the end of comments in a flattening media-hierarchy

Oh the incivility!

Recently the Toronto Star turned off online comments on their website.  I beat them to it by about a year.  I was recently asked why I would do that.  Don't I want people to interact with my online content?

I sure do!  And if they want to they can share my blog and then comment on it to their heart's content.  What do I possibly get out of running a comments section on a blog?  Nothing!  If you ask for a login no one bothers to do it, if you allow open, anonymous comments you get buried in advertising and nastiness, the typical by-products of human interaction.

With the advent of pervasive social media the idea of needing a comments section within your online content has had its day.  Anyone reading online content has their own social media presence of some sort nowadays.  They are more than welcome to leverage that in order to comment on my content.  In doing so they share my content.  It's the least they can do if it prompted them to have an opinion on it that they want to share.

We've moved from stratified, traditional, paper based media delivery though early adopter online media delivery to a more mature, everyone-has-a-presence-online media delivery system (nicely explained in this essay lambasting education's inability to free the essay from its millennium of bondage).   Embedded comment sections are a hold-over from an earlier internet where online readers tended not to have their own online presence.

Digital technology is forcing an increasingly flat media-scape.  Millennials spend almost no time in traditional media.  They could barely pay attention to Star Wars in the theatre when I was there last week.  I've stopped showing videos in class because asking Millennials to watch media simultaneously is alien to them and frustrating for me.  In a world where people distrust and often ignore the patronizing nature of traditional media it's best not to fight the flow.

If you're determined to hang on to the comment section in your online content you're swimming against the current.  You're assuming that your content is somehow more established, more authentic, more valuable.  You are belittling your visitors' online presence by making them work in yours.  It's ultimately about you refusing to surrender control of your content in an increasingly democratic communication medium.  That idea of control is a holdover from traditional, paper-based media hierarchies, it isn't surprising that a newspaper struggled with this.  You've got to let it all go Neo.

If you want insipid examples of human nastiness and stupidity you'll find them online, especially in anonymous, internal comment sections.  I'd long stopped reading The Star's comment section for this very reason.  I also tend to blacklist those brave (often conservative) souls on twitter and other social media who hide behind anonymous or fake user names.  They feel very brave and are usually overly aggressive in their anonymity.

What's funnier are those people who create social media presences based on their real self and then proceed to advertise their ignorance to the world.  If someone is going to confuse Twitter with texting there isn't much we can do for their employment prospects.  People who are nasty online tend to get bitten though.   It's a self correcting process and it's happening less and less because we're getting better at it.

This flattening media-scape isn't just hurting traditional media, it's also snapping at people who don't realize that their reach has changed.  Democratizing media means empowering people who have no experience with publication, and make no mistake, every time you post on social media you're publishing to the entire planet.  People in Timbuktu can read your tweets if they are so inclined.

There will come a point when there have been enough cautionary tales and social experience with self-publication that people will learn best practices and the vast majority will realize just how empowered and potentially dangerous we've all become in our flat new world.

In the meantime, if people want to comment on my content they're welcome to share away, but I'm not providing a comments section because it belittles my reader's own online presence and dilutes my material with mean and often irrelevant comments.

Notifications Off

While away in the States recently I turned off notifications in the various apps on my phone to save on data, and then turned off notifications entirely when I got home, I found I was enjoying the silence.

In that silence I started thinking about operant conditioning and just how wired to our personal devices we've become.  Digital distraction is a cultural phenomenon with people wringing their hands over rising vehicle accident rates and people falling into open manhole covers.  We tend to forget that looking at a screen when we should be doing something else is a choice.  We'd rather play the victim than accept that kind of responsibility.

The dreaded notification is at the core of this idea of being victimized by digital distraction.  There is a simple fix though: turn them off.  Your social media is all still waiting there for you, the only thing you're missing is immediacy, but that urge to respond quickly points to a deluded sense of self importance; despite what you think, most people aren't pouring over their social media waiting for you to post something.

