51 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2023
    1. In my book Technology’s Child: Digital Media’s Role in the Ages and Stages of Growing Up, I explore how the design of platforms and the way people engage with those designs helps to shape the cultures that emerge on different social media platforms. I propose three layers for understanding this process.
  2. Nov 2022
  3. Oct 2022
    1. By teaching them all to read, we have left them atthe mercy of the printed word.

      Knowing how to read without the associated apparatus of the trivium, leaves people open to believing just about anything. You can read words, but knowing what to do with those words, endow them with meaning, and reason with them. (summarization)


      Oral cultures with knowledge systems engrained into them would likely have included trivium-esque structures to allow their users to not only better remember to to better think and argue.

    1. Edgerly noted that disinformation spreads through two ways: The use of technology and human nature.Click-based advertising, news aggregation, the process of viral spreading and the ease of creating and altering websites are factors considered under technology.“Facebook and Google prioritize giving people what they ‘want’ to see; advertising revenue (are) based on clicks, not quality,” Edgerly said.She noted that people have the tendency to share news and website links without even reading its content, only its headline. According to her, this perpetuates a phenomenon of viral spreading or easy sharing.There is also the case of human nature involved, where people are “most likely to believe” information that supports their identities and viewpoints, Edgerly cited.“Vivid, emotional information grabs attention (and) leads to more responses (such as) likes, comments, shares. Negative information grabs more attention than (the) positive and is better remembered,” she said.Edgerly added that people tend to believe in information that they see on a regular basis and those shared by their immediate families and friends.

      Spreading misinformation and disinformation is really easy in this day and age because of how accessible information is and how much of it there is on the web. This is explained precisely by Edgerly. Noted in this part of the article, there is a business for the spread of disinformation, particularly in our country. There are people who pay what we call online trolls, to spread disinformation and capitalize on how “chronically online” Filipinos are, among many other factors (i.e., most Filipinos’ information illiteracy due to poverty and lack of educational attainment, how easy it is to interact with content we see online, regardless of its authenticity, etc.). Disinformation also leads to misinformation through word-of-mouth. As stated by Edgerly in this article, “people tend to believe in information… shared by their immediate families and friends”; because of people’s human nature to trust the information shared by their loved ones, if one is not information literate, they will not question their newly received information. Lastly, it most certainly does not help that social media algorithms nowadays rely on what users interact with; the more that a user interacts with a certain information, the more that social media platforms will feed them that information. It does not help because not all social media websites have fact checkers and users can freely spread disinformation if they chose to.

  4. Aug 2022
    1. Many U.S.educators believe that increasing political polarization combine with the hazards ofmisinformation and disinformation in ways that underscore the need for learners to acquire theknowledge and skills required to navigate a changing media landscape (Hamilton et al. 2020a)

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  5. Jul 2022
    1. Unfortunately, many corporate software programsaim to level or standardise the differences betweenindividual workers. In supporting knowledgeworkers, we should be careful to provide tools whichenable diversification of individuals’ outputs.Word-processors satisfi this criterion; tools whichembed a model of a knowledge worker’s task in thesoftware do not.

      Tools which allow for flexibility and creativity are better for knowledge workers than those which attempt to crystalize their tasks into ruts. This may tend to force the outputs in a programmatic way and thereby dramatically decrease the potential for innovative outputs. If the tools force the automation of thought without a concurrent increase in creativity then one may as well rely on manual labor for their thinking.


      This may be one of the major flaws of tools for thought in the educational technology space. They often attempt to facilitate the delivery of education in an automated way which dramatically decreases the creativity of the students and the value of the overall outputs. While attempting to automate education may suit the needs of institutions which are delivering the education, particularly with respect to the overall cost of delivery, the automation itself is dramatically at odds with the desire to expand upon ideas and continue innovation for all participants involved. Students also require diverse modes of input (seen/heard) as well as internal processing followed by subsequent outputs (written/drawn/sculpted/painted, spoken/sung, movement/dance). Many teachers don't excel at providing all of these neurodiverse modes and most educational technology tools are even less flexible, thus requiring an even larger panoply of them (often not interoperable because of corporate siloing for competitive reasons) to provide reasonable replacements. Given their ultimate costs, providing a variety of these tools may only serve to increase the overall costs of delivering education or risk diminishing the overall quality. Educators and institutions not watching out for these traps will tend to serve only a small portion of their intended audiences, and even those may be served poorly as they only receive a limited variety of modalities of inputs and outputs. As an example Western cultures' overreliance on primary literacy modes is their Achilles' heel.


