Tag: Information

Bookmarked So You’ve Decided to Unfollow Me – Cory Doctorow – Medium (Medium)

Find a writer you like and read them. If you can’t find the writer whose work you want to read, become that writer. That’s what I did. It’s great.

Cory Doctorow addresses the changing times in regards to challenges with being able to be able follow a particular part of someone’s interests or output.

If you loved a writer’s output of x but couldn’t abide their output of y, no problem — you’d just suck their feed into your reader and tell it to block stuff tagged as y.

That dream is mostly dead. Even on the Fediverse, your ability to follow someone for x but not y is crude as hell, hardly better than the web of the early 2000s.

Personally, what I find interesting about Doctorow’s discussion is whether you find a writer or are just interested in a topic. Although I am really intrigued by Chris Aldrich’s model, where you can easily put together a custom feed of the bits you you like. I fear that this sort of model still puts too my onus on the writer, not the reader. I also feel that maybe there is something of a reality of going crate digging. Maybe, feed readers will continue to evolve and become ‘smart’, but for now I will live with the practice of serendipitously sifting and sorting through feeds for the dots.

Bookmarked The Technology of Wellness, Part 1: What I Don’t Know (Audrey Watters)

We still trust some stories sometimes. Importantly, we trust what confirms our pre-existing beliefs. Perhaps we can call this the Michael Crichton Ego Effect. We have designated ourselves as experts-of-sorts whenever we confront the news. We know better than journalists, because of course we do. (This effect applies most readily to men.)

Bookmarked The Joy of Search: Why We All Need to Be Better Searchers…and How to Be Better (clalliance.org)

A useful strategic trick to get to a deeper understanding of your research question is to write up a mini-essay that presents all of your information and frames what it is you’re trying to figure out. I’m 99% convinced that having to write something down (and have that writeup make sense) is a great method to making sure that all of your ducks are in a row. If you’re being honest with yourself, you’ll pick up all KINDS of mistakes in your reasoning and data.

Dan Russell shares some strategies to support the searching for information. The most interesting one was the idea of collating the ideas and information in the form of an essay. I guess blogging fits this mould.
Liked The Guardian’s nifty old-article trick is a reminder of how news organizations can use metadata to limit misinformation (Nieman Lab)

If we know lots of people on social will only glance at our headlines and not tap through, why can’t we bring better information to them where they are?

Liked Critically evaluating online information while under attack by an author (W. Ian O’Byrne)

In this interaction, the online reader becomes the victim as they are flooded by incoming traffic, or information, originating from many different sources. Trying to stop this attack, or identify the source is simply impossible. Trying to identify truth in a topic is a challenge as the reader is forced to negotiate subtle nuances in truth and fiction.

The reader would ultimately look at the vast amount of information coming at them on a topic from multiple sides, not know what is true, and give up. They ultimately decide that “nothing is true” and head back to their personal belief sets since it is a known quantity and believable.

Ian O’Byrne compares the challenge of critical evaluation with that of a DDOS attack, suggesting that put under enough pressure users often simply wave the white flag.
Replied to Episode 113: Privacy Not Included by Doug Belshaw, Dai Barnes (Today In Digital Education Podcast)

This week, Doug and Dai discuss what people get up to in autonomous vehicles, internet-era ways of working, Facebook-designed school curricula, open source culture, podcasts, information environments, and more!

I enjoyed the discussion of ‘news’. Personally, I draw upon a diet made up of aggregations, newsletters, podcasts and feeds. I have gotten to a place where I initially sift through titles and summaries to work out what is out interest and either read them or send to Pocket to read/listen or save to Huffduffer before saving them. I touched upon my filters here and my workflows here.

I wanted to clarify a comment made in response to my post. If the perception is that I sit all day at my desk reading the web, then it is wrong. I did spend time curating resources associated with Google, however I have moved departments and Google is no longer at the core of my work. Although I dip in now and then to my feed, the majority of my curation occurs out of hours on the train ride home or after the children have finally gone to bed. Rightly or wrongly, this is what I choose to spend my time with. I have little interest in gaming or watching television. I would argue that my current work does not necessarily allow the time, but rather the cognitive space to explore divergent ideas.

In regards to my newsletter, thank you for the feedback. Some food for thought moving into the new year.

Listened Ep. 102 danah boyd “Seeing New Worlds” from Team Human

Playing for Team Human today, technology and social media scholar, founder of Data & Society Research Institute, and author of It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, danah boyd.

In a conversation between danah boyd and Doug Rushkoff, she explains that at the heart of our current problems with media, facts and trust is capitalism. By design capitalism gives you what you want. The problem though is that capitalism and democracy are no longer constrained within nation states as they may have been in the past. There is neither the opportunity for nationalistic paternalism to moderate wants nor a means of managing different groups. Media in a multi-national environment has become confusing. We are now in a world of networks and graphs. All media companies are in the business for amplification, the problem has therefore become what is amplified, which as so many have pointed out is often at the extremes. danah boyd says that we need an intervention, but to achieve that we firstly need to be appreciate all the micro-decisions that got us to here. How do we deal with these well intended decisions when they have negative implications? One of the challenges is filling the data voids, rather than blocking various search terms we need to develop the content that maybe missing. This is particularly important for today’s young people, for

if we don’t support young people in building out a strategically rich graph, they will reinforce the worst segments of our society (1.10)

For those who may not have kept up with boyd’s work since It’s Complicated, this is a really good introduction.

Bookmarked The “Always Check” Approach to Online Literacy (Hapgood)

One of the things I’ve been trying to convince people for the past year and a half is that the only viable literacy solution to web misinformation involves always checking any information in your stream that you find interesting, emotion-producing, or shareable. It’s not enough to check the stuff that is suspicious: if you apply your investigations selectively, you’ve already lost the battle.

Mike Caulfield continues his work on fact checking arguing that we need to develop the habit of doing check every time we engage with a new link. He makes the comparison with checking your rear view mirrors when driving.

Now imagine a world where checking your mirrors before switching lanes was rare, three standard-deviations-out behavior. What would