I didn't get data while I was away, I figured I'd get by with wifi when I could find it.  This quieted the noise even more, making me wonder why I'd want a device constantly demanding my attention in the first place.  

The lack of data made me very conscious of the urge to post as events are happening.  You see this all the time at sports events.  A game winning goal gets scored and instead of cheering people are taking bad photos and spending time putting them online.  It happens in concerts too.  People spend bucket loads of money and time getting to these events only to view them through a smartphone screen, or ignore it entirely while they create social media posts.

You get this urge when you're in the middle of something fantastic to want to share it immediately like a live news broadcast, but your social media audience isn't watching a show, they come and go.  Audiences on social media aren't like audiences on broadcast media, they are never all in the same place at the same time.  That sense of urgency is you misunderstanding how social media is different from broadcast media.  Sure, take a picture, but if you don't post it in the next 30 seconds your ratings aren't going to drop.  Your production team isn't going to be out of a job.

Social media is inherently addictive.  It is designed to provide an
unconditioned stimulus response.  It doesn't take long to tie the
notification to that initial, unconditioned response.

Our approach to smartphone use needs to evolve.  Having a general purpose, networked computer in your pocket shouldn't mean you're on the social media hook 24/7.  A good first step is to try and view your social media use from a more accurate perspective, don't get sucked into a false sense of immediacy with it.  Enjoy being where you are, maybe snap a picture to share later when you've got a quiet moment.  Whatever you do don't miss what you're doing because you're viewing it through a smartphone screen, or ignoring it while you're making social media updates about it.  In spite of what you might think, you're not a media personality, even if you do have 1000 friends on Facebook.

A good first step is to turn off notifications.  It'll all still be there waiting for you, but you won't be a Pavlovian experiment in distraction when you interact with it.  This will probably upset mobile service providers who are making a mint from over-priced travel packages designed to keep you 'connected'.  You'll probably also find your interactions take on a more nuanced and thoughtful appearance; something else it would be nice to see more of on social media.

We're All Just So Busy

If I hear this one more time I might pop.  We're no busier than we ever were.  If we were all so busy we'd have solved world hunger, the impending energy crisis, unemployment, racism, our broken democracies and poverty.  If we're all so terribly busy, what is it that we're busy with, because it doesn't appear to be anything important.

Most recently I heard it on CBC radio when someone was talking about an online dating site that allows you to quickly, with little more than a photo and a couple of bio points, select a date and meet them.  Not surprisingly, the CBC piece was on the disasters that have come from this.  When asked why people do it, the interviewee trotted out, "well, we're all just so busy now-a-days."  I would suggest that if you are too busy to develop a considered relationship with a possible life partner, then you're getting what you deserve.

These people aren't busy, they are distracted.

I see students who spend more than half their walking hours engaged in the (mostly) viewing and (seldom) producing of social media.  Much of this is so utterly banal that it defies belief, yet people get so wrapped up in it that they feel trapped.  For those who feel the urge to publish their every thought for the world to see, the results are often less than complimentary.

There are those who are leveraging social media in interesting ways, but for the vast majority it is a passive time sink that has conditioned them to do many things poorly and barely ever finish a thought.

This myopia feeds data bankers who make a lot of money from the freely given marketing information.  It also feeds the industry that creates a treadmill of devices to cater to the process.  Lastly, our digital myopia also feeds the egos of all the 'very busy' people who see themselves as a vital part of this wonderful new democracy.

At yoga the other week our instructor gave us this:  pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.  There are things we need to do in life in order to survive and thrive:  look after our bodies, look after our minds, look after our dependants, seek and expand our limitations, find a good life.  This can be very challenging, but it is dictated by choice.  When we make good choices we tend to see a reward.  Eat well and feel better, expand your mind and learn something new, look after your family and enjoy a loving, safe environment.  Poor choices lead to poor circumstances.  In a world where we have more dependable machines and efficient communication, we should enjoy a sense of ease greater than previous generations who had to tune carburetors and ring through telephone exchanges.

Make some good choices.  How busy are you really?

