DL 398
When Systems Stop Singing
Published: August 4, 2025 β’ π§ Newsletter
Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 398. Your source for thoughtful analysis on education, technology, and our evolving digital culture.
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π Newsletter Restart: After a brief hiatus, we're back with a new publishing approach that honors our TL;DR roots while embracing digital garden growth. Issues now live at digitallyliterate.net with rich interconnections to nearly a decade of thinking about digital literacy. Subscribe to get notified when new issues are published, but the real experience happens on the web, where ideas can breathe and connect.
This evolution from TL;DR simplicity to networked thinking reflects how digital literacy itself has matured. What started as "too long; didn't read" curation has become "thinking that lasts; developing relevance." Approachable entry points that can deepen into accessible lifetime learning paths. The garden approach lets you decide how to interact. Grab the quick insights and move on, or dig deeper into the conceptual soil that's been growing for years.
π Note on Format: This restart issue is longer than usual as we demonstrate the new approach. You'll see vault links throughout that connect to existing thinking, plus new "seed pages" that will grow from ideas introduced here. Future issues will feel more familiar in length while maintaining these rich connections.
I've obviously had a lot happening in the year since we last talked. On my main website, I've been documenting my thinking as I explore these areas. Some of the motivation for these changes was that I was growing a bit frustrated with the structure and format of the blog, newsletter, and silos that I was creating.
More to the point, I wanted a mix between a newsletter and a wiki. I wanted a place where I could link to an idea and we could watch it grow over time. I've been watching, thinking, and writing about these spaces for over a decade. I wanted a space where I could link to a quick primer on a topic and allow the reader to go explore for themselves a bit.
This would help add some friction, serendipity, and fun to the newsletter creation process for me. And I think it would for you as well. Let's see what we can build together.
π Key Takeaways
- Communication Under Stress: From whale songs stopping to personal ghosting to cognitive overwhelm, systems break down by going silent
- Digital Overwhelm is Real: Longitudinal data shows smartphone impacts on mental health; "brain opacity" captures our collective struggle
- Silence as Signal: Sometimes, stopping communication isn't failure but an authentic response to unsustainable demands
- Newsletter Evolution: This restart bridges TL;DR simplicity with digital garden depth, ideas that grow over time rather than disappear into inboxes
- Interconnected Thinking: Environmental stress, information overload, and personal burnout follow similar patterns of system breakdown
π Recent Work
I've been busy over the last year or so. Here are some of the highlights of what you've missed.
- AI and the Future of Education: Disruptions, Dilemmas and Directions -Together with good friends, Bryan Alexander, Helen Beetham, Doug Belshaw, Laura Hilliger, and Karen Louise Smith, we held a webinar to discuss a number of think pieces we published as part of a call from UNESCO.
- Growing intelligence: Charleston, state scramble to deal with AI - A great local news piece about AI and how it'll impact local businesses. I appreciated stepping outside of my bubble and thinking about how this impacts real people.
- Navigating AI in Higher Education - In this podcast, I encourage more dialogue about what these advances mean for teaching and learning.
- Experts weigh in on screen time amid South Carolinaβs student cellphone ban - I talked about βscreens on, screens off, and screens on the sideβ as a more holistic screentime framing.
- The rise of AI in schools: How this new technology is impacting classroom instruction and student assignments - I had an interview with a local "parent-focused" newspaper on the topic of AI in our kids' lives.
𫨠Urgent Technopanics?
We've talked quite a bit about screentime over the years. It seems only right that we continue this newsletter by picking up where we left off.
A new paper published in the Journal of Human Development and Capabilities from a neuroscience startup called Sapien Labs found that among current young adults in Generation Z, the first generation to grow up with smartphones, the worse the mental health outcomes were, the earlier the use of the gadgets began.
Using longitudinal data from the Global Mind Project, a massive mental health database assembled by Sapien, a team found that among the more than 100,000 18-to-24-year-olds whose outcomes they tracked, those who got phones when they were younger experienced more suicidal ideation, aggression, reality detachment, and hallucinations as they aged.
I'll keep thinking critically about this topic, and I'd urge you to do the same. In our house, we're slowly approaching this again as our youngest prepares for 5th grade. For now, she mostly wants to be able to text her friends and play video games. We'll see how this plays out.
Why it matters: This isn't just another "screens are bad" study; it's longitudinal data from 100,000+ young adults showing measurable mental health impacts correlated with early smartphone adoption. The timing matters because we're making decisions about device access for the next generation while this data is emerging.
The deeper insight: We're conducting a massive, uncontrolled experiment on developing minds. The question isn't whether technology harms kids, but how we design healthy relationships with powerful tools. This connects directly to our ongoing explorations of Digital Citizenship and the need for Media Literacy frameworks that help young people navigate rather than avoid digital complexity.
πΆβπ«οΈ My Brain Finally Broke
Several years ago, I started to spend more time thinking about the growing information war we find ourselves in the middle of. Ultimately, I think this leads to individuals being under attack as they interact online (and offline) and don't know what to think or do.
This essay by Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker does a great job of capturing this moment. Tolentino describes this as feeling an opacity in her brain, struggling to process information and feeling disconnected from reality. She reflects on the impact of technology, particularly smartphones, on our perception of time and the world around us.
I think this is a couple of different threads coming together. One is our move from print to pixel as a civilization. Another is our willingness to choose the digital as opposed to the physical world. A third is that this digital world is hard to understand, and groups are using that to their advantage. This connects directly to my ongoing work on a digital Information War and how Disinformation campaigns exploit cognitive vulnerabilities. More to come on this.
Why it matters: Tolentino's "brain opacity" captures something many of us feel but struggle to name - the cognitive exhaustion of living in information overload while simultaneously being manipulated by systems designed to capture our attention. This isn't just personal struggle; it's a collective crisis of Digital Literacy in an age of Surveillance Capitalism.
The deeper insight: Our brains evolved for local, concrete information processing. We're now drowning in global, abstract information streams optimized not for understanding but for engagement. The solution isn't digital detox but developing better cognitive frameworks for navigating information abundance. This connects to our ongoing work on Critical Thinking in digital spaces and the urgent need for Human-in-the-Loop approaches to information processing.
π» Ghosting as Defense Mechanism
Ghosting is the act of abruptly ending all communication with someone without explanation. It is most commonly associated with romantic relationships, but can also occur in friendships or professional settings. The practice can be emotionally damaging for the person being ghosted, leaving them with feelings of rejection, confusion, and a lack of closure.
As I sat down this week to write this issue, this post from Mandy Kloppers came across my feed, and it resonated with me. Friends, I ghosted you over the last year. As I've been holding more meetings with folks on a number of projects, I've been asked why I haven't published the newsletter in some time. I just disappeared.
It was not about cruelty, but about avoidance and self-preservation. As Klopper explains in the post, behind every silence is a story. At some point, I might be able to share that story.
The deeper insight: Breaking the cycle of ghosting requires someone to take the first step towards honesty and authenticity. Being honest and respectful, even online, feels better than leaving messages unanswered. But there's something deeper here about how digital spaces can amplify avoidance behaviors. When everything feels performative online, sometimes silence feels like the only authentic response. This connects to our broader questions about Digital Identity and the challenge of maintaining genuine relationships in mediated spaces.
π Sing While You're Starving
Researchers are alarmed after noticing a significant drop in the number of vocalizations from blue whales.
Research suggests this drop in vocalizations signals a potential food scarcity issue. Devastating heatwaves have led to toxic algae blooms and a collapse in krill and anchovy populations, impacting whale food sources. The warming ocean temperatures, exacerbated by climate change, are causing long-term consequences for marine life.
Scientists are concerned about the future implications of marine heatwaves on the ecosystem and whale reproduction. Understanding and addressing the effects of climate change on marine life is crucial for our future.
The deeper insight: There's a parallel between whale communication breakdown and our own information ecosystem collapse. Both represent complex systems under stress where communication - the foundation of community - begins to fail. When overwhelmed systems stop "singing," we lose the social bonds that make survival possible.
π€ Consider
"Silence has its own movement, and it penetrates into the depths, into every corner of the mind."
β J. Krishnamurti
This captures something essential about the silences we've explored, from whale songs stopping to personal ghosting to cognitive overwhelm. Sometimes silence isn't absence but a different kind of presence, penetrating deeper than all our digital noise.
π§ Navigation
Previous: DL 397 β’ Next: DL 399 β’ Archive: π§ Newsletter
π Connected Concepts
- System Silence Patterns - Exploring parallels between environmental stress and cognitive breakdown across scales
- Digital Overwhelm - When information abundance becomes cognitive burden
- Information War - Building systematic understanding of how digital complexity enables manipulation
- Digital Identity - Authentic self in mediated spaces
Part of the π§ Newsletter archive documenting digital literacy and technology evolution. Now publishing from my digital garden with rich interconnections to nearly a decade of thinking about technology, education, and human agency.
π± Digital Garden Note: This issue lives at digitallyliterate.net where you can explore connections to related concepts, follow idea evolution from seeds to evergreens, and engage with a living knowledge network rather than static newsletter archive. The "Living Threads" above will develop and connect across future issues. This is newsletter as growing ecosystem rather than episodic content.