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TLDR 151

Too Long; Didn't Read Issue 151

Published: 2018-05-25 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Issue 151. Just keep moving forward.

This week I posted the following:

🔖 Key Takeaways

📺 Watch

This TED talk from Tania Douglas discusses the challenges of our current pursuits of technology, particularly in global health contexts.

What good is a sophisticated piece of medical equipment to people in Africa if it can't handle the climate there? Biomedical engineer Tania Douglas shares stories of how we're often blinded to real needs in our pursuit of technology—and how a deeper understanding of the context where it's used can lead us to better solutions.

Douglas emphasizes need for appropriate technology—the idea that effective solutions must be designed with deep understanding of the cultural, economic, and infrastructural realities where they'll be deployed. Medical devices that require reliable electricity, trained technicians, and regular maintenance may be inappropriate for resource-constrained settings regardless of their technical sophistication.

This applies beyond global health to any technology implementation—understanding context is prerequisite for creating tools that genuinely serve human needs rather than creating new problems through mismatch between design and reality.

📚 Read

This longer reflection responds to the leaked Selfish Ledger video from Google, which presents a speculative vision of how total data collection could be used to guide human behavior toward "better" outcomes. The video, apparently an internal thought experiment, imagines a future where Google's accumulated data about users becomes a "ledger" that doesn't just record our actions but actively intervenes to shape them.

The Selfish Ledger concept draws on Dawkins' idea of the selfish gene—but instead of genes using bodies to replicate themselves, data uses humans to perpetuate and expand itself. The video suggests using behavioral nudging, environmental modifications, and carefully designed interventions to guide users toward predetermined goals like sustainability, health, or social connection.

While these aims might sound benevolent, the implications are profound: Who decides what behaviors are desirable? What right do corporations have to manipulate our choices, even toward ostensibly good ends? How does this total data approach interact with human autonomy, consent, and dignity?

The post explores these questions through lenses of data ethics, surveillance capitalism, and critical pedagogy. It challenges us to articulate better visions of technological futures—ones that enhance rather than diminish human agency, that serve people rather than treating them as resources to be optimized. The Selfish Ledger represents an extreme of data-driven social engineering that demands critical response and alternative imaginaries.

The Selfish Ledger video itself is worth the 10 minutes to understand what's being discussed.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a new European Union law that takes effect today (5/25/2018), and it's the reason you've been receiving non-stop emails and notices about privacy policy updates. It covers data protection and privacy for EU citizens, but it also applies to a lot of other countries in various ways, and since all the tech giants are huge multi-national corporations, it affects a lot of the stuff that you use on a daily basis.

It's trying to solve the problems that exist as companies are collecting and abusing your personal info. The regulation defines what is considered "personal data" much more broadly than previous laws—including not just names and addresses but IP addresses, cookie identifiers, location data, and anything that can be used to identify an individual.

Key provisions include:

Click through to the site to learn more about what is considered "personal data" and what GDPR intends to do about companies collecting and using this information without meaningful consent or transparency.

What's going on in your child's brain when you read them a story?

A newly published study gives some insight into what may be happening inside young children's brains in each of those situations. And, says lead author Dr. John Hutton, there is an apparent "Goldilocks effect"—some kinds of storytelling may be "too cold" for children, while others are "too hot." And, of course, some are "just right."

27 children around age 4 went into an FMRI machine. They were presented with stories in three conditions: audio only; the illustrated pages of a storybook with an audio voiceover; and an animated cartoon. All three versions came from the Web site of Canadian author Robert Munsch.

The findings revealed:

This research suggests that illustrated storybooks hit sweet spot for early childhood brain development—providing enough support for comprehension without doing all the cognitive work for the child. It has implications for debates about screen time, educational media, and the continued value of traditional picture books in digital age.

This new report from Whitney Phillips offers an unprecedented look at the paradox of reporting on the so-called "alt-right." Doing so without amplifying that ideology is extremely difficult, if not downright impossible. The report comes out of the Data & Society research institute's Media Manipulation Initiative, and draws on in-depth conversations with dozens of journalists to illustrate an uncomfortable truth: Journalists inadvertently helped catalyze the rapid rise of the alt-right, turning it into a story before it was necessarily newsworthy.

One of the most interesting things I pulled from the report discussed the need to not trust social media posts, or even a series of posts as a "person on the street."

Instead, reporters should talk to sources for digital culture stories at length, ideally face-to-face, whenever possible. According to The New York Times' Farhad Manjoo, this approach yields greater insight into the totality of that person's perspective, since a person's online performative self may not accurately reflect that person's true perspectives and motives, and/or may obscure details that would help shed light on the person's digital footprint. If there is no time to conduct such interviews, Manjoo stated, reporters should at least reflect on the fact that the character(s) this person plays on the internet likely don't tell the whole story.