Rockstars of the Digital Classroom!

Another one of those things that would have been unimaginable only a decade ago - an  international micro-conference!  Wendy Gorton of Wikispaces fame collected together teachers using digital tools in the classroom and created a virtual meeting place where they could all share their processes and practices.

Garth Holman is a teacher deep into how #edtech pushes pedagogy in Ohio.  Jessica Sullivan is living in eternal summer in Caracas, Venezuela where she is leveraging social media and digital tools to produce students who are actually digitally fluent!  Our kids should be so lucky.

That it is possible to put something together like this with little more than an internet connection and a few laptops is astonishing.  Wikis themselves are a web-specific evolution in information sharing, a crowd sourced medium for self publication.  The social power of wikis are still reverberating around the world.  Garth talked about how his students create learning content and then set it free online, my own students do something similar using wikis.  As a way of creating shared notes and interconnecting information, wikis leverage digital learning spaces in a way that many other digital tools that act like paper analogues do not.  If you're using Google-docs to replace handouts you're not getting what the new medium is capable of.  Many teachers use digital tools as a replacement for paper, but that doesn't use the fluidity of digital information to best effect.

Besides exploring the limits of digital information sharing and delivery you've also got to consider the best digital tool for the job.  If you're only using a single digital tool you're probably finding it difficult.  When trying to use Google-docs to create shared notes you've probably run into the chaos that ensues.  Wikispaces lets you create working groups and lock out areas of a wiki so only the production team in that subject can edit.  As each student builds their own interlinked page in the wikispace, they are able to produce collaborative, supported material without stepping on each other.  Diversifying your digital learning toolbox is vital.  If you're not picking the best tool for the job you're going to run into organizational problems.

I'm doing a presentation at the upcoming elearning Ontario symposium on creating a sufficiently complex digital learning ecosystem.  The idea that a single system (D2L) or a single platform (GAFE) can give you a sufficiently diverse digital learning environment isn't just simplistic, it's also a bit monopolistic.  As a digitally fluent teacher you should be able to reach out online and find the digital tools that suit your learner's needs best.

In addition to regularly using Wikispaces, I'm also a big fan of Prezi and blogging (platform irrelevant).  If you're looking to leverage digital tools in learning, offering a broad ecosystem of digital tools is the first step towards a student centred, diversified learning environment.  All of the teachers above talk about how they are using Twitter in addition to a variety of other digital tools to make that happen.

Ghostly Distractions & Digital Doppelgängers

Cyborgs are all around us now, and 
they have trouble finishing a thought

If you popped into a current classroom from any time before the last five years you'd think your students had gone mad, or were in need of an exorcist. Being unfamiliar with the rapid miniaturization and personalization of electronics, you'd be left wondering what it is they are fiddling with on their navels, why they seem to be constantly thinking about something else, and why when you walk into your next class the students there already know what happened to pretty much everyone else in the school (and the ones who skipped) last period.

I was talking to a colleague the other night about this sense of personal dislocation in students, though digital vertigo isn't a student only issue. The teacher in question won't even make a Facebook account because he believes (perhaps rightly) that it means the internets will know where he is all the time. He was telling me about a difficult student who was giving him a hard time in class. This teacher has a great rapport with students so many other students leapt in and argued his point for him. Afterwards the difficult student in question seemed overly despondent and would not re-engage in discussion. I suggested that the disagreement in class may not have ended in the classroom but had become virtualized.  The idea that invisible forces were emanating from and reflecting back into the classroom was quite upsetting to this teacher.

The fluidity with which teens pass back and forth between physical and virtual space make them very hard to read, at many moments in their day they are literally in two places at once. That uncommunicative student may still be getting hammered on Facebook long after the physical confrontation is over; digital echoes of a verbal disagreement. The moods so common in teens anyway are amplified by these invisible, always on, invasive connections; their volatile minds are wired to always-on drama.

