DL 201

Mastering Your Life

Published: 2019-06-15 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to issue 201. Mastering your life.

Hi all, my name is Ian O'Byrne and welcome to Digitally Literate. In this newsletter I curate the news of the week and distill it into an easy-to-read resource for you. Thank you for reading.

This week I posted the following things elsewhere online:

Addressing Technopanic in the Age of Screentime - My latest post for the ILA Literacy Daily blog.
People say they care about privacy but they continue to buy devices that can spy on them - Survey data highlights the decisions we make about privacy as we use Internet connected devices.
Moving from Computational Thinking to Coding & Programming with Adolescents - I gave a workshop this week on computational thinking to a group of teachers in middle grades and high school.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Secret Surveillance Research: Duke researchers secretly recorded thousands of people walking on campus to build facial recognition datasets, raising fundamental consent and ethics questions.
Deepfake Democratization: Stanford's new algorithm makes video editing as easy as text editing, with enormous implications for both content creation and misinformation.
Internet Saturation Point: Mary Meeker's 2019 report shows 51% of world connected with growth slowing as easy-to-reach populations come online.
Smartphone-Only Divide: Pew data reveals roughly one-in-four lower-income adults access internet only through smartphones, highlighting persistent digital inequities.
Summer Slide Complexity: Research on summer learning loss shows the phenomenon is real but nuanced, with multiple factors beyond simple "time off" explanations.

📺 Watch

VR Haptic Feedback Technology

I've been playing a bit with virtual reality (VR) over the last year. A member of our research group suggested that VR is getting better, and the tipping point will be if/when haptic feedback gloves and suits come down in price.

Put simply, a series of actuators, or little pressure sensitive motors, synchronize to give you the feeling of movement. Some of the more expensive platforms have "microfluidic technology" that pumps fluid through the system to mimic touch with "sub-millimeter precision."

We're quickly moving to Ready Player One territory.

Haptic feedback represents the missing sense in virtual reality—we can see and hear virtual environments but not feel them. The technology ranges from simple vibration motors to sophisticated microfluidic systems simulating texture and pressure. The Ready Player One reference isn't hyperbole: the novel/film depicted full-body haptic suits enabling complete sensory immersion. Current trajectory suggests this technology moving from expensive curiosity to consumer accessibility within years, not decades. The implications extend beyond gaming: surgical training, remote collaboration, accessibility tools for sensory disabilities. When virtual touch becomes convincing, the boundary between physical and digital experience blurs further.

📚 Read

Duke University Secret Facial Recognition Research

In 2014, Duke researchers set up cameras to record thousands of individuals walking on West Campus, with the objective of collecting a data set that could enhance facial recognition technology. The letter of apology from one of the researchers is available here.

This story is a chilling account of the issues with data collection and surveillance in our modern society. We are constantly under surveillance, and if it were not for the work of the Duke Chronicle, it remains to be seen if this story would have come to light. We need to consider the many stories like this (and worse) that never come out.

Research ethics questions aside…this story is an example of the challenges of collecting data and sharing it openly online. Your data can be shared widely online, and used for a variety of purposes. In an age of deepfakes, and a need to train algorithms…this data is a goldmine.

The Duke incident reveals how surveillance normalizes through institutional legitimacy. Researchers assumed recording people without consent was acceptable because it happened on campus and served science. The student newspaper—not ethics boards or administrators—exposed the practice. This matters because facial recognition datasets train systems now deployed by law enforcement, border control, and commercial surveillance. People who walked across Duke's campus in 2014 may now be in databases used for purposes they never imagined and cannot escape. The apology acknowledges harm but cannot undo data already distributed. We need proactive consent frameworks, not retroactive apologies.

Scary Deepfake Tool Lets You Put Words Into Someone's Mouth

Last week, Stanford researchers announced they'd created an algorithm that makes "editing video as easy as editing text."

This has big implications in video editing and content creation, but there are even bigger challenges with deepfake videos as we think about critical evaluation of online information.

Thanks to Bryan Alexander for the share.

The text-based video editing interface represents a threshold moment in media manipulation. Previously, convincing video fakery required specialized skills and significant time. Now, changing what someone appears to say becomes as simple as editing a document—select words, delete, retype. The content creation applications are genuinely useful: fixing verbal stumbles, adjusting phrasing, streamlining presentations. But the misinformation implications are severe: fabricated confessions, manufactured political statements, fake evidence. We're entering an era where video evidence becomes fundamentally unreliable, requiring new verification systems and new skepticism toward visual media. The researchers know this; they published anyway. The technology exists regardless; better to understand it openly.

Mary Meeker's Most Important Trends on the Internet

Every year at this time, Mary Meeker delivers her annual Internet Trends Report, a look at the significant trends in digital spaces. You can review this highly anticipated slide deck here…beware, it's 333 slides.

