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DL 229

Fragmented Digital Lives

Published: January 18, 2020 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 229. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Hi all, welcome to issue 229 of Digitally Literate.

This week I spent time behind the scenes working on a couple projects. Some of this includes starting to blog again for our Screentime Research Group. If you would like to get involved in that work…please send me a note.

The newsletter that you're reading is a weekly review of the news, notes, tips, and tricks from the week that resonated with me. I leave a trail of digital breadcrumbs as I read online. Some of this I share on my social networks…much more I do not. At the end of the week, I review my notes and write up this newsletter.

If you haven't already, please subscribe if you would like this to show up in your inbox. If you're reading on the website, feel free to leave a comment behind using Hypothesis. Feel free to reach out and let me know what you think of this work at hello@digitallyliterate.net.

📺 Watch

Thomas Frank with a look at neuroplasticity—our brains change their physical structures in response to the technologies we use.

Here's a look at the science behind how the Internet changes our brains, and how using it is actually overwriting the structures that allow us to focus intensely and do deep work.

I know there is a lot of debate about neuroplasticity. I'm slowly dipping my toe into this area of research. The implications for learning and attention are significant if the research holds.

📚 Read

Candace L. Odgers and Michaeline R. Jensen published a review of the research from the past decade that combs through about 40 studies that have examined the link between social media use and both depression and anxiety among adolescents. That link, according to the professors, is small and inconsistent.

A growing number of academics are challenging assumptions about the negative effects of social media and smartphones on children. This is important counter-narrative to the moral panic framing that dominates mainstream coverage.

A great interactive piece in The New York Times examining how American history textbooks can differ across the country, in ways that are shaded by partisan politics.

As an example, in one textbook, in an annotated Bill of Rights, a California textbook explains that rulings on the Second Amendment have allowed for some gun regulations. In the same place, the Texas edition of the textbook contains only a blank white space.

The differences between the texts can be traced back to several sources: state social studies standards; state laws; and feedback from panels of appointees that huddle in hotel conference rooms, to review drafts of the textbooks. Requests from these review panels show the sometimes granular ways that ideology can influence the writing of history.

Clearview AI devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The backbone of the system is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites. This goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.

This is the stuff that really concerns me when we think about surveillance of our data online. It's not as much the companies that I know are collecting our content (e.g., Google, Facebook, Amazon) it is these shadowy, secretive groups that are collecting and archiving our content…and connecting the dots between all of our content.

The implications are terrifying: anyone with access to this tool can identify strangers from a single photo.

Tanya Basu in MIT Technology Review sharing the work of the Human Screenome Project in the Screenomics Lab at Stanford University.

Byron Reeves, Thomas Robinson, & Nilam Ram from the Lab shared news of the launch of the project in Nature.

The project launches a data collection and computational framework that includes precise recording and mapping of our fragmented digital lives. This will capture everything we do on our phones by taking screenshots of your smartphone activity every five seconds to better understand our digital lives.

The title of this issue comes from their framing—our digital lives are fragmented, switching between apps and contexts constantly. This research will help us understand what that fragmentation actually looks like.

Tom Vanderbilt with a piece in Nautilus on the reasons why we love the more than 135 million how-to videos available online.

Vanderbilt suggests that this is because humans learn by seeing others engage in tasks, and map these behaviors out before we try them out ourselves. Vanderbilt then shares some insight from researchers in artificial intelligence and robotics to indicate that robots may also value how-to videos to learn as well.

The connection between human and machine learning through observation is fascinating—we're both wired to learn by watching.

🔨 Do

Prioritize. Work smarter. Practice self-care.

🤔 Consider

Writing is not destined to leave traces, but to erase, by traces, all traces, to disappear in the fragmentary space of writing more definitely than one disappears in the tomb.

Maurice Blanchot

Blanchot's meditation on writing and traces takes on new meaning in the age of Clearview AI and the Human Screenome Project. We think our digital traces disappear, but they accumulate in databases we never consented to, forming portraits we never intended. The fragmentary space isn't erasure—it's permanent capture.

Here in Digitally Literate, I often talk about gun violence. This week gun violence impacted a local school, and many of the families in my neighborhood. This caused a discussion with my wife about the concerns we have about sending our children out into the world everyday.

On the heels of this discussion, I came across the discussion/debate about the recent Eminem song, Darkness. Please note, the language, content, and tone of these materials is not safe for work, and may be triggering for many. The song is a harrowing, disturbing takedown of gun violence, framed through the point of view of the perpetrator of the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting, one of the worst mass shootings in modern US history.

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