      Tools for thought should actively attempt to increase the potential solution spaces available to their users, while later still allowing for focusing of attention. How can we better allow for the divergence of ideas and later convergence? Better, how might we allow for regular and repeated cycles of divergence and convergence? Advanced zettelkasten note taking techniques (which also allow for drawing, visual, auditory and other modalities beyond just basic literacy) seem to allow for this sort of practice over long periods of time, particularly when coupled with outputs which are then published for public consumption and divergence/convergence cycles by others.

      This may also point out some of the stagnation allowed by social media whose primary modes is neither convergence nor divergence. While they allow for the transmission/communication portion, they primarily don't actively encourage their users to closely evaluate the transmitted ideas, internalize them, or ultimately expand upon them. Their primary mode is for maximizing on time of attention (including base emotions including excitement and fear) and the lowest levels of interaction and engagement (likes, retweets, short gut reaction commentary).

  6. Apr 2022
    1. The historian in me always wants to look back at how this sort of media control has played out historically, so thinking about examples like William Randolph Hearst, Henry Luce, David Sarnoff, Axel Springer, Kerry Packer, or Rupert Murdoch across newspapers, radio, television, etc. might be interesting. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_proprietor

      Tim Wu's The Master Switch is pretty accessible in this area.


      On the intercultural front, the language (very careful public relations and "corporate speak") used in this leaked audio file of the most recent Twitter All Hands phone call might be fascinating and an interesting primary source for some of the questions you might be looking at on such an assignment. https://peertube.dk/w/2q8cdKR1mTCW7RyMQhcBEx

      Who are the multiple audiences (acknowledged and unacknowledged) being addressed? (esp. as they address leaks of information in the call.)

    1. Given the difficulty of regulating every online post, especially in a country that protects most forms of speech, it seems far more prudent to focus most of our efforts on building an educated and resilient public that can spot and then ignore disinformation campaigns

      On the need for disinformation educations

      ...but what is the difference "between what’s a purposeful attempt to mislead the public and what’s being called disinformation because of a genuine difference of opinion"

    1. “Man Who Killed Amanda Knox’s Roommate Freed on Community Service.” My name is the only name that shouldn’t be in that headline.

      I find it interesting that Amanda's name is the only name mentioned in the New York Post's headline. Not the killer's, nor the victim's, Meredith Kercher. Even though this same New York Post, published an article on March 27, 2015 of Amanda's acquittal. The headline should read, "Rudy Guede, the man who murdered Meredith Kercher, Freed on Community Service." In my opinion the New York Post continues to use her name because it's probably more recognizable, than the others, and they need to sell papers. It's marketing! Doesn't make it right though. But geesh! Give Meredith some respect!

  7. Feb 2022
  8. Jan 2022
  9. Nov 2021
  10. Aug 2021
  11. Jul 2021
    1. whether the advent of modem communications media has much enhanced our understanding of the world in which we live.

      But it may be seriously questioned whether the advent of modem communications media has much enhanced our understanding of the world in which we live.

      Now that I'm thinking about it, I sort of want the ability to more easily capture audio, annotate and save it while I'm listening to radio or even television. Pausing the media and having the ability to reply it (TIVO and some DVRs provide this capability) and do other things with it would be truly fantastic, especially for saving tidbits for later use and consumption.

  12. Apr 2021
    1. Though its format can be copied and manipulated, HTML doesn’t make that easy.

      In fact, HTML makes it very easy (true for the reasons that lead Mark to write that it can be copied and manipulated). It's contemporary authoring systems and the typical author-as-publisher and the choices they make that are what makes this difficult.

      The future of rich media lies in striving to be more like dead media (or at least mining it for insights by better understanding it through thoughtful study), rather than the misguided attempts we've been living inside.

      (This is something that I've done a 180 on in the last year or so.)

