Before becoming an administrator I was an “open-door storyteller” who authored a book on undergraduate media literacy. I dusted off my copy of the book after reading a Pacific Standard magazine article on media literacy for Generation Z. The author notes that we have a very tall task ahead of us. He closes with, “[u]shering the [media literacy for children] curriculum into the 21st century will demand of us—the adults—to undertake the educational equivalent of the Manhattan Project.” My book was very positive about the media literacy abilities of students, so I guess that if writing it today it would have a very different tone. Wow!
social media
In the September 2018 issue of Wired magazine Clive Thompson argues that we need software to help slow us down, not speed up. He discusses “friction engineering,” which is “software that’s designed not to speed us up but to slow us down. It’s a principle that inverts everything we know about why software exists.” In social scientific circles, a great example the article cites is the social media site Nextdoor’s attempts to redesign its software to reduce racial profiling [see also my August 13, 2018 post.]
One strange item about the article: the online title is “We Need Software to Help Us Slow Down, Not Speed up.” In the print magazine, however, the article appears on page 38 as “Slow Software: In Praise of Fiction.” Weird.
“There has never been a time when so much data existed about human behavior,” begins a Chronicle of Higher Education article about the academic use of Facebook’s data. “What many of us buy, sell, like, dislike, read, and tell our friends is recorded on the internet thanks to sites like Facebook. To social scientists, the company is sitting on a gold mine… [A] commission, would be trained on the company’s policies and would theoretically know why some information can be shared and some can’t, presumably because of legal proceedings or certain privacy laws. The scholars on the commission would not be able to do their own research or share the company’s secrets, but they would solicit proposals from others and serve as a filter for the data, meting it out to the researchers as deemed appropriate.”
The Pacific Standard also has an article about Facebook releasing its data to social scientists. This is a very interesting and potentially powerful development!
A couple of weeks ago I posted a note about an online game designed to help people detect fake news. This game is even more timely than I initially thought, as I just learned about a new research study that found that falsehoods are more popular than truths on Twitter. The study “analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.” Wow!
The Atlantic‘s new “You Are Here” series explores the [social] science behind everyday life. The “How the Internet is Changing Friendship” episode asks, “Wherever your friends are, you can always check up on them with social media. But does that mean that we’re keeping friendships alive past their natural expiration date, or are virtual connections actually making friendships stronger?” Very interesting question!
I have recently discovered a great podcast series, Social Sciences Bites. Here’s the series description:
The social world is a world we create, that we all have in common. In this series of illuminating podcasts, hear leading social scientists present their perspectives on how our social world is created, and how social science can help us understand people and how they behave. Each podcast includes a downloadable written transcript of the conversation.
An article on the Pacific Standard website provides additional information. This podcast series will be very valuable in the Unites States if expected significant policy changes occur in President Trump’s administration. One future podcast could be with SJSU sociology professor Scott Myers-Lipton, who argues that President Trump should launch a civic works program.
Recently a friend and I had a conversation on the messaging service WhatsApp about mobile phone charging cables:
I’ll have to visit There’s Research on That! to see if my hunch is correct about mobile phone charging cables causing problems in folks’ ability to fully use their phones and stay connected with friends and family…
Facebook has recently been accused of censoring conservative political commentary in users’ newsfeeds. The Wall Street Journal has an interesting graphic that addresses a corollary issue: the newsfeeds of liberal and conservative usesrs are very different. Wow!
One of the TV shows I’m following this year is the dystopian drama The 100. Recently the death of a queer character on the show prompted members of the LGBTQ+ community to launch a campaign to influence TV producers to create better representations of LGBTQ+ folks. Today I discovered a great article about why media portrayals of members of minority communities matter. Among other things, the author argues:
The natural antidote to ignorance is travel; it’s meeting new people and staying open-minded to new experiences. However, not everyone has the luxury of doing that. A lot of people are stuck in their physical environments, surrounded by people who are similar to themselves. This is where the media comes in. It is a form of mental traveling, full of experiences we are unlikely to have in our real lives. However, how likely are we to stay open-minded if the media constantly tells us that the world is violent, evil, and full of people who want to do us harm? What kind of expectation will that create in meeting new people? If the media continues to perpetuate fear, anxiety, and xenophobia it will be minorities who will continue to pay the price.
Many thanks to Tania Hew for telling me about this article!
One of my favorite books of all time is Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. I used an analysis of it as my first published article. I enjoy speaking about it with students (the book, that is; I can barely remember an article written 22 years on the past!). Usually these students are enrolled in college, but three years ago a high school teacher in Iowa asked me to interact with her students while she discussed the book with them during Black History Month. After some brainstorming, we decided that she would set up a blog for us to interact: in groups students would post questions to me, and I would answer them. At the end of each response I posed a question to each group, which generated additional discussion. It was a lot of fun, and the students learned a lot, I hope. This year Kris asked me if I would repeat the project with her current group of students in AP Literature, and I readily agreed. Check out our discussions by visiting the course blog!
In the September 2018 issue of Wired magazine Clive Thompson argues that we need software to help slow us down, not speed up. He discusses “friction engineering,” which is “software that’s designed not to speed us up but to slow us down. It’s a principle that inverts everything we know about why software exists.” In social scientific circles, a great example the article cites is the social media site Nextdoor’s attempts to redesign its software to reduce racial profiling [see also my August 13, 2018 post.]
One strange item about the article: the online title is “We Need Software to Help Us Slow Down, Not Speed up.” In the print magazine, however, the article appears on page 38 as “Slow Software: In Praise of Fiction.” Weird.
“There has never been a time when so much data existed about human behavior,” begins a Chronicle of Higher Education article about the academic use of Facebook’s data. “What many of us buy, sell, like, dislike, read, and tell our friends is recorded on the internet thanks to sites like Facebook. To social scientists, the company is sitting on a gold mine… [A] commission, would be trained on the company’s policies and would theoretically know why some information can be shared and some can’t, presumably because of legal proceedings or certain privacy laws. The scholars on the commission would not be able to do their own research or share the company’s secrets, but they would solicit proposals from others and serve as a filter for the data, meting it out to the researchers as deemed appropriate.”
The Pacific Standard also has an article about Facebook releasing its data to social scientists. This is a very interesting and potentially powerful development!
A couple of weeks ago I posted a note about an online game designed to help people detect fake news. This game is even more timely than I initially thought, as I just learned about a new research study that found that falsehoods are more popular than truths on Twitter. The study “analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.” Wow!
The Atlantic‘s new “You Are Here” series explores the [social] science behind everyday life. The “How the Internet is Changing Friendship” episode asks, “Wherever your friends are, you can always check up on them with social media. But does that mean that we’re keeping friendships alive past their natural expiration date, or are virtual connections actually making friendships stronger?” Very interesting question!
I have recently discovered a great podcast series, Social Sciences Bites. Here’s the series description:
The social world is a world we create, that we all have in common. In this series of illuminating podcasts, hear leading social scientists present their perspectives on how our social world is created, and how social science can help us understand people and how they behave. Each podcast includes a downloadable written transcript of the conversation.
An article on the Pacific Standard website provides additional information. This podcast series will be very valuable in the Unites States if expected significant policy changes occur in President Trump’s administration. One future podcast could be with SJSU sociology professor Scott Myers-Lipton, who argues that President Trump should launch a civic works program.
Recently a friend and I had a conversation on the messaging service WhatsApp about mobile phone charging cables:
I’ll have to visit There’s Research on That! to see if my hunch is correct about mobile phone charging cables causing problems in folks’ ability to fully use their phones and stay connected with friends and family…
Facebook has recently been accused of censoring conservative political commentary in users’ newsfeeds. The Wall Street Journal has an interesting graphic that addresses a corollary issue: the newsfeeds of liberal and conservative usesrs are very different. Wow!
One of the TV shows I’m following this year is the dystopian drama The 100. Recently the death of a queer character on the show prompted members of the LGBTQ+ community to launch a campaign to influence TV producers to create better representations of LGBTQ+ folks. Today I discovered a great article about why media portrayals of members of minority communities matter. Among other things, the author argues:
The natural antidote to ignorance is travel; it’s meeting new people and staying open-minded to new experiences. However, not everyone has the luxury of doing that. A lot of people are stuck in their physical environments, surrounded by people who are similar to themselves. This is where the media comes in. It is a form of mental traveling, full of experiences we are unlikely to have in our real lives. However, how likely are we to stay open-minded if the media constantly tells us that the world is violent, evil, and full of people who want to do us harm? What kind of expectation will that create in meeting new people? If the media continues to perpetuate fear, anxiety, and xenophobia it will be minorities who will continue to pay the price.
Many thanks to Tania Hew for telling me about this article!
One of my favorite books of all time is Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. I used an analysis of it as my first published article. I enjoy speaking about it with students (the book, that is; I can barely remember an article written 22 years on the past!). Usually these students are enrolled in college, but three years ago a high school teacher in Iowa asked me to interact with her students while she discussed the book with them during Black History Month. After some brainstorming, we decided that she would set up a blog for us to interact: in groups students would post questions to me, and I would answer them. At the end of each response I posed a question to each group, which generated additional discussion. It was a lot of fun, and the students learned a lot, I hope. This year Kris asked me if I would repeat the project with her current group of students in AP Literature, and I readily agreed. Check out our discussions by visiting the course blog!