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DL 215

Less Is More

Published: September 21, 2019 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 215. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Hi all, my name is Ian O'Byrne and welcome to issue 215 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. Special thanks to Gretchen Scronce, the Virtual Services Coordinator at the College of Charleston. I always like chats about critical evaluation of online info. :)

This week I posted the following:

📺 Watch

Content Warning: This PSA contains graphic content related to school shootings that may be upsetting to some viewers. If you feel that this subject matter may be too difficult for you, you may choose not to watch this video.

This video was posted earlier this week, and it instantly garnered a lot of discussion & debate. Much of the initial response focused on "I would never show this to my kids" or "I would be mad if a teacher showed this to my kids."

To this, I suggest that this video is not for children. This is for adults. If this makes people upset, or fear for the lives of innocents…good. Perhaps we need to address gun violence in society.

The PSA's power lies in its subversion—what begins as typical back-to-school commercial gradually reveals the horror that American schools now prepare for routinely. The discomfort is the point.

📚 Read

This week, millions of people around the world started marching to kick off the Global Climate Strike (9/20/2019 - 9/27/2019). This began with the actions of youth, most notably Greta Thunberg, in an attempt to stave off a climate catastrophe.

You can get involved by sharing notifications on your digital spaces or social media networks.

The scale of youth mobilization represents something new—a generation that understands they'll inherit the consequences of current inaction. Their moral clarity cuts through adult equivocation.

As we consider the impact of climate change, we need to understand that environmental issues are all interrelated. You should do your part, but understand the chief concern is not straws, plastic bags at the supermarket, meatless burgers, or cow farts. Much of the root cause of this crisis is rampant capitalism. Since 1988, 100 corporations have been responsible for 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.

Technological shifts always come at an environmental cost. Every sector of our economy is still based on some form of extraction, pollution, and waste. And all of them depend on carbon. Renewable energy, in particular, requires a great amount of rare minerals and land-use. The same goes for nuclear energy, which demands considerable resources in order to mine uranium, construct power plants, and deal with its waste. Even digital technology has environmental impacts.

To sustain the natural basis of our life, we must slow down. We have to reduce the amount of extraction, pollution, and waste throughout our economy. This implies less production, less consumption, less work, and degrowth.

Thanks to Doug Belshaw for sharing many of these links in his Thought Shrapnel networks.

In some of my keynotes, I indicate that adults may not entirely understand how to use digital tools and online social spaces. Perhaps there is a need or opportunity to learn from youth as they adjust to these tools and practices.

This piece in the NY Times suggests that Gen Z-ers and millenials may not be lazy and entitled…perhaps they're the first generation to understand work-life balance!!!

The narrative flip is important: what older generations interpret as lack of commitment might actually be healthy boundary-setting that refuses to replicate burnout culture.

As more news continues to come out about Jeffrey Epstein and the money ties to higher ed & technology, I've been thinking about how we should address these realities.

danah boyd takes these issues head on in this transcript of her speech as she was receiving the 2019 Barlow/Pioneer Award.

"Move fast and break things" is an abomination if your goal is to create a healthy society. Taking shortcuts may be financially profitable in the short-term, but the cost to society is too great to be justified. In a healthy society, we accommodate differently-abled people through accessibility standards, not because it's financially prudent but because it's the right thing to do. In a healthy society, we make certain that the vulnerable amongst us are not harassed into silence because that is not the value behind free speech. In a healthy society, we strategically design to increase social cohesion because binaries are machine logic not human logic.

The Great Reckoning is in front of us. How we respond to the calls for justice will shape the future of technology and society. We must hold accountable all who perpetuate, amplify, and enable hate, harm, and cruelty. But accountability without transformation is simply spectacle. We owe it to ourselves and to all of those who have been hurt to focus on the root of the problem. We also owe it to them to actively seek to not build certain technologies because the human cost is too great.

Boyd's framing—accountability without transformation is spectacle—applies beyond tech. It connects to the climate strike (individual action without systemic change), to workplace culture (policy changes without power shifts), to all the ways we perform progress without achieving it.

A strong teacher voice can silence both children and adults – and it's about emphasis, not volume, says Julia Croyden.

A good teacher voice can cut glass if used with care. It can silence a class of children; it can strike fear into the hearts of grown men. A quiet, carefully placed "Excuse me", with just the slightest emphasis on the "-se", is more effective at stopping an argument between adults or children than any amount of reason.

Authority doesn't require volume—it requires presence and precision. This connects to the issue's theme: less can be more. A whispered correction lands harder than shouting.

🔨 Do

Creative procrastination, rather than idle postponement, can make you more successful.

Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist from UPenn's Wharton Business School, suggests that procrastination has the opportunity to make you more creative. Watch more in his TED Talk about the habits of original thinkers.

The research shows that ideas need incubation time. Starting early but finishing late gives your subconscious space to make unexpected connections. Procrastination becomes a feature, not a bug, when it serves the creative process.

🤔 Consider

Things are strongest where they're broken.

Louise Penny

Penny's observation echoes kintsugi—the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold, making the repair part of the object's beauty and history. The Great Reckoning boyd describes requires this approach: not hiding our fractures but letting them inform stronger reconstruction.

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.

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