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TLDR 160

Too Long; Didn't Read Issue 160

Published: 2018-07-28 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Issue 160. Identifying your piece in the puzzle.

This week I posted the following:

Starting on Friday, August 3rd, I'm taking two weeks off from the Internet and enjoying some time with family and friends. I'll be doing some playing online so you may see some stuff from me bubble up, but I hope not. TL;DR will start back up with #161 on August 17th.

🔖 Key Takeaways

📺 Watch

ASMR as focus tool

I have to admit that I've been listening to a lot of ASMR over the last couple of weeks. I'm teaching a couple of classes online, and doing a lot of writing/research. I've found that having an ASMR video playing in the background on my headphones works a lot better than white noise or music. It's an ambient buzz that helps me focus.

Please note, you need to find something that works for you. Many of the videos/channels contain some role-playing and interesting visuals that I don't bother with. Some of the audio triggers may annoy you. You need to experiment.

To get started, check this video from Gibi. One of my recent favorites is this video from the ASMRctica ASMR channel.

The appeal of ASMR for focus represents interesting evolution in how people manage attention and create working environments. Unlike music which can be distracting or white noise which becomes monotonous, ASMR provides ambient human presence—whispering, gentle sounds, repetitive movements—that occupies just enough attention to prevent mind-wandering without demanding full concentration. It's companionship without conversation, presence without interaction.

This matters as more work happens in isolated home offices or headphone-wearing open plan spaces. We're discovering audio environments that serve productivity needs traditional background noise doesn't address.

📚 Read

Sinan Aral in the Harvard Business Review posits that false news spreads online faster, farther, and deeper than truth does—but it can be contained. This post identifies a lot of interesting data points on how truth moves about online.

Key findings from the research:

HBR also shares supplementary posts on what do we know about false news, and how we all can fight misinformation.

The research demonstrates that novelty and emotional arousal drive false news spread. People share surprising information that provokes strong emotions. This creates perverse incentive for content creators: Truth-telling is disadvantaged because truth is often incremental, nuanced, and emotionally moderate. Falsehoods can be dramatic, simple, and emotionally explosive.

Hey Mom, did you see this? Camps are using facial recognition

More than 100 summer camps are using facial recognition technology to help parents catch a glimpse of their kids when they're away at camp, a convenience that also raises privacy concerns over the increasing reach of surveillance in society.

Apps/tools like this sound incredible. Parents and participants love quickly seeing photos of themselves show up days later in their email or text messages. But, what are the larger privacy or security implications?

The convenience narrative—"wouldn't it be nice if..."—drives adoption of surveillance technology in contexts where we previously accepted separation and uncertainty. Parents used to send kids to camp and receive letters, maybe phone calls, perhaps photos in mail weeks later. Now we expect real-time updates, constant visibility, perpetual monitoring.

Each individual case seems harmless. What parent wouldn't want to see their child having fun? But aggregated across society, we're building infrastructure of total surveillance justified through convenience and care. The facial recognition systems trained on children's faces at camp don't stay at camp. The acceptance of constant monitoring as normal parenting doesn't stop at camp gates.

We're teaching children that being constantly watched is normal, that privacy is old-fashioned, that care requires surveillance. These lessons have consequences for what kind of society we're building and what kinds of freedoms we're surrendering.

I've blogged quite a bit about my meditation habit, and how the Headspace app helped me start this practice. This post from Lisa Parker at the University of Sydney discusses her research on 61 apps and published work. The research suggests questions that we should be asking about what these apps are doing with our data, and potential threats to privacy and security in digital spaces.

Key findings:

One of the key takeaways from the research is also the indication that the therapy that you desire from these apps/tools should be connected to therapy and social supports from human beings in your life.

Digital mental health tools offer accessibility and affordability advantages—no insurance needed, no appointment scheduling, available 24/7. But they can't replace human connection, professional judgment, or nuanced response to individual circumstances. The danger isn't that apps supplement care but that they substitute for it, that people use Headspace instead of therapy rather than alongside it.

The data privacy concerns are especially acute given sensitivity of mental health information. Depression tracking, anxiety triggers, therapy session content—this intimate data deserves highest protection. Instead, many apps treat it as commercial asset to be monetized, shared, or used for purposes beyond stated therapeutic aims.

I spend a lot of time researching and teaching others about digital spaces, and the ways in which we use these tools to read, write, socialize, and connect. At some point in this work, I indicate that there are positives and negatives that come with our use of these texts, tools, and spaces.

This post from Quartz synthesizes these challenges in one easy to read piece. I also appreciate how this focuses on the culture and individuals in one country that may seem foreign to students and colleagues. That makes it a bit easier to separate ourselves from the discussion and critique our use of tech.

