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TLDR 144

Too Long; Didn't Read Issue 144

Published: 2018-04-30 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Issue 144. The Dalai Lama reminds us that "A lack of transparency results in distrust and a deep sense of insecurity."

Here's what I posted this week:

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🔖 Key Takeaways

📺 Watch

If you're like me, you need a bit of whimsy in your world right about now. This video has been a hit in my home over the last week. View this as an amuse-bouche before the remainder of this week's issue.

John Collins, better known as "The Paper Airplane Guy," has devoted himself to designing, folding, and flying the world's finest paper airplanes. This video will show you how to fold five of his airplanes. You can also read more in his piece in WIRED.

📚 Read

This week has been quite eventful for Facebook. Next week is going to be worse.

Facebook has been sliding in their indications of what they knew was happening behind the scenes with your data. Soon after the 2016 U.S. election Mark Zuckerberg indicated that it was ridiculous that Facebook had anything to do with the results. As time wore on, they've slowly let on a little bit at a time how much their social network was leveraged. As regular readers of TL;DR, we've been following this story from the beginning.

This week, Facebook has been flooding the zone with multiple press conferences, conference calls, and interviews. Zuckerberg held a conference call in which the takeaway was that Facebook "didn't do enough." I recommend listening to the full conference call here. Sheryl Sandberg admitted they dropped the ball, and advertisers are "pushing pause" on ad buys. Facebook also released that most of its 2 billion users have had their data scraped by "malicious actors."

Oh...and I didn't mention that there is evidence that Facebook is watching your private messages or deleting personal messages if/when Zuckerberg contacts you. Finally, the social network is pausing a secret research project in which they wanted to study the social connections of their most vulnerable patients.

Next week, Zuckerberg is set to testify before the U.S. Congress, while he will not speak to anyone in the UK. There are rumors that the social network will send out notifications to users on Monday to let you know if your data was scraped.

Tim Wu's piece in the NY Times details the ways in which Facebook has failed, and the need for competitors to offer something better. As we've seen over the last couple of months/years, Facebook has been playing it fast and loose in terms of our data and identity on their site…and how they're manipulating your feed to keep you on there for longer periods of time.

It's also important to recognize that Facebook is acting as they are designed to act. You are the product that is being sold. If you share content openly on Facebook (or other social spaces) you cannot be surprised if/when people can "scrape" that data.

Wu notes:

What comes after Facebook? Yes, we have come to depend on social networks, but instead of accepting an inherently flawed Facebook monopoly, what we most need now is a new generation of social media platforms that are fundamentally different in their incentives and dedication to protecting user data. Barring a total overhaul of leadership and business model, Facebook will never be that platform.

Brian X. Chen with a reminder about what we should really learn from all of this Facebook news. You should hesitate before sharing your data with an unknown brand, tech tool or service.

Chen notes:

This applies to just about everything that touches your personal technology, including the apps that you download to your phone or computer and the free online services that you use. And, yes, it also includes those seemingly harmless personality tests run by some unfamiliar organization on Facebook — the kind that helped Cambridge Analytica get the data on users.

It's time to stop using technology and the internet as though you were shopping at a supermarket. In a grocery store, you can reasonably assume that the food labels are accurate and the products safe to eat, because the food industry is heavily regulated. The handling of personal digital information, in contrast, is loosely regulated. There have been scores of obscure companies baiting you with products that purport to improve your life — but actually capitalize on your data.

I know that it can be difficult, but we need to try and remove the lens of politics and our individual tribes before reading the next story.

One of the things we've discussed over the past couple of months is the need for more media literacy in our classrooms. Critical media literacy expands this by integrating different cultural elements, including politics. The challenge for educators is that you want to provide your students with information, help contextualize it, keep your bias and perspectives out of it, and let them make up their own minds.

This story about the Sinclair Broadcast Group, and the video remix of the anchors, is an opportunity to teach media literacy for the next decade.

The adolescent & teen years have always been a challenging time. Peer pressure, insecurity & hormones are just some of the issues facing those in these age groups. But does social media exacerbate these problems?

This post from the Center for Digital Ethics & Policy shares recent research on the topic and relation to screentime. The piece concludes by asking who is responsible for the role of social media in adolescent/teen depression and anxiety?

🔨 Do

This great post by Aaron Davis is exactly what I've needed this week. It may not look like it...but it's exactly what you need as well. Let me explain why.

As I help students and colleagues build up their digital identity, I indicate the need for them to have one URL or domain that they own and control. At this one hub, they can connect all of the loose ends and write themselves into being.

The challenge is that we're often split into a bunch of different silos, social networks, and tools. The reason is that the companies and developers of these tools want it that way. Google doesn't want to help Facebook, and Facebook doesn't want to help Twitter. As a result, we've got a little bit of our identity in one place, and a different part in another. These companies also do not make it easy at all to connect the dots.

I think the answer is to have that one hub that you use to connect those dots. Davis makes this point through a conversation with good friend Amy Burvall. Aaron extends this by looking at the spaces in which he exists online. He also gives insight into the PESOS and POSSE models.

I'll modify Aaron's statement to make my point here:

I think that you should do more to own your presence. What if you actually collected together your media and stories into one space. I think that many of us face that same conundrum.

I'm in the process of changing up my signals and will have announcements soon. This will be a big game changer...for me.

🤔 Consider

"The question isn't, 'What do we want to know about people?', It's, 'What do people want to tell about themselves?'" — Mark Zuckerberg

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