Some of the big takeaways for me:

51% of the world (3.8 billion people) were internet users last year, up from 49% (3.6 billion) in 2017. Growth slowed to about 6 percent in 2018 because so many people have come online that new users are harder to come by.
Americans are spending more time with digital media than ever: 6.3 hours a day in 2018, up 7 percent from the year before. Most growth comes from mobile and connected devices.
The number of interactive gamers worldwide grew 6 percent to 2.4 billion people last year, as interactive games like Fortnite become the new social media for certain people.
The internet will become more of a cesspool: Getting rid of problematic content becomes more difficult on a large scale.

Meeker's report captures the internet's maturation inflection point. Early growth came from connecting people eager to join; remaining unconnected populations face barriers—poverty, infrastructure, literacy—that connectivity alone doesn't solve. The 6.3 hours daily digital media consumption approaches a third of waking life, fundamentally reshaping attention patterns. The Fortnite-as-social-media observation matters: gaming becomes primary social infrastructure for young people, with implications for communication norms and community formation. The "cesspool" prediction is grimly realistic: content moderation that worked at smaller scale fails as platforms reach billions, and automated solutions create new problems while solving old ones.

Pew Research: Mobile Technology and Home Broadband 2019

The latest report from the Pew Research Center on the ways in which we connect to the Internet.

The share of Americans who say they own a smartphone has increased dramatically over the past decade – from 35% in 2011 to 81% in 2019.
37% of U.S. adults say they mostly use a smartphone when accessing the internet.
A majority of Americans subscribe to high-speed internet service at home or own a smartphone, but digital gaps remain between some groups.
Roughly one-in-four lower-income adults are "smartphone only" internet users.
A growing share of non-broadband users cite their smartphone's capabilities as the reason they do not subscribe to high-speed internet service at home.

The "smartphone-only" finding reveals how digital divide has evolved rather than disappeared. Lower-income Americans aren't unconnected—they're connected through devices with smaller screens, limited storage, data caps, and difficult typing. Try applying for a job, writing a resume, or completing homework on a phone. The smartphone substitutes for broadband but doesn't equal it. The growing share citing smartphone capabilities as reason for no broadband suggests people rationalizing constraints as choices. This has policy implications: "everyone's connected" statistics obscure quality-of-connection inequities that perpetuate educational and economic disadvantage.

What Advice Articles Miss About 'Summer Loss'

A great piece in The Conversation from Kelly Chandler-Olcott about the "summer slide".

The summer slide is real…but, there are a number of factors that impact how we view this "time off."

Chandler-Olcott's nuanced treatment challenges simplistic summer slide narratives. The phenomenon exists but varies by subject (math more vulnerable than reading), by socioeconomic status (wealthy kids often gain while poor kids lose), and by measurement method (some apparent loss reflects testing artifacts). The solutions matter too: enrichment programs serving middle-class families don't address food insecurity, lack of air conditioning, or parents working multiple jobs without childcare. Framing summer loss as parenting failure—just read more!—ignores structural conditions shaping summer experiences. Effective intervention requires addressing material circumstances, not just prescribing activities.

🔨 Do

Avocado Smoothie Recipe

I started up our summer reading schedule with my kids this past week. As part of that, my son checked out a cookbook that recommended adding avocado to smoothies. Smoothies are an artform in our house…so we tested it out.

Peanut butter, frozen bananas, almond milk, yogurt, and an avocado. The end result is that the avocado made it slightly green…but the texture was super smooth. I definitely recommend this for your breakfast or snack.

The avocado addition demonstrates culinary experimentation that cookbooks enable—trying combinations you wouldn't invent independently. The texture improvement comes from avocado's fats creating creaminess without dairy heaviness. Kids engaging with cookbooks connects to broader literacy: procedural reading, measurement, sequencing, following instructions. Summer reading need not mean only novels; practical texts teach reading while producing tangible outcomes. The family smoothie ritual combines nutrition, reading, and shared activity—the integration that makes practices stick.

🤔 Consider

"When the voice and the vision on the inside is more profound, and more clear and loud than all opinions on the outside, you've begun to master your life." — Dr. John

Dr. John's observation on inner clarity connects to this issue's themes of surveillance and attention. Duke researchers recorded people's external movements; deepfakes manipulate external expressions. Mary Meeker documents how much time we spend consuming external content. Mastering your life means cultivating internal voice strong enough to navigate the noise.

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🌱 Connected Concepts:

Surveillance Research — Duke University secretly recording thousands for facial recognition datasets raising consent and ethics questions about academic data collection in Research Ethics.
Deepfake Technology — Stanford's text-based video editing making manipulation as easy as word processing with implications for evidence and truth in Media Manipulation.
Internet Trends — Mary Meeker's 2019 report documenting connectivity saturation rising digital media consumption and gaming as social infrastructure in Digital Culture.
Digital Divide — Pew research revealing smartphone-only internet users concentrated among lower-income populations with quality-of-connection inequities in Technology Access.
Summer Learning — Kelly Chandler-Olcott's nuanced analysis of summer slide showing socioeconomic variation and structural factors beyond parenting in Educational Equity.

Part of the 📧 Newsletter archive documenting digital literacy and technology.