There was a time when you could read a class by the students you had in it. Relationships were obvious and management challenging but straightforward. If you had the nitro and the glycerin in the room  you could separate them, you can't do that any more.  You can't do that if you move them to a different class... or a different school.  I've had students who moved up to our small town to get out of the GTA and away from a bad influence only to be intimately connected with them on Facebook the moment anyone's back is turned. Always on, always connected, always being emotionally amplified - that is the modern, connected high school student.

This creates some  interesting new psychology in the classroom.  That student who used to feel isolated for their poor behavior in class might be experiencing any number of unseen influences.  Instead of being able to modify poor behavior by moving a student, or placing them in classes where their bad influences are not, they are always connected.  Many of those connections may very well be morally supporting or even inciting them; they never feel isolated in their bad attitude and are always supported in their beliefs, even if it is hurting them.  In that sense you might argue for a lack of emotional growth because  you never have a chance to get free of a clique or bad influence.  In the other direction you've got the example above where a group of students may easily create an ad hoc digital mob and go after someone. This can happen so quickly and quietly that it's almost impossible to consider let alone manage.


Working with the emotionality of high school students is challenging at the best of times, but with the drama-net of Facebook fully embedded in every student's mind, administration struggles with the more obvious cyber-bullying while the subtle ghostly influences go unnoticed, thought every teacher faces them daily.

As students migrate to Twitter without realizing the very public nature of it (many think it similar to texting),  coercive social media becomes even more widely broadcast than just between Facebook friends. Suddenly we have social media as means of large scale slander, creating influence well beyond the intent of the ignorant person thinking their tweets are private.

This is a new social situation that affects early adopters while others remain entirely ignorant.  Many teachers don't consider it at all because they have no experience with social media yet it increasingly influences the students in their classrooms. Kids whose minds are in many places at once, constantly being emotionally tweaked and influenced by social media inputs, not knowing how to manage this pervasive influence in an effective way.

Digital literacy considers media fluency, collaboration and critical thinking, but the extent to which digital media is influencing the minds of our students isn't really on the table. Their inability to manage their own access (watch a student, they are Pavlovian in their use of social media, they can't self manage) is only one part of the problem.  In the emotionally charged world of high school, social media pours gasoline on that fire, making teaching a challenge in ways that it never was before.

***
had to add a wee update. It's Monday morning and the internet meme from the weekend that all the grade 10s are talking about is of a girl and her feminine hygiene product on youtube.  It sets new (low) standards on what teens are willing to do to get seen online.  

This race to the bottom in terms what teens are able to subject themselves to is radically changing how they approach both sexuality and social norms in general.  Teens nowadays have seen things that would have been virtually impossible for them to see even a decade ago, and this is entirely a digitized influence.

You really don't want even think about what teens do for truth or dare nowadays, they've seen things that will make you ill, they dare each other to.  The entire nasty world is available to them and influencing them moment to moment. Yet another way that online  influence creates a classroom unlike any before.

Radical Transparency

Mr Universe Knows!

I just read an email from our union lamenting the lack of control when it comes to presenting our contract information to us.  In the 36 hours OSSTF took to put together a two page comparison of our deal with the one the Catholic teachers had land on them, details leaked to the press and were already flowing around social media before that.

When we finally got 'official' information it was formatted entirely in comparison to the OECTA deal - we don't get to see actual details, we get a selection of facts designed to look better than the pile of manure OECTA provincial executive signed off on for their members (none of whom have ratified it) last summer.  I'm having trouble seeing the democracy through the political machinations.

Watching the government, the forth estate and our union trying to manipulate the flood of information in an increasingly flat mediascape is rather tragic to watch.  These lumbering dinosaurs try to breach holes or spin facts, only be swamped by crowd-sourced social media.  They want to harness the crowd for their own ends only to find their carefully laid plans designed to manipulate results thrown into the weeds.

We might have evolved into Web2.0, but it is also causing a more democratic means of understanding the world and ushering in a Democracy2.0 wherein people have access to more information sources and are no longer held captive by traditional organizations and the big media that served them.  The Arab Spring, Occupy, Anonymous and many other social movements are happening because governments and corporations don't own the signal any more.  Anyone with an internet connection can publish to the world, find information and create community with like minded people.

