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DL 272

Deadnaming

Published: December 12, 2020 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 272. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Hi all, welcome back. This is the last issue of the newsletter for 2020. I'll continue to blog and work behind the scenes—but I'll see you back in the new year.

This week I worked on the following:

📺 Watch

"The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology." - Edward O. Wilson

📚 Read

FTC and 48 states allege Facebook should be broken up in pair of lawsuits.

Kara Swisher on the need for government to take back power from Big Tech: The Big Tech companies that have sprouted up since the Microsoft case have been treated by government as if they were the most delicate of flowers. There have been laughable fines, while one merger after another was allowed to sail on by.

Because Facebook has been buying up tech over the last decade, breaking it up will be very complicated.

Eight months ago, Deborah Birx praised Florida's COVID-19 dashboard as an example of "the kind of knowledge and power we need to put into the hands of the American people." That dashboard was built by Rebekah Jones.

In May, Jones was fired for reportedly refusing to manipulate data to justify reopening the state early—and now Florida state police have raided her home and seized equipment she was using for an independent COVID-19 tracker.

Jones posted a series of tweets about the incident, including video of police entering with guns drawn.

Tackling Misinformation: What Researchers Could Do with Social Media Data

Misinformation researchers' holiday wishlist.

In this multi-authored piece, 40+ mis- and disinformation researchers discuss what valuable research they could conduct, if only platforms would make their data more available.

As scientists, our findings are only as good as the dataset at our disposal—it is urgent that we have access to real-world data where misinformation is wreaking the most havoc.

We all struggle to communicate on the internet. Now, young people are leading a sincere effort to clear things up. Tone indicators are paralinguistic signifiers used at the ends of statements to help readers fill in the blanks.

Looking to add more tone indicators to your online content? Here's a great resource to add to your repertoire.

According to the Trans Journalists Association style guide, deadnaming is a trans person's given or former name that they no longer use.

How to be supportive/respectful when talking to or about a trans person:

🔨 Do

A still-in-development service that promises to automatically create "a personalized podcast feed for you to listen to" from any articles you'd otherwise put on your to-read list.

I'll start recommending this to students that would rather create an audio feed of readings from my courses.

🤔 Consider

We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.

E.O. Wilson

Wilson's observation frames this final issue of 2020—a year where godlike technology was used to track pandemics and spread misinformation, where medieval institutions struggled to regulate trillion-dollar platforms, where Paleolithic emotions drove us to raid homes with guns drawn. The gap between what we can do and what we should do grows ever wider.

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