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DL 253

Confuse, Divide, and Distract

Published: July 4, 2020 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 253. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Hi all, welcome to issue 253 of Digitally Literate. Each week in this newsletter, I synthesize the news of the week in education, technology, and literacy.

This week I worked on a couple things behind the scenes. More to come.

📺 Watch

The U.S. celebrates this Independence Day amid nationwide protests and calls for systemic reforms.

In this short film, five young descendants of Frederick Douglass read and respond to excerpts of his famous speech, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" which asks all of us to consider America's long history of denying equal rights to Black Americans.

📚 Read

Bringing millions of students back to campus would create enormous risks for society but comparatively little educational benefit, an economist says.

With no indication that the federal government is prepared to step in quickly with a financial rescue plan for higher education, colleges and universities are being forced to choose between bad alternatives.

But a toll will be paid, and it will largely not fall on students. Dining-hall workers, custodians, secretaries, librarians, medical personnel—as well as older faculty members—are far more vulnerable.

Is Academia in denial? Read more here.

We are not burned out because life is hard this year. We are burned out because we are being rolled over by the wheels of an economy that has bafflingly declared working parents inessential.

The benefits to society of schools being open are greater than the benefits of opening most other institutions. Although we can mitigate transmission within schools to some degree, the best way to ensure that schools can open—and stay open—is to keep community spread of the virus low. We can reopen schools in the fall if we close the bars and gyms now.

As we argue about masks, staying in, or going out to the pub—we're losing an entire generation of our youth.

We are engaged in a worldwide information war, as such disinformation is coming at us from all sides—from friend and foe alike.

This is designed to confuse, divide, and distract.

A growing body of research highlights the strain on our ability to read, understand, process, and take action on the flood of news with which we're confronted. Some of the biggest events in 2020 have demanded more of our time, more direct action, and have been more emotionally taxing than we're used to. The result feels like a mental DDoS attack that drags down our mental health, allows misinformation to thrive, and even makes the job of delivering news more difficult.

Starting as early as 2015, Facebook executives started crafting exceptions for the then-candidate that transformed the world's information battlefield for years to come.

This is the biggest test of whether Facebook will ever truly put society and democracy ahead of profit and ideology. As much as they stonewall, we already know the answer.

We're now seeing Facebook be more responsive when it comes to content on the platform as a result of the advertising boycott. We also see the impact of this ad boycott impacting Reddit as they overhaul their hate speech policies.

How can society better support families in a digital age?

🔨 Do

Extend the Life of Your Tech

In a pandemic-induced recession, it's more important than ever to take care of our smartphones and other gadgets.

🤔 Consider

The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent.

Malcolm X

Malcolm X's observation on media power resonates in a week where information overload becomes a weapon. The mental DDoS attack isn't accidental—it's designed to confuse, divide, and distract while the powerful escape accountability.

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