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TLDR 150

Too Long; Didn't Read Issue 150

Published: 2018-05-18 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Issue 150. Trimming the fat.

You'll notice some changes this week as we're slimming down for the summer. Let me know what you think.

This week I posted the following:

🔖 Key Takeaways

📺 Watch

For her "True Stories" series, cartoonist Lauren ELL (Lorenzo) gives us a candid look into her dysfunctional (her words) family's life by secretly recording their conversations and then animating them.

The Alexa video above is her most popular and was uploaded in March. The animated format captures both the humor and chaos of everyday family life mediated by voice assistant technology—revealing gap between promise of seamless smart home automation and messy reality of device misunderstandings, accidental activations, and family members shouting at Alexa.

You might also want to check out her latest, called A Family Dinner, which continues the series of authentically capturing ordinary family moments elevated through animation that makes them simultaneously relatable and absurd.

📚 Read

Searching for Alternative Facts is an ethnographic account drawn directly from Francesca Tripodi's research within upper-middle class conservative Christian communities in Virginia in 2017. Tripodi uses Christian practices of Biblical interpretation as a lens for understanding the relationship between so-called "alternative" or "fake news" sources and contemporary conservative political thought.

The key insight: "By applying the practices of scriptural inference to Google searches, this report also implicates Google in reaffirming people's existing beliefs."

Tripodi reveals how information literacy practices developed in religious contexts—carefully reading text, looking for specific keywords, cross-referencing sources that confirm interpretation—transfer to online search in ways that reinforce rather than challenge existing beliefs. Readers approach Google like scripture, mining for evidence rather than testing hypotheses.

This research helps explain the puzzle of how intelligent, educated people end up believing demonstrably false information. It's not lack of critical thinking skills but application of specific literacy practices that produce confirmation bias. The problem isn't just filter bubbles created by algorithms but interpretive frameworks users bring to information seeking.

Major depression is on the rise among Americans from all age groups, but is rising fastest among teens and young adults, new health insurance data shows.

So what is possibly behind the data? Possibly a mix of "how busy people are" in addition to time spent in front of screens, lack of community, isolation, and sleep disruption.

"It is possible that the increased rates of depression in adolescents is related to a combination of increased electronics use and sleep disruptions in already vulnerable individuals."

The data reveals troubling trends: depression diagnoses increasing across demographics, but particularly alarming rates among young people who have grown up with smartphones and social media as constants in their lives. While causation is difficult to establish definitively, the correlation between rise of digital technologies and rise of depression warrants serious attention and research.

I'd also recommend reading this post from NPR about when teens cyberbully themselves—revealing even more complex dynamics of social media's impact on adolescent mental health.

More examination and reflection of the role and substance of social media connections in society. The article examines a lower threshold for maintaining friendships, and indicates that some people strongly favor mediated interactions over in-person interactions, especially millennials accustomed to constant communication via devices.

Most interesting: "However, digital media channels 'don't distinguish between quality of relationships,' he said. 'They allow you to maintain relationships that would otherwise decay. Our data shows that if you don't meet people at the requisite frequencies, you'll drop down through the layers until eventually you drop out of the 150 and become "somebody you once knew." What we think is happening is that, if you don't meet sometime face to face, social media is slowing down the rate of decay.'"

This research drawing on Dunbar's number—the cognitive limit to number of stable social relationships we can maintain—suggests social media changes dynamics of friendship maintenance. Digital connection allows us to keep more people in our networks longer, but these relationships exist in kind of suspended animation, preserved but not deepening without face-to-face reinforcement.

The question becomes: is slowing friendship decay valuable, or does it create illusion of connection while preventing us from investing deeply in smaller number of truly close relationships?

The usual side effects of poverty are abundant and well documented. They include crime, chronic stress and a long list of health conditions. This post from PBS posits that you may have not heard of another one: lower IQ.

When asked to explain these results, scholars disagree on the possible causes.

"Instead," they write, in their depressing conclusion, "it appears that poverty itself reduces cognitive capacity. We suggest that this is because poverty-related concerns consume mental resources, leaving less for other tasks."

This research challenges assumptions about intelligence as fixed, innate quality. It suggests cognitive capacity is partially determined by material conditions—not because poverty deprives people of educational resources (though it does), but because mental burden of scarcity itself impairs thinking.

When you're worried about making rent, feeding children, or affording medical care, those concerns occupy mental bandwidth that could otherwise be used for problem-solving, planning, and other cognitive tasks. This creates vicious cycle: poverty impairs cognition, impaired cognition makes it harder to escape poverty.

The implications for education policy, social services, and understanding achievement gaps are profound. We can't address cognitive impacts of poverty purely through educational interventions without addressing poverty itself.

The #MeToo movement, which has rocked politics, media, business and entertainment, is exploding with full force in academia and on college campuses across the country.

Since December, more than 2,400 anonymous accounts of sexual misconduct have been posted online through a spreadsheet in which victims and witnesses describe incidents they say occurred in their work with lecturers, professors, deans and others.

The scale of accounts reveals how endemic harassment is in academic settings—power dynamics of professor-student relationships, isolated research environments, prestige-based hierarchies, and cultures that protect reputations of powerful men all contribute to environments where misconduct can persist for decades.

In a somewhat related story, I have been thinking about the literature and research that I read and cite. More to the point, I need to cite more diverse scholars, and more women.

The connection between interpersonal harassment and scholarly citation practices might not be immediately obvious, but both reflect whose voices, knowledge, and contributions get recognized and valued in academic spaces. Consciously working to cite more diverse scholars is one way to address systemic inequities in whose knowledge counts.

I have two little ones in the house, so interruptions are a frequent event in our house.

I have also (tried) to be more present in discussions, and listen to students, colleagues, and friends while in discussion. This includes listening, and not just waiting to present my points. This also includes the subtle balance between leadership, and monopolizing the discussion.

Within these contexts, it's important to recognize lenses of power, identity, and gender. In this post, Stanford doctoral candidate Katherine Hilton found that people perceive interruptions in conversation differently, and those perceptions differ depending on the listener's own conversational style as well as gender.

The research reveals that what counts as interruption isn't objective—it's interpreted through cultural and personal frameworks. Some conversational styles feature lots of overlapping speech as sign of engagement and enthusiasm (cooperative overlapping), while others treat any speaking before someone finishes as rude interruption.

Gender shapes these interpretations significantly. When women interrupt, they're often judged more harshly than men doing identical behavior. When men interrupt women, it's often not recognized as interruption at all but as legitimate turn-taking.

Watch this video clip and calibrate your perspectives on what you consider interruption and how gender and status might be shaping your interpretation.

🤔 Consider

"This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave." — Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe, who passed away this week, captured something essential about creative hunger and the drive to document and understand life in all its complexity. His observation about artists as "life's hungry man" resonates with this issue's exploration of how we seek, interpret, and make meaning from information. The scriptural inference research shows people hungrily searching for confirmation of existing beliefs. The depression data reveals hunger for connection in digitally-mediated world. The friendship research explores our appetite for maintained relationships even when attenuated by distance. Poverty research demonstrates how material scarcity starves cognitive capacity. MeToo accounts document hunger for justice and recognition. Interruption studies examine how we hunger to be heard. In each case, we see humans grasping for understanding, connection, validation, and agency—simultaneously gluttons of eternity seeking to consume all experience and beauty's misers hoarding what we manage to capture. Wolfe's New Journalism insisted on bringing novelistic techniques to nonfiction, recognizing that truth requires not just facts but narrative, voice, and immersion in lived experience. This trimmed-down summer issue continues that tradition: fewer items, but each an invitation to look deeply at how we live now.

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