How is a political organization to survive in a time where they can't control their own message?  Perhaps by putting out a message that doesn't need controlling in order to be accepted.  This would mean un-spinning and de-lawyerizing your organization and simply being direct and consistent with what you stand for.  Being accessible and open about communicating wouldn't hurt either - if you're working behind closed doors, you're not getting the point..

Your political party shouldn't be trying to win elections, it should have a clear vision of what it stands for and then never waiver from that goal in word and deed.  If you're consistent, radical transparency and the flattening mediascape doesn't frighten you, it empowers you.  If you're a shifty, manipulative organization that is used to getting its own way by having direct access to big media, your days are numbered.

Radical transparency means you don't have to stand up and read a script, you don't have to wonder how the numbers will play out on a new policy, and you never have to come back to an interview and say, wow, we really screwed that up.  You don't have spin doctors telling you what to think about issues, you know your beliefs and you act on them.

As insane as I think Tim Hudak's tea party Conservatives are, at least they are consistent in their insanity.  The NDP are also consistent in their left winged-ness.  The Liberal party (whom I used to vote for and was considering membership in after I became a Canadian citizen) are something unique to Canada, but in trying to be centrist they have ended up being worse than the right wing bullies; a manipulative party that only stands for being in power, consistency be damned.

I'm having trouble being unionist at a time when my union seems to be playing the same kind of Liberal game, of speaking out of both sides of their faces.  One moment the offered contract is a disaster and we're ordered to go on work action; the union is overjoyed at the crowd sourced support they are seeing online and myself and others are more than happy to vocally convey the unfairness of the situation.  In the next we are suddenly accepting a similar contract.  Communication has stopped and online voices have turned from supportive to hurt and confused.

I'm a creature of this flattened mediascape.  I cannot understand or condone the backroom politics or spin.  I don't want to be manipulated, I don't want to be treated like an idiot who can't know details, I want the facts, and if I'm not given them, they are easily enough found online.

Digital Footprint 2.0

SOURCES

The source(s) of this post (and a good example of the richness of thinking you can get out of an online PLN):

@MzMollyTL's Digital Footprint discussion from ECOO last year that stirred up the new teachers in my AQ.

@melaniemcbride's comment on the sweatshop mentality of the always on teacher:

https://twitter.com/melaniemcbride/status/230841214180683779

@dougpete's blog on edublogging:
http://dougpete.wordpress.com/2012/08/03/this-week-in-ontario-edublogs-27/

...which led to some interesting questions about online presence:
http://dougpete.wordpress.com/2012/08/05/dont-hurt-yourself-with-social-media/

Phew!  That is a lot of build up!  Here I go...

DIGITAL FOOTPRINT 2.0

I think we're ready for an evolution in what our expectations are around this.  Diana's original presentation suggested that teachers need to familiarize themselves with online media, and that is still true.  However, since that presentation there have been political upheavals supported by social media, underground poltical movements powered by social media, and I'm currently watching the  'Twitter Olympics': the first really social media powered Olympic games.  Even the forth estate is grudgingly trying to manage the tidal wave of social media.  Merely familiarizing yourself isn't going to cut it anymore.  Ignoring it will make you irrelevant to your students with astonishing speed.

Social media is becoming mainstream and there are increasing expectations that people know how to use it.  Only in extremely staid, conservative situations (educational administration) is social media being shunned.  Even the very conservative family reunion I attended recently wanted to start making use of social media to keep in touch, and these were people who play banjos.  Social media is becoming ubiquitous, even unhooking the Ontario government's ability to manipulate media into justifying its agenda.  This is a powerful force, not something to be trifled with or poked at tentatively.  If you're going to do it, do it honestly, and be yourself.  You'll find the ability to expand your interests online empowering if you don't try and game it.