  13. Mar 2021
  14. Jun 2020
  15. May 2020
  16. May 2019
      • 0:37 - need to recognize the networked nature of today's media
      • 0:37 - need to recognize the networked nature of today's media
      • 0:48 - work within traditional media literacy and build on things that have worked for decades, but recognize what has changed and use the strengths of networked media
      • 1:05 - how do children check sources on the internet
      • 1:20 - one of the simplest ways is to follow the links back to the source
      • 1:34 - when it's a photo, you can do a reverse image search
      • 1:50 can do a news search and sort by date to see if the news story is current
      • 2:45 - misinformation campaigns happening - mixing genuine content with misinformation
      • 3:25 - some create alternate identities or fake accounts
      • 4:25 - important to get a sense of how reliable a source is
      • 4:35 - what is the purpose of the source and what is their business model? - is there accuracy and reliability in this, then likely will trust it as a source
      • 5:10 - impact that we don't get our news from a limited number of sources
      • 5:45 - some of these sources are from friends on social media, others are algorithmically determined
      • 6:08 - some advantages and disadvantages - the old model was news curated in a newspaper; new model has the potential of getting news we may not have gotten in the old model
      • 6:20 but in the old system you had gatekeeping and 'provenance'; in online news it's sometimes an effort to see where the information originates; gate keeping falls to us now
      • 7:05 we need to train young people to do this
      • 7:30 how should we teach this?
      • 7:35 - with the concept approach you don't need to feel like an expert
      • 7:40 - success teaching media literacy from the key concepts for three decades; begin from these
      • 7:52 - media are constructed;
      • 7:55 - they have commercial considerations;
      • 7:58 they have social and political implications;
      • 8:00 that audiences negotiate meaning;
      • 8:05 that each medium has a unique form and the form influences the content
      • 8:20 these can be applied to any form of media and adapted to any grade from K-12
      • 8:30 so the key concepts of digital literacy are paralleled and are in addition to those, they don't replace the original five concepts
      • 8:40 now have implications of digital literacies in that they are networked so we need to understand the idea of the network
      • 8:50 understand that content now is shareable, that this is the default rather than the exception
      • 8:55 - the ways the tools we use influence not just the content but the ways we use them
      • 9:05 - this has an impact, an ethical dimension
      • 9:10 - these can be applied in any context and to any grade level
      • 9:20 - we have a full digital literacy curriculum that we offer (speaking about Media Smarts Canada); it has lessons on seven different aspects that a teacher or school board can use
      • 9:45 - the value of the key concepts is teachers can modify these resources to their contexts
      • 9:50 - teachers have in those key concepts what is essentially a GUIDING STAR to understand what they are supposed to be achieving with these lessons
  17. Dec 2018
    1. It is based on reciprocity and a level of trust that each party is actively seeking value-added information for the other.

      Seems like this is a critical assumption to examine for current media literacy/misinformation discussions. As networks become very large and very flat, does this assumption of reciprocity and good faith hold? (I'm thinking, here, of people whose expertise I trust in one domain but perhaps not in another, or the fact that sometimes I'm talking to one part of my network and not really "actively seeking information" for other parts.)

  18. Nov 2018
  19. Oct 2018
    1. When students are shown quick techniques for judging the veracity of a news source, they will use them. Regardless of their existing beliefs, they will distinguish good sources from bad sources.

      https://webliteracy.pressbooks.com/

  20. Aug 2018
    1. Most Americans pay at least a little attention to current events, but they differ enormously in where they turn to get their news and which stories they pay attention to. To get a better sense of how a busy news cycle played out in homes across the country, we repeated an experiment, teaming up with YouGov to ask 1,000 people nationwide to describe their news consumption and respond to a simple prompt: “In your own words, please describe what you would say happened in the news on Tuesday.”
  21. Jul 2018
    1. We’ve built an information ecosystem where information can fly through social networks (both technical and personal). Folks keep looking to the architects of technical networks to solve the problem. I’m confident that these companies can do a lot to curb some of the groups who have capitalized on what’s happening to seek financial gain. But the battles over ideology and attention are going to be far trickier. What’s at stake isn’t “fake news.” What’s at stake is the increasing capacity of those committed to a form of isolationist and hate-driven tribalism that has been around for a very long time. They have evolved with the information landscape, becoming sophisticated in leveraging whatever tools are available to achieve power, status, and attention. And those seeking a progressive and inclusive agenda, those seeking to combat tribalism to form a more perfect union —  they haven’t kept up.
    2. How many years did it take for the US military to learn that waging war with tribal networks couldn’t be fought with traditional military strategies? How long will it take for the news media to wake up and recognize that they’re being played? And how long after that will it take for editors and publishers to start evolving their strategies?
    3. News agencies, long trained to focus on reporting information and maintaining a conceptual model of standards, are ill-equipped to understand that they may have a role in this war, that their actions and decisions are shaping the way the war plays out.
    1. open access to the skills and know-how needed to use the web to improve their lives, careers, and organizations.