The report challenges journalists to develop more sophisticated approaches to covering extremism and manipulation campaigns—recognizing that attention itself is what these movements seek, and that coverage can serve their goals even when critical. The metaphor of oxygen is apt: journalists provided the oxygen of amplification that allowed fringe movements to catch fire.

We often see photos and/or video come in to our devices to connect us. At the same time, some of this content also awakens or perhaps shocks us to the conditions that others bear.

This piece in the NY Times Magazine unpacks the challenges of presenting this information, while not just making this an opportunity for people to be "customers or tourists of reality."

Photography works and doesn't work, it is tolerable and intolerable, it confounds and often exceeds our expectations.

The essay grapples with ethical questions about documentary photography and video: What does it mean to look at images of suffering? What responsibilities come with viewing? How do we avoid voyeurism or using others' pain as spectacle? When does witnessing become a form of consumption rather than genuine engagement?

These questions become more urgent in era of constant image circulation through social media, where photographs of violence, poverty, and injustice scroll past in same feed as vacation photos and product advertisements. The context of viewing shapes meaning—are we bearing witness or just browsing? Are we moved to action or merely feeling momentary emotion before scrolling on?

The piece challenges us to think critically about our relationship to images of others' reality, especially when those realities involve suffering we're not experiencing ourselves.

As a blogger, I've often considered whether or not to allow comments on my sites. As an educator, I try to help my students (and their students) be more empathetic as they engage in discourse online. As a researcher, I study the ways in which individuals and groups discuss online either productively, or unproductively.

I think this guide provides meaningful guidance as you may be involved in some of the same lenses that I've indicated above. I also think this has value for my recent work and development with IndieWeb philosophies.

There are at least four good reasons for a journalist to engage in the comments on their articles:

  1. To improve the quality of the comments - Active moderation and engagement sets tone for discussion
  2. To create a loyal audience for your work - Readers who feel heard become invested in your journalism
  3. To increase people's trust in your work - Transparency and responsiveness builds credibility
  4. To find new story ideas, sources, connections - Comment sections can surface leads and perspectives you missed

The guide also suggests three ways in which you (the author, mediator) should show up in the comments: respond to questions and corrections, encourage constructive participation, and guide conversation toward productive directions.

This applies beyond professional journalism to anyone creating content online and grappling with how to foster meaningful discussion rather than descending into toxicity or disengagement.

🔨 Do

We always hear about new hacks and data breaches from the services we use everyday. Even more of a concern (to me) is the hacks that happen with services that you no longer use.

This site, titled "Have I been pwned" searches the databases of known hacked sites and other materials to see if your data is out there. Take a minute to see if your info, usernames, and passwords are out where you don't think they should be.

The service, created by security researcher Troy Hunt, aggregates data from confirmed breaches and allows you to search by email address or username to see if your credentials have been exposed. If you find your information in breach database, you should immediately change passwords on affected accounts (and any other accounts where you reused same password).

Pwn is leetspeak for the verb "own." In online spaces, this means that you have been owned, conquered, or dominated. In security context, being "pwned" means your account or data has been compromised.

Beyond checking your own accounts, the site offers notification service that will alert you if your email address appears in future breaches—essential tool for maintaining security hygiene in era of frequent data breaches.

🤔 Consider

"The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress." — Philip Roth

Philip Roth's mordant observation about creative process resonates with this issue's theme of "just keep moving forward" in ways both cautionary and encouraging. The works-in-progress littering the road to hell include Google's Selfish Ledger—a speculative internal video that leaked before its dystopian vision could be refined or rejected. They include GDPR's attempt to regulate data practices that have outpaced legal frameworks. They include journalistic practices that inadvertently amplified the alt-right before understanding consequences. They include our incomplete understanding of how different media formats affect children's developing brains. They include comment sections that too often devolve into toxicity despite intentions for dialogue. Every item in this issue represents work-in-progress: technologies, regulations, practices, and understandings still being negotiated. Roth's warning reminds us that good intentions don't guarantee good outcomes, that prototypes and experiments can cause real harm, that the gap between vision and execution is where danger lives. Yet moving forward requires accepting that we're always working with incomplete knowledge, imperfect tools, and evolving understanding. The alternative to works-in-progress isn't perfection—it's paralysis. The challenge is keeping critical consciousness engaged as we proceed, remaining alert to harms being caused by our experiments, and maintaining capacity to change course rather than defending works-in-progress that should be abandoned rather than completed.

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