The article examines how WhatsApp misinformation has led to mob lynchings in India—false rumors about child kidnappers spreading rapidly through encrypted messaging leading to deadly violence against innocent people. Simultaneously, social media enables marginalized communities to organize, share information, and build solidarity across geographic boundaries.

This duality isn't unique to India but feels more urgent there given scale and consequences. The same platform characteristics—viral spread, encrypted privacy, network effects—produce both coordination for good and mobilization for harm. The same affordances that help activists organize protests enable mobs to coordinate violence.

Solutions that address one problem often exacerbate the other. More government monitoring reduces privacy that protects activists. End-to-end encryption prevents platform moderation. Removing forward limits slows organization. Each intervention involves tradeoffs between security and freedom, safety and privacy, protection and empowerment.

The lesson: Technology is neither inherently liberating nor inherently oppressive. Its effects depend on context, power structures, existing tensions, and how people choose to use affordances platforms provide.

I'm always looking for a new podcast, and definitely enjoy podcasts about music or creative works. Lastly, I've been spending more time collecting content for my class on slam poetry, hip-hop, and rap.

A good friend, Mike Manderino, recommended the Dissect Podcast. The podcast is motivated by the "swipe culture" in which we hurriedly rush from content to content to content. As a potential antidote, host Cole Cuchna focuses each season on one album, and each episode analyzes one song, measure by measure, word by word.

I just finished the first season, which focused on the early work of Kendrick Lamar, and one of his albums, "To Pimp a Butterfly." I'm thoroughly enjoying the deep dive into content and the background info he provides about creativity and inspiration in the work of the artists.

Subscribe to Dissect now on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Play, iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.

The podcast's premise counters dominant mode of media consumption—quick takes, hot takes, surfaces skimmed. Instead: slow, careful attention to single work over extended time. One song becomes hour of analysis. One album becomes season of episodes.

This models different relationship with art—not as content to consume but as text to study, not as background but as foreground demanding full attention. It demonstrates that depth remains possible in age of overwhelming abundance, that slowing down reveals dimensions speed misses.

For educators, it's exemplar of close reading applied to contemporary art form students actually engage with. The analysis techniques Cuchna uses—examining word choice, identifying allusions, tracking themes, understanding historical context—transfer to any text worth sustained attention.

🔨 Do

Over the last two years, I've been working to make my research and teaching materials more approachable and accessible for people. As an example, take a look at the publication and blog post that I started this week's newsletter with. The publication gives me credit at my institution, whereas I also want to take what I learned in the research and present it in a way that teachers, parents, and the general individual can use in their daily lives.

This Twitter thread from Dan Quintana shares guidance on a couple of extra steps that you can take to repurpose your talks for sharing on social media. I found a couple of actionable steps that I'll add to my repertoire. I'm also thinking about putting out a post in which I share how I repurpose my work.

I also see opportunities for teachers to repurpose their teaching and learning materials from their classrooms.

Quintana's approach:

The tension between academic credibility and public accessibility is real. Tenure committees value peer-reviewed publications in specialized journals. Public impact requires reaching people where they are—on social media, in blogs, through accessible language.

The answer isn't choosing one over the other but developing skills to do both. Publish the research that counts for promotion. Then translate it into forms that actually influence practice, policy, and public understanding. Academic work that only reaches other academics has limited impact regardless of how rigorous it is.

For teachers, same principle applies: classroom lessons can become blog posts, video tutorials, shared resources that benefit educators beyond your school. The work you do deserves wider audience than one classroom, one year, one group of students.

🤔 Consider

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson's celebration of authentic selfhood resonates with this issue's theme of identifying your piece in the puzzle. Every item explores tension between external pressures and internal integrity. Harmful discourses in classrooms demand we shape ourselves to fit dominant narratives—research provides tools for resistance. False news spreads faster because it conforms to emotional expectations while truth requires uncomfortable adjustment. Facial recognition systems want to make us legible, trackable, knowable to surveillance apparatus. Mental health apps promise to optimize us according to algorithmic definitions of wellness. Social media in India shows platforms trying to make diverse communities into uniform audiences manipulable through viral content. Dissect podcast models sustained attention in world insisting we consume content at accelerating pace. Repurposing academic work means resisting pressure to write only for narrow specialist audience. The accomplishment Emerson celebrates isn't finding true self hidden beneath false selves—it's continually choosing authenticity against constant pressure toward conformity, repeatedly identifying your piece in puzzle even when offered easier pieces that don't actually fit who you are. The world doesn't just want to make you something else once—it constantly tries, through every platform, every norm, every system optimized for compliance rather than genuine human flourishing. Resistance requires daily choice.

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