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DL 270

Little Worlds

Published: November 28, 2020 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 270. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Hi all, welcome back. Take a look around.

This week I worked on the following:

📺 Watch

This is a clip from Apple TV's "Tiny World."

It features the pygmy marmoset, the smallest monkey in the world, completely fascinated by a leaf insect.

📚 Read

Facebook is a cesspool.

The problem isn't communication, in and of itself. It's the ability to create an echo chamber. Humanity was not built for this.

Even with the best intentions, these digital texts, tools, and spaces are too powerful and they're breaking the social connections of users. It's too much for human psychology to bear, and it's ruining us. We need to do something about this, fast, but I have no idea what.

Fox News acknowledged Trump's loss. Facebook and Twitter cracked down on election lies. But true believers can get their misinformation elsewhere.

There have always been conspiracy theorists, and they always find ways to share and amplify narratives. The problem with social media is that actual journalism shows up in your feed right alongside nonsense. The multiple narratives look similar to the average consumer.

Perhaps this isn't a question about 'information literacy' but a need to have information sources that are more bifurcated.

Perhaps an exodus of certain users to different spaces is a good thing?

The Mistake Imperative

Students often see mistakes as a source of embarrassment, stress, or even humiliation. The human brain is agnostic, however, and makes good use of the data—mistakes are crucial pieces of information that force a cognitive reckoning.

Six ways to make this a reality:

Just remember that your brain is not for thinking.

A mysterious monolith has been discovered in a remote part of Utah, after being spotted by state employees counting sheep from a helicopter.

The structure, estimated at between 10ft and 12ft high, appeared to be planted in the ground. It was made from some sort of metal, its shine in sharp contrast to the enormous red rocks which surrounded it.

TikTok Paint-Mixer Fired, Then Hired

An Ohio University senior who worked at a local Sherwin-Williams store was fired after the company discovered his popular paint-mixing TikTok channel @tonesterpaints, which has over 1.2 million followers.

Tony Piloseno had been pointing to his viral account as an example of what Sherwin-Williams could do on social media. But it led corporate personnel to investigate, and they fired him.

Piloseno received job offers from major paint companies and announced he had agreed to a full-time position with Florida Paints.

Perhaps I've got this content construction thing all wrong.

🔨 Do

I love cooking, so this past week was a joy for me. Everything turned out great.

This week I also took time to create some turkey stock using the instant pot. I froze the stock using ice cube trays and bagged them up to last for some time.

🤔 Consider

Sometimes the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.

Anthony Liccione

Liccione's observation frames an issue about scale—the pygmy marmoset fascinated by a leaf, mistakes as crucial data points, a mysterious monolith in the desert, paint-mixing videos that capture millions. Little worlds contain multitudes.

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