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DL 234

Turning Cracks & Crevices Into Chasms

Published: February 22, 2020 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 234. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Hi all, welcome to issue 234 of Digitally Literate.

I posted and shared the following this week:

If you haven't already, please subscribe if you would like this newsletter to show up in your inbox. Feel free to reach out and let me know what you think of this work at hello@digitallyliterate.net.

📺 Watch

"Russian trolls were different from normal trolls," says Clint Watts, a former U.S. government intelligence analyst who observed how Russia deployed a campaign of disinformation to discredit Hillary Clinton and help elect Donald Trump.

Nick Schifrin talks with Watts, author of "Messing With the Enemy," about what Americans can do to withstand future attempts by Russia to meddle in democracy. Review the transcript here.

The interview provides practical guidance for recognizing and resisting information warfare tactics.

📚 Read

Mass propaganda used to be difficult, but Facebook made it easy.

In the past, authoritarian regimes wielded state-run media to utilize propaganda capitalizing on preexisting beliefs, attitudes, and fears. While state-run media infrastructure doesn't exist in the United States, thanks to Facebook's microtargeting features, individual citizens can still find themselves in information environments monopolized by just one side.

For a deeper dive, read this report on Weaponizing the Digital Influence Machine: The Perils of Online Ad Tech from Data & Society.

There has been news over the past week about Russian disinformation campaigns and their interest in disrupting the 2020 Presidential campaigns.

Sadly, this is largely viewed through partisan lenses as opposed to thinking about how this impacts American institutions and societies around the globe.

The same Kremlin playbook was deployed outside the United States—from Britain to France, Spain to Italy, Hungary to Montenegro. For those who study Russian intelligence modus operandi, the pattern is clear.

To learn more about these practices, read this RAND Report on The Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model. The good news is that you're in the right place—as these events present themselves, I'll try to cover them from a balanced perspective.

This article shares new research from the Pew Research Center on the growing partisan gap in thinking about addressing climate change in the U.S.

The challenge is that media channels are being used for disinformation campaigns to shift blame and divert attention from climate change. We saw this playbook in the piece about Rupert Murdoch and Australia's Bushfire Debate in Digitally Literate #228.

It will be interesting to see how the world addresses a changing environment when partisanship is a major factor in decision-making.

As the future of work constantly shifts, there is a movement to a sharing economy.

The authors consider the sharing economy as characterized by consumers or firms granting each other temporary access to their underutilized physical assets. This definition from Frenken and Schor (2017) decomposes into three components: (1) peer-to-peer exchange; (2) temporary access through borrowing or renting; and (3) better use of underutilized physical assets.

The term sharing economy has often been used interchangeably with platform economy, gig economy, collaborative economy, and on-demand economy—each emphasizing different aspects of changes to economic organization. The piece considers whether this economy is beneficial for society or consolidates resources for a chosen few.

The Case for Inclusive Teaching

Kevin Gannon with a must-read piece on the need for inclusive teaching in higher education.

Gannon includes guidance that inclusive education rests on three imperatives:

🔨 Do

A great guide for setting up a podcasting and video conferencing hub on your desktop.

I already have the mic from my podcasting. I just need to set up the lights and connect my camera to a swing arm. As remote work and content creation converge, these setups become increasingly valuable. Thank you to Doug Belshaw's Thought Shrapnel for this post.

🤔 Consider

Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.

Gautama Buddha

Buddha's teaching on anger connects to this issue's exploration of how disinformation exploits our emotions. Propaganda works by weaponizing fear and anger—we grasp at hot coals of outrage while those who benefit from division remain untouched.

This article focuses on the school district where my son goes to elementary school. The title indicates students are using Google Docs to bully each other. The real theme is far more sinister—the district is monitoring and surveilling students as they use Chromebooks and Google Docs.

Yes, youth will always use tools in their possession to vent, cry for help, or lash out. Yes, we should support, defend, and advocate for youth. But large-scale surveillance is too far. Instead of paying for monitoring tools and third parties—perhaps we should hire more teachers, social workers, and counselors, and pay them what they're worth.

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