DL 293
Self-Mesmerism
Published: May 29, 2021 • 📧 Newsletter
Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 293. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.
🔖 Key Takeaways
- Designing for Adolescent Well-Being: Data & Society report finds numerous challenges in how platforms prioritize (or don't) teen mental health
- Surveillance Weaponizes Care: Protection, direction, and management can be perceived as aligned with care—surveillance exploits this
- Nature-Based Climate Solutions: Analysis shows these solutions powerful for long-term cooling, but must be designed for longevity
- QAnon Dismisses UFOs: Conspiracy followers see government UAP disclosures as distraction from "real" issue of voter fraud
- Self-Mesmerism: Music and trance states offer a way to quiet the mind and do deep work
Hello all! I will not send out a newsletter next week as I'll take some time with family as the school year ends for my children.
This week I posted the following:
- Mental Health and Depression - May is mental health month. I talk about my struggles for balance and the impact of anxiety and depression.
- Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching & Learning (CETL) - My institution is starting up a CETL and I applied for director. I didn't make it past the first round. I'm sharing my application to promote transparency and open scholarship.
📺 Watch
Visualizing Atoms: Bohmian Trajectories in Hydrogen
Do we picture atoms the completely wrong way?
This video uses Bohmian trajectories to visualize the wavefunctions of hydrogen orbitals, rendered in 3D using custom Python code in Blender.
Super cool stuff that challenges our typical mental models of the subatomic world.
📚 Read
Designing for Adolescent Digital Well-Being
In a Data & Society report, Amanda Lenhart and Kellie Owens interview tech industry professionals to understand how adolescent well-being is prioritized (or not) in the design of popular social media and gaming platforms.
Lenhart and Owens find numerous challenges to designing for adolescent digital well-being—competing incentives, limited understanding of teen development, and metrics that don't capture harm.
The Weaponization of Care
Autumn Caines on how surveillance and the gender norms around care reinforce each other:
Protection, direction, influence, and even management can easily be perceived as closely aligned to concerns of care, if not inseparable from them. Be it for our children, partners, or property, surveillance promises that we can gain peace of mind or become more conscientious—that we can think of ourselves as better caregivers.
When care becomes justification for surveillance, both are corrupted.
Nature-Based Solutions Can Help Cool the Planet—If We Act Now
Analysis suggests that to limit global temperature rise, we must slash emissions and invest now to protect, manage, and restore ecosystems and land for the future.
Nature-based solutions can have a powerful role in reducing temperatures long-term. Land-use changes continue to act long past the point at which net-zero emissions are achieved. Before then, nature-based solutions can provide real but limited mitigation benefits.
Put simply, nature-based solutions must be designed for longevity. This means paying closer attention to their long-term carbon-sink potential, as well as their impacts on biodiversity, equity, and sustainable development goals.
So You're Vaccinated! How Can You Let People Know?
You've taken time to get the coronavirus vaccine. Thank you!
Current CDC recommendations indicate mask mandates are no longer needed—as long as people are vaccinated.
If you are vaccinated, what responsibility do you have to prove this to others? The social dynamics of signaling vaccination status remain awkward.
QAnon Crowd Convinced UFOs Are a Diversion From Voter Fraud
It's never been a better time to believe in UFOs—unless you're a QAnon follower.
QAnon emerged in late 2017 and gained traction throughout Trump's presidency. Its core theory revolves around Satan-worshipping pedophiles plotting against Trump, but the movement has been described as a "big tent conspiracy theory" involving constantly evolving schemes.
Recent research suggests religion, education, race, and media consumption are strong predictors of conspiracy theory acceptance among Americans.
🔨 Do
Self-Mesmerism: Music and Trance States for Deep Work
Having trouble getting things done?
Self-mesmerism might be a way to quiet your mind and get some deep work done.
Music has long been associated with trance states. The concepts of automatic response and conditioned reflex have been the basis for a model in which the self is vulnerable to external stimuli such as music.
Find the right soundscape, let it carry you into focused work.
🤔 Consider
In the spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours.
Eric Carle
Carle's observation about spring's variability connects to this issue's threads—the complexity of designing for adolescent well-being, the multiple weather patterns of conspiracy thinking, and the climate solutions that must work across decades. Nature is complex. So are we.
Bonus: Men—it's okay to moisturize and use eye cream. There's nothing wrong with wanting to look good and take care of yourself. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk. :)
🔗 Navigation
Previous: DL 292 • Next: DL 294 • Archive: 📧 Newsletter
🌱 Connected Concepts:
- Digital Wellbeing — Adolescent platform design, self-mesmerism, mental health
- Privacy Rights — Weaponization of care, surveillance as caregiving
- Media Literacy — QAnon and UFOs, conspiracy theory predictors
- Civic Engagement — Nature-based climate solutions, vaccination signaling
- Philosophy — Eric Carle on complexity, care and control