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DL 203

Know the Why

Published: 2019-06-29 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to issue 203. Know the why.

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

This week I was busy helping to facilitate at a weeklong institute on computational thinking and coding at the Infusing Computing initiative. As part of this work, I created a couple of tutorials to help guide users as they test out Slack as a backchannel for discussions.

🔖 Key Takeaways

📺 Watch

Great lesson to share with your students! The reason you teach them is to help them find "their why"!

When you know your why, your what becomes more clear and impactful.

The "why" framework transforms how we approach education and work. Most instruction focuses on what (content) and how (process), but purpose provides motivational foundation that sustains effort through difficulty. Students asking "why do I need to learn this?" aren't being difficult—they're seeking the meaning that makes learning stick. Teachers who can articulate why particular knowledge matters—connecting curriculum to students' futures, values, and identities—enable deeper engagement than those who rely on grades and requirements. The principle extends beyond education: organizations, projects, and individuals all benefit from clarity about purpose that precedes strategy and tactics.

📚 Read

"Be Internet Awesome", a new Initiative from Google. Six new media literacy activities designed to help kids analyze and evaluate media as they navigate the internet.

The new media literacy lessons developed for Be Internet Awesome make it easy and fun for kids to learn key skills for evaluating what they see online. These lessons complement the program's digital safety and citizenship topics, which help kids explore the online world in a safe, confident manner.

The activities were developed in collaboration with experts Anne Collier, executive director of The Net Safety Collaborative, and Faith Rogow, co-author of The Teacher's Guide to Media Literacy and a co-founder of the National Association for Media Literacy Education.

The collaboration with Collier and Rogow lends credibility that Google's internal team alone couldn't provide. Both bring decades of media literacy expertise—Collier from net safety perspective, Rogow from critical media analysis. The curriculum addresses a genuine need: schools want media literacy resources but lack expertise and time to develop them. Google's platform reach ensures wide distribution. The tension, of course, is Google teaching critical evaluation of online information while being one of the primary distributors of that information. Students should learn these skills and also learn to apply them to Google itself.

Americans spent less time reading and more time watching TV last year than ever before, according to new time use data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

This dataset suggests that it's not just the kids that are to blame for this move from print to pixel. The majority of changes in time use come from seniors aged 65 and older. Use of the Internet by this group jumped from 14% to 73% over the last 18 years.

So while society frets about teens growing "horns" on their heads from too much phone use, in the end it may be older Americans who are most adversely affected by the changes in technology.

The data challenges dominant narratives about youth and technology. Moral panics typically target young people—"kids these days"—while ignoring identical behaviors in older populations. Seniors' internet adoption represents a massive behavioral shift: 14% to 73% means millions of people fundamentally changed how they spend time. The implications differ: seniors may be more vulnerable to misinformation, more susceptible to scams, less equipped with digital literacy skills developed through formal education. The "horns" study referenced (later debunked) exemplifies how sensational youth-focused claims get attention while systemic changes in older populations go unremarked. We should worry less about teenagers and more about everyone.

A new study suggests that a failure to mimic other people's smiles automatically could be playing a role in loneliness. A failure to mimic a smile might send an antisocial signal to others, the researchers note, undermining social connections, and leading to social disconnect.

I have two takeaways from this.

First, when we move to high tech, we sometimes lose high touch. I'm thinking about the increasing move from physical to digital spaces, and how this impacts our mental health. Does staring at a screen for most of our interactions lead to isolation?

Second, when you see someone (especially a stranger)…smile first.

The smile mimicry research reveals one mechanism by which loneliness becomes self-sustaining. We unconsciously mirror others' expressions—a smile triggers a smile—creating emotional attunement that builds connection. If loneliness suppresses this automatic response, interactions feel less warm, others sense something off, connections fail to form. The "high tech, low touch" observation connects this to digital mediation: video calls don't trigger the same mimicry responses as in-person presence, emoji substitute poorly for facial expression. The practical advice—smile first—represents intervention at the behavioral level: even if the reflex has faded, deliberate action can restart connection loops.

Four ways to harness the advantages of screen time from NPR's Life Kit:

The Life Kit guidance moves past simplistic screen time limits toward nuanced engagement. "Share screens" transforms passive consumption into interactive activity—discussing what's happening, asking questions, connecting to other knowledge. "More than time" recognizes that two hours of educational content differs from two hours of algorithmic rabbit holes. "Be smart about content" requires parental media literacy. "Look for positives" reframes screens from threat to opportunity requiring cultivation. The underlying philosophy: screens are tools whose value depends entirely on how they're used, and parents' role is guidance rather than prohibition.

Ben Walsh in Barron's on Facebook's cryptocoin, Libra. Walsh suggests that the key motivation for the social network is users.

He uses the example of Farmville, the wildly popular game that captured the world's attention for some time. Games like Farmville and Candy Crush are cheaply made, and require that users stay logged in to Facebook for hours and hours…and make in-game purchases. This gives them command of this purchasing power.

I'd take this a step further, and suggest that this is not just about cornering the market on in-app purchases…and keeping you logged in. First, I think this is a centralized wolf in decentralized clothing. Far worse than that…I think this is all about digital identity.

Coindesk points out that in a section describing the consortium that will govern the Libra coin, the white paper states:

An additional goal of the association is to develop and promote an open identity standard. We believe that decentralized and portable digital identity is a prerequisite to financial inclusion and competition.

I think this is all about digital identity. Facebook's model is all about learning as much about you as possible and selling this information to others. If they connect this identity to a finance model they've connected the dots from your identity to your data trail, to your wallet.

The digital identity revelation buried in Libra's white paper deserves more attention than it received. "Financial inclusion" rhetoric sounds humanitarian—helping unbanked populations access services. But Facebook establishing global identity standards means Facebook verifying who you are, tracking your transactions, and connecting that financial data to your social data. The identity-data-wallet connection creates comprehensive behavioral profiles: what you say, who you know, what you buy, where you go. This isn't cryptocurrency ideology (decentralization, privacy, censorship resistance); it's the opposite. Facebook wants to become infrastructure for identity itself, extracting rent from every verification.

🔨 Do

Track THIS, "a new kind of incognito" browsing project between mschf internet studios and Mozilla's Firefox team, opens up 100 tabs crafted to fit a specific character—a hypebeast, a filthy rich person, a doomsday prepper, or an influencer.

The idea is that your browsing history will be depersonalized and poisoned, so advertisers won't know how to target ads to you.

Track THIS represents adversarial creativity—using the system's logic against itself. Ad targeting assumes browsing behavior reveals authentic preferences; flooding history with persona-consistent but inauthentic data creates noise that drowns signal. The character options (hypebeast, rich person, prepper, influencer) are themselves commentary on algorithmic stereotypes ad tech trades in. The practical utility may be limited—sophisticated tracking uses many signals beyond history—but the conceptual contribution matters: demonstrating that surveillance systems can be actively resisted, not just passively avoided. Obfuscation joins encryption and abstention as privacy strategy.

🤔 Consider

"Despair = Suffering - Meaning" — Chip Conley

Conley's equation reframes despair as suffering without purpose. This issue's "know your why" theme connects: students need meaning to sustain effort, screen time quality matters more than quantity, loneliness is disconnection from meaningful relationships, Facebook's identity project gives meaning to data extraction. When we understand why we suffer, suffering becomes bearable. Without meaning, any suffering becomes despair.

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