POCKET NETWORKS

The social networks we see spring up like mushrooms in the rain are being prompted by the miniaturization of computer hardware.  Smartphones are increasingly common, and since 2010, the vast majority of 'phone' use has been in data, not voice.  We use our mobile computers as interconnected computers, not as phones.  Our students do it, we do it, even boomers are doing it.  Like the telegraph, then the telephone after it, this is a revolution in how we communicate with each other, and almost everyone is carrying around the means in their pockets.

Our classrooms have more processing power in the pockets of students than desktop labs did ten years ago.  Their ability to communicate is unparalleled in history, and disregards geography like no other telecommunications system before it.  Just hoping that everyone considers doing something with their online presence is no longer enough, and ignoring or banning the hardware that is causing this is turning a blind eye to a profound shift in social communications.  Schools that ban smartphones should be banning other new inventions, like electricity, telephones, televisions... which very quickly starts to look backward.

GENUINE ONLINE PRESENCE

Being online offers you an opportunity to be anonymous, but this requires a great deal of work on your part.  The nature of the internet means you're always leaving digital bread crumbs about how and where you're communicating from.  Anti-web types will use this as an excuse to harp on privacy issues, but when have we ever been able to communicate privately?  Gossip has always been and always will, and what you say has always followed you, it just follows you in an amplified manner now.  Social media allows you to broadcast gossip.  If you were a gossip before, you're a digitally enhanced gossip now.  It's never been more important to be the best person you are in public; there is a record now, and I've seen students constantly bitten by this as their Facebook updates land them in the VP's office.

Trying to be someone else is exhausting!

The genuine self as an online presence offers an opportunity to meet others beyond your geographic situation that share your interests.  You quickly find yourself a part of an online community that reflects your predilections and offers you a sense of collaborative discourse that might be missing in your workplace, or your immediate geography.  If you're genuine in expressing your interests, you'll create a genuinely satisfying social media ecosystem.  If you fabricate yourself, or limit yourself to specific identities (your teacher self comes to mind here), you won't be exploring the actual usefulness of this new medium.

The other advantage of being genuine online is that you attract meaningful dialogue.  If you're one dimensional, you tend to attract n00bs, marketing interests and bots (who are also one dimensional).  If you're genuine and human in your presentation of self, you'll attract a richer class of connection, one that offers powerful insights regardless of where you are in relation to each other on the planet.  You're harnessing the true potential of social media when you are multi-dimensional and human in your approach to it.

Developing a digital footprint is no longer about simply participating, or creating a cardboard cutout of your professional self, it's about honestly expressing your own views in a genuine manner.  The myriad of apps and means of communicating in a social network allow you to express yourself in simple (twitter), complex (blog) or focused interests (Google+, Facebook) ways.  Knowing how to use the tools effectively is key.

If you're fabricating a professional appearance, well, that's just work, and doing it all summer, 24/7 is not going to do you any real good.  Ultimately, you're doing an awful lot of work and not exploring this new medium effectively, probably because you're scared of it.

School Leadership 2.0

Several school administrators made comments in Doug's blog about the need for restraint.  In a leadership role, you're not free to fly off the handle whenever you have an opinion.  You always need to consider the working relationship you have to foster.  Having said that, George's comment about social media being a useful tool in fostering a team based on real knowledge of each other suggests that social media can be a means of allowing people who might not otherwise to know each other better.

The tendency has been for management (union, board, ministry, and any other ed-based management you can suggest) to shy away from social media.  They fear the de-centralization of power, and see it as a threat to their dominance.  It's nice to know some administrators are fighting this tendency, but I've heard of many more who don't hire the best candidates because their online presence creates unease, and in worst cases not considering hiring a teacher at all because they are familiar with the social web that most students spend their lives in.  Why they think that hiring belligerent, intentionally irrelevant teachers is a good idea is beyond me.

