and future) spaces. To put a finer point on this, how do we create a space for youth to safely express themselves online and offline and engage in these literacy practices.
As we saw with the Parkland students, growing up online definitely helps. Charlie Warzel wrote that a strength of the Parkland students was being “effectively born onto the internet and innately capable of waging an information war.”
The youth activists of this climate movement are battle-hardened by the Internet and they’ve found a way to turn online organizing into mobilization on the streets.
Simply put, they don’t seem to care what adults, skeptics, deniers and crusty politicians think of them. And they waste very little of their time, energy and focus work-shopping their message or bulletproofing it against criticism. They simply pay their enemies no attention. They’re participating in the culture wars while also managing to float above the fray.
Use of social media to manipulate public opinion now a global problem, says new report
The new report ‘The Global Disinformation Order: 2019 Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation’, co-authored by Professor Philip Howard, Director of the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), and Samantha Bradshaw, Researcher at the OII, is the only regular inventory of its kind to look at the use of algorithms, automation and big data to shape public life.
The report explores the tools, capacities, strategies and resources employed by global ‘cyber troops’, to create global disinformation order, using social media platforms to target international audiences with disinformation.
Facebook remains the platform of choice for social media manipulation, with evidence of formally organized campaigns taking place in 56 countries.
Facebook announces Horizon, a VR massive-multiplayer world
This week we moved five minutes closer to Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One.
Facebook today announced it’s building its own Ready Player One Oasis. Facebook Horizon is a virtual reality sandbox universe where you can build your own environments and games, play and socialize with friends or just explore the user-generated landscapes. This is Facebook’s take on Second Life.
Do you have an Oculus and interest in gaining early access? Apply for the beta here.
‘Stealing Ur Feelings,’ an Interactive Documentary About Big Tech, AI, and You
The six-minute documentary explains the science of facial emotion recognition technology and demystifies how the software picks out features like your eyes and mouth to understand if you’re happy, sad, angry, or disgusted.
Test it out here. Please be advised…this is super scary…super creepy.
Have a discussion with your “digital executor”
Doug Belshaw some of his thoughts about how to handle your digital assets and domains after you die. Belshaw shares a template for a Digital Estate Planning, as well as the suggestion of a digital executor.
Doug suggests that we divide our online lives into three buckets:
- Really important to my legacy
- Kind of important
- Not important
If I were to die before the next issue of this newsletter, I would consider my main blog, and the various iterations of my newsletter to be in the first, or second bucket. Photos and videos are most definitely in the first bucket. My social media feeds and those digital breadcrumbs I’ve left behind can fade away into digital dust.
Some of this thinking informs my use of digital spaces and hosting. I pay for hosting on my sites, but also back up to the Internet Archive as much as possible. I also load all of my audio podcasts to the Internet Archive. This is not a foolproof mechanism, but it saves it a bit longer.
What are your thoughts about what you’ll leave behind?
When haters go after your looks and differences, it means they have nowhere left to go. And then you know you’re winning! I have Asperger’s syndrome and that means I’m sometimes a bit different from the norm. And – given the right circumstances – being different is a superpower.
Greta Thunberg
Digitally Literate is a synthesis of the cool stuff I find as I surf, skim, & scan the Internet each week. I take notes of everything that piques my interest, and then pull together the important stuff here in a weekly digest.
Feel free to say hello at hello@digitallyliterate.net or on the social network of your choice.