Select a result to preview

DL 267

When The Dust Settles

Published: November 7, 2020 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 267. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Hi all, welcome back to Digitally Literate. Thanks for showing up this week. You are appreciated.

This week I worked on the following:

📺 Watch

See the full methodology behind the film and explore more at Google's site.

📚 Read

Since the 2016 election, Kevin Roose, tech columnist for the NY Times, has been using CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned data tool. You can check out @FacebooksTop10, a Twitter account Roose created showing the top 10 most-interacted-with link posts by U.S. Facebook pages every day.

Most days, the leader board looks roughly the same: conservative post after conservative post.

Conservative political influencers have spent years building a well-oiled media machine that swarms around every major news story, creating a torrent of viral commentary that reliably drowns out both the mainstream media and the liberal opposition.

The result is a parallel media universe that left-of-center Facebook users may never encounter, but that has been stunningly effective in shaping its own version of reality.

Facebook Has A Metric For "Violence And Incitement Trends." It's Rising.

The metric, which assesses the potential for danger based on keywords, rose to 580 from 400 this week—a 45% increase.

Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation researcher, said she wasn't aware Facebook had this metric and was heartened they were tracking it. Still, suppression of individual hashtags "is not going to do the trick."

"We're talking about the broader structure of Facebook that incentivizes these communities to organize and foster offline violence."

Great post from Laura Jimenez.

So, what are you going to do about that when the dust settles?

How are you going to work to learn and unlearn and teach your family, your students, or your colleagues to see and read in new ways?

Leaders may change. The problems remain. Do the work.

The members of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine's Class of 2024 started a new tradition by writing their own class oath to acknowledge their ever-evolving responsibilities as physicians.

What responsibility do leaders have as they post and interact in society?

I'm wondering if a corollary for this type of oath exists for educators and researchers…

An interview with Greta Thunberg on the release of the "I Am Greta" documentary on Hulu.

We still need to communicate the positive things, but above that we need to communicate reality. In order to be able to change things we need to understand where we are at. We can't spread false hope. That's practically not a very wise thing to do. Also, it's morally wrong that people are building on false hope.

🔨 Do

I'm planning on following (writing along with) this project. I hope you'll join me.

Each month, a pair of provocateurs will post a new provocation and invite you to reflect, react, and respond. You can participate using the hashtag #InclusiveDesignUnGuide.

🤔 Consider

What I know for certain is that we can make things better.

Barack Obama

Obama's measured optimism frames an issue about aftermath—what happens when elections end but problems persist. The conservative media machine keeps running. The violence metrics keep rising. Greta reminds us false hope is morally wrong. The only honest path forward is doing the work.

Previous: DL 266 • Next: DL 268 • Archive: 📧 Newsletter

🌱 Connected Concepts: