We can't be in control of our lives as long as those lives are contained by platforms and we lack the tools for mastery over our virtual bodies and minds online. It doesn't matter if Facebook, Google and the rest have no malicious intent, or if they really do want to "bring the world closer together", or to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" or to "develop services that significantly improve the lives of as many people as possible". We need to be free and independent agents of our selves.
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a way to pay compliments to the original post/poster of external content
The coverage of Elon Musk’s companies is almost always coverage of Elon Musk. That’s how he wants it, of course. Journalists, as mythmakers, seem happy to oblige.
For more mythology, watch Musk’s Q and A at SXSW:
Yes, it's complicated and ugly and dirty and no one wants regular updates about the sordid behaviour of our elected representatives, who are, after all imperfect like the rest of us. But I smell a rat. Could it be that when a prominent bloke strays it's a cliche, and when a woman does it, it's time to grab some popcorn?
The way we organise the school curriculum (and the way most of the world organises the school curriculum) is not consistent with what we know about the conditions for successful learning. The current curriculum is not designed to guarantee teaching at an appropriate level of challenge for each and every learner. An alternative would be to structure the curriculum not in year levels but in proficiency levels, where a proficiency level is an absolute level of attainment or competence in an area of learning, regardless of age or year of school.
If you're British, you've reportedly got about a 10% chance of descending from this guy's tribe.
Taleb suggests any intervention will have iatrogenics – the question for leaders is whether we are even aware of them?
Google, Facebook hidden trackers follow users around the web at alarming rates, says DuckDuckGo's CEO Gabriel Weinberg. To make any real progress in advancing data privacy this year, we have to start doing something about them. Not doing so would be like trying to lose weight without changing your diet. Simply ineffective.
So maybe I’ll focus, instead, on Go Up goals and Give Up goals. Like Seth says in his post, people are generally happy to help you with your give up goals. They’ll remind you to drink less, exercise more, and spend less money. My 2018 give up goals might include be less lazy on the exercise front and eat fewer carbs for breakfast. I’ll try to give up working on a device when my kids are present. I’ll fail, but I’ll try. I’ll give up taking jobs that don’t compensate my worth.
Bringing a sociomaterial sensibility built on actor-network theory to this study positions me in a particular way. This eschews the notion of a pre-existent reality ‘out-there’ waiting for the knowing subject to discover and explain it. Nor is reality constructed by the distant researcher through a set of discursive practices. Instead, reality is performative, brought into being as a result of the relationships which form and reform when actors, both human and nonhuman, intra-act. As a researcher of and with teachers using Twitter then, I am entangled with a heterogenous mix of educators, software platforms, digital devices, terms of service, time zones, screens, hashtags and notifications. What emerges from the study depends on the knowledge practices which are brought to bear, but these do not solely involve a researcher, research participants and standard qualitative methods, but also an eclectic mix of other nonhuman actors. Together their relational performances constitute ‘methods assemblage’ (Law, 2004), where different realities become enacted depending on the actors which participate. One implication might be that this should not be statement of my positionality, but of ours.