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No Easy Silver Bullets

Published: September 26, 2021 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome back. Here's Digitally Literate, issue 305. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

Remember to hydrate and take time to smile this week.

🔖 Key Takeaways

📺 Watch

Never before in human history have we been richer, more advanced, or powerful. Yet we feel overwhelmed facing rapid climate change. While solutions seem simple on the surface, implementation proves incredibly complex.

This video received support from Gates Notes, Bill Gates' personal blog addressing global health, climate change, and more.

For additional perspective, these five climate scenarios show potential planetary futures based on current policy trajectories.

📚 Read

The concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations' computer understanding, becomes increasingly meaningless to modern students. For those who grew up with floppy disks, hierarchical folder systems provided intuitive organizational logic—Downloads, Desktop, Documents folders nested within "This PC" with clear structural relationships.

Mental models have shifted as people become accustomed to limitless data streams in social media and cloud storage systems (Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive). Physical file placement matters less than accessibility through search and algorithmic retrieval.

People now view their documents like a laundry basket—everything thrown together with an AI robot fetching whatever they need on demand. This transformation impacts how people understand privacy, organization, and digital system navigation.

Facebook Tried to Make Its Platform a Healthier Place. It Got Angrier Instead.

Continuing the Facebook Files investigation, internal memos reveal how 2018 algorithm changes rewarded outrage despite CEO Mark Zuckerberg's resistance to proposed fixes.

Attempting to boost "meaningful social interactions" (MSI), Facebook tweaked algorithms to strengthen user bonds and improve well-being. This initiative aligned with industry trends like Google and Apple focusing on screen time management, motivated by Tristan Harris and the Center for Humane Technology.

The MSI logic suggested encouraging more friend and family interaction while reducing passive consumption of professionally produced content, which research indicated harmed mental health. Publicly, Facebook framed these changes around user wellbeing, but internal documents suggest concerns about declining user engagement.

The result: divisive, inflammatory content went viral. Publishers received incentives to produce controversial material because salacious content sells while safe content remains boring.

Facebook research teams demonstrated MSI changes failed to drive meaningful social interactions, instead fostering racial divisions, conspiracy beliefs, and disturbing news consumption. Despite learning this during 2016 election fallout, Facebook leadership ignored research and took no corrective action, prioritizing growth over user welfare.

Germany enacted one of the world's toughest online hate speech laws in 2017, requiring Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to remove illegal content within 24 hours or face fines up to 50 million euros ($59 million). Supporters hailed it as watershed internet regulation and a model for other countries.

Germany's Nazi history drives attempts to balance free speech rights against hate speech combat. The country maintains some of the world's strictest laws against incitement to violence, hate speech, Holocaust denial, and public Nazi symbol display.

Despite having comprehensive online hate speech legislation, Germany struggles to contain toxic content, particularly around September 26 elections. This reveals the complexity of effective regulation in rapidly evolving digital environments.

The Educational Power—and the Limits—of Personalized Children's Books

Natalia Kucirkova explores personalized books—print or digital materials tailored to specific children—in Scientific American. The pandemic increased demand for stories that excite children while supporting emotional processing.

Personalized books offer adjustment options, interactivity, and allow parents to populate text with children's data. Research shows individually tailored reading materials can boost engagement and learning, but discerning effectiveness remains challenging.

The focus should emphasize child-caregiver interaction. Discussing all media consumption with children remains crucial for learning outcomes.

Despite alarming headlines, many school districts successfully returned students to classrooms without COVID outbreaks. Betsy Ladyzhets researched five successful communities, sharing 11 lessons on the COVID-19 Data Dispatch:

🔨 Do

Strategic Starfish Exercise

Laura Hilliger and the We Are Open Co-op team developed this exercise for balancing daily tasks with long-term goals:

  1. Identify key priorities - Clarify most important objectives
  2. Break into actionable steps - Make large goals manageable through specific actions
  3. Allocate focused time - Schedule dedicated periods for progress, not perfection

This approach helps maintain momentum on important projects while managing immediate responsibilities.

🤔 Consider

Every new technology goes through a phase of euphoria, followed by a phase of retrenchment. Automobiles were a fantastic replacement for horses, but as their numbers increased it became clear that they had their own health and cleanliness issues. The same is true of the internet.

Hal Varian

This observation perfectly captures the themes explored throughout this issue. Facebook's algorithm changes demonstrate how technical solutions often create unexpected problems. Germany's hate speech regulation reveals the limits of legal approaches to complex social challenges. The shift from file folders to search-based organization shows how technological convenience can eliminate useful cognitive frameworks.

Varian reminds us that every technological advancement brings both benefits and unforeseen consequences. The internet's democratization of information came with amplification of misinformation. Social media's connection capabilities enabled harassment and division. Recognizing these patterns helps us approach new technologies with both optimism and caution.

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🌱 Connected Concepts:

Part of the 📧 Newsletter archive documenting digital literacy and technology.

In an attempt to make sense of digital wellbeing for this issue, I fell down into a rabbit hole trying to understand this state of personal wellbeing experienced through the healthy use of digital technology. This resource from Paul Marsden helped.

I also listened to almost everything I could from HEALTH after this post popped up in my reading feed. Experimental noise rock with Trent Reznor and NIN in their origin story? Yes please.

Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0. is haunting, ethereal, grainy, & dystopic. A perfect way to close this issue. :)