What I love about social media is that it is democratizing information.  No longer do we have to succumb to the broadcast media's idea of what is true.  Twitter told me about Bin Laden hours before broadcast media would, or could.  As a social media-ist, I'm responsible for vetting my own information feed, and broadcasting my own truth.  As both a leader, and a professional, this means not being a jackass, but being a meaningful social mediaist requires this from the get go.  If you're going to do social media well, being a gossip, spreading untruths, will eventually turn the crowd on you.  Generating drama and controlling spin doesn't work very well in a democratized information medium; the truth just bypasses you.

Social media is an opportunity to build a more ideal information medium, one without favoritism or fabrication, one that does not favor the status quo in order to maintain it; the crowdsourced truth is dangerously unmanageable... and free from spin.  

As a member of that tribe I try not to let invective and one-up-man-ship dictate my actions, I try to be collaboratively engaging.  This isn't contrary to any professional or leadership role I may have; in fact, it should enhance those roles.  When you broadcast your actions, it behooves you to it well.

CONCLUSION: THE REVOLUTION IS HAPPENING, REGARDLESS

The social media revolution has harnessed mobile electronics and the internet to produce a democratized media frenzy.  Old-school, forth estate media is floundering, trying to manage their loss of broadcasting monopoly, but still seeing it as an immanent threat.  Other power structures are also frustrated by this decentralization of voice.  Where once a hierarchy could dictate the message, now social media swirls around these old-school broadcasting roadblocks.  

Unions are watching members broadcast their opinions directly, without being able to dictate a unified response.  Governments and corporations are finding that the dictatorial control they once had over traditional media is weakening, because traditional media matters less.  As social media responses bypass traditional censorship, we once again see the many assert their power.

There is no doubt that these changes will force a fundamental shift in how we work with each other.  This kind of radical, data driven transparency gives control freaks a nervous breakdown, but in the end, I can't believe that freeing the signal from the self-involved interests of the powerful isn't better for everyone; that it will result in fairer, transparent, more effective organizations.

As educators, we have to try and get a grip on this ourselves, and then be ready to try and (usefully) assist our students in effectively navigating this exciting, historical change.  It's no longer enough to pay some attention to what your digital footprint is.  It's no longer enough to do the minimum necessary.  If we're going to teach future generations how to survive in the rough sea of democratized data we've made for them, we need to adapt and master the waves ourselves.

A relevant educator is recognizing the radical nature of these changes and is doing their best to create a genuine online persona, one that accurately reflects the public persona they demonstrate in their physical life.  What's private isn't at issue here, but our public selves are changing, and it doesn't do anyone any good to try and game social media by making cardboard cutouts of themselves online.


Some things to consider:
Dancing in the Datasphere: a philosophical look at where we are going
The Singularity: an inside look at what Silicon Valley believes is coming

Don't kid yourself, you're living in the middle of a revolution!

Architect of the Future

I just read @banana29's "Emergence of Web3.0" blog on the immediate future of the web.  Web3.0, if Alanna is on her game (and I know she is), looks like the next step in managing our data meltdown.

Last year ended with me in a dark and questioning place about the effects of digital media on how people think.  I've done my due diligence, and read The Shallows by Nick Carr.   Carr puts forward a compelling, well researched and accurate account of just what the internet is doing to people in the early 21st Century.  I see it in school every day with the digital zombies.  What is to become of the poor human too stupid to pass the are-you-human capcha?  The Shallows points us to our failure to manage the digital revolution we've begun.

I've decided to start off the new year by going to the opposite side of the digital Armageddon/digital paradise debate; I've just started Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near on the advice of a Quora member who describes The Singularity as the opposite of The Shallows.  Kurzweil begins the book with some math and an explanation of how exponential growth works.  In the process he suggests a different growth pattern than the one most people would intuitively follow.

If Kurzweil is right, and I suspect he is closer than many futurist speculators, then we are about to hit a period of accelerated growth similar to that of the industrial revolution.  Our floundering in data is much the same as the mid-nineteenth century's floundering in early industrialization.  Like Dickins, Carr points to the perils of new technology and how it's making us worse, and there is no doubt that, for the vast majority, it is making them worse at this early stage digitization.