      Teaching media literacy is an important skill!

  22. Feb 2018
  23. Dec 2017
  24. Apr 2017
    1. 1) No one can even agree on a definition of “fake news,” even though a ridiculous number of words are being spent trying to define it.2) Folks don’t seem to understand the evolving nature of the problem, the way that manipulation evolves, or how the approaches they propose can be misused by those with whom they fundamentally disagree.3) No amount of “fixing” Facebook or Google will address the underlying factors shaping the culture and information wars in which America is currently enmeshed.
  25. Mar 2017
    1. many students I met were being told that Wikipedia was untrustworthy and were, instead, being encouraged to do research

      Is this a problem with media literacy? Or does it stem from a mindless bias against Wikipedia? The problem described sounds like literacy taught poorly.

  26. Jan 2017
    1. Fake news is just squatting in one part of one building in an entire landscape of neglect and corruption; evicting them will make no difference to the blight.
    2. never mind that fake news is neither new (forgery, quackery, and conspiracy theorizing are not recent inventions) nor exclusively right-leaning. The new form it has taken in readily sharable social media, however, has made it easy for conventional media to excuse themselves from responsibility for how the election was covered.

      "Fake news" was a small factor, compared to mainstream media treating Trump as a legitimate candidate, and sensationalizing hacked emails that contained nothing significant.

    1. A new form of information manipulation is unfolding in front of our eyes. It is political. It is global. And it is populist in nature. The news media is being played like a fiddle, while decentralized networks of people are leveraging the ever-evolving networked tools around them to hack the attention economy.
    2. The techniques that are unfolding are hard to manage and combat. Some of them look like harassment, prompting people to self-censor out of fear. Others look like “fake news”, highlighting the messiness surrounding bias, misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda. There is hate speech that is explicit, but there’s also suggestive content that prompts people to frame the world in particular ways. Dog whistle politics have emerged in a new form of encoded content, where you have to be in the know to understand what’s happening. Companies who built tools to help people communicate are finding it hard to combat the ways their tools are being used by networks looking to skirt the edges of the law and content policies. Institutions and legal instruments designed to stop abuse are finding themselves ill-equipped to function in light of networked dynamics.
    1. personal responsibility
    2. Children are indoctrinated into this cultural logic early, even as their parents restrict their mobility and limit their access to social situations. But when it comes to information, they are taught that they are the sole proprietors of knowledge. All they have to do is “do the research” for themselves and they will know better than anyone what is real. Combine this with a deep distrust of media sources. If the media is reporting on something, and you don’t trust the media, then it is your responsibility to question their authority, to doubt the information you are being given. If they expend tremendous effort bringing on “experts” to argue that something is false, there must be something there to investigate.
    1. Did Media Literacy Backfire?

      Media literacy asks people to raise questions and be wary of information that they’re receiving. People are. Unfortunately, that’s exactly why we’re talking past one another.

      ...

      Addressing so-called fake news is going to require a lot more than labeling. It’s going to require a cultural change about how we make sense of information, whom we trust, and how we understand our own role in grappling with information.

    1. The problem isn’t the fake news itself, as much as the historical consciousness that allows so many to willingly believe it with no skepticism.
  27. Dec 2016
    1. The Web has become an insidious propaganda tool. To fight it, digital literacy education must rise beyond technical proficiency to include wisdom.

      • Double-check every claim before you share.
      • Be wary of casual scrolling.<br> Everything you see affects your attitudes.
      • Don't automatically disbelieve the surreal (or unpleasant).
      • Do not exaggerate your own claims.
      • Be prepared to repeat the truth over and over.
      • Curate good resources, and share updates to them.
        • It will reinforce the previous information.
        • it will boost search engine rankings of the collection.
  28. Nov 2016
    1. Digital literacy

      Everything listed here is important. Are we skipping too quickly past what is commonly called media literacy? Does choosing appropriate images include these considerations--for example, who made the image, for what purpose, with which viewpoints included or excluded, etc.? http://www.medialit.org/reading-room/five-key-questions-form-foundation-media-inquiry

  29. Jul 2015
  30. May 2015
    1. including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words.

      Image Description

      The possibilities of digital writing, given the WYSIWYG interface above, allow for students to integrate a variety of media into their own annotation compositions. Moreover, this use of media is not simply illustrative but as an integral part of the overall argument.

      Image Description