Just as children were pressed into dangerous factory work and pollution killed millions in early industrialization, so our first steps into digitization have zombified much of the populace, making them less than what they were before.  Our heavy-handed, pre-digital habits have been hugely amplified by networked efficiencies and have hurt many digital natives in the process.  What used to be slow moving, linear marketing in the pre-digital age has become an unending avalanche of brain numbing, tedious attention grabbing on the nascent world wide web.

Sharing music on a mixed tape used to be a benign bit of theft between friends, of no real damage.  Take that idea of sharing music and digitize it, and suddenly you've crippled a major industry that only existed in the first place because live music was industrialized into sell-able media.  Digitization creates efficiencies that would seem completely foreign and unbelievable in previous contexts.

Having friends over to watch a movie, or going out to a movie together that happened before home video, suddenly turns into video sharing online, and stuns another media empire.  They struggled against VCRs, then got knocked flat by torrents, but at no point did they think it wasn't OK to charge me $6 to see Star Wars in the theatre each of nine times, then $40 for the VHS, then another $40 for the DVD, then another $40 for the bluray (it's not done yet, they're going to resell it to me in 3D next).

Suddenly police states (like Egypt, Libya or San Francisco) can't create silence and obedience out of fear, and dictators around the world are faced with a slippery new medium for communication that is not centrally administrated and controlled.  Dictators around the world (from media companies to Gaddafi) fear their loss of control over the signal.

We've always shared media, we're a social species and love to share art that represents our stories and culture.  Digitization brought that back after a century of industrialized, centralization of culture that trivialized and often eradicated memes that weren't attractive to enough people.  This subtle and persistent destruction of variation culturally bankrupted us by the end of the 20th Century.  To many, watching that monster die doesn't bring on any waves of despair, and will usher in a renaissance of creativity.

Web2.0 pushed social media, allowing common interests and individual ideas to flourish regardless of geography.  No matter how trivial or insignificant your interest, you are always able to find a critical mass of people online who you can share your fascination with.  This has corrosively weakened the century of industrialized, forced shared interests we've all been required to live with.

Digitization is re-animating the idea of a more unique sense of the self.  You no longer have to be a brand name junkie based on massive, global industrial interests telling you what you should like.  Advertising is agonizing over this now, as are those massive, global interests.

Into this maelstrom of early digitization comes Carr, accurately describing how the early internet is a new medium, infected by the old industrial interests whose heavy handed marketing has created whole generations of attention deficit zombies.  When you combine the heavy handed tactics of pre-digital business with the near frictionless and always on nature of digital media, you get a recipe for Ritalin.

Like the soot covered, pollution infected children of the industrial revolution, the screen caged digital child is being treated roughly, but to expect that the early days of a revolution will be like the later days is not historically reasonable; though that shouldn't stop us from fighting against the dehumanization of children caused by our current mistakes.

Those soot covered child-laborers prompted society to develop public education systems that eventually produced stunning break-throughs in all eras of human endeavor.  In fact, that initial failure of industrialization eventually produced a more educated and capable population thanks to the public education it caused.  We won't see soot covered digital children forever.

The digital world we will eventually develop will have as much in common with 2012, as 1970 did with 1870.  And if you believe Kurzweil, the exponential growth curve will develop information technology and artificial intelligence so advanced that it begins self-recursion, drastically increasing capabilities.  No longer limited to biological evolution, Kurzweil forsees a  rate of growth that makes the industrial revolution look positively anemic.  It won't take one hundred years for us to see as much change as industrialization did in a century.

This will happen less soon but more quickly than people suspect, such is the nature of exponential growth.  In the process we will  be abused by old habits on new technology less and less as more of us become more  capable.  Web2.0 and social media are a huge step in this direction.  We'll beat back the manipulators and make the technology serve us rather than having economic interests overpowering us with their own heavy handedness.

If this seems like a lost cause, it isn't; you can't let something like The Shallows scare you off inevitable change.  You're living in a transformative time, and these are the moments when the people who can see the truth of things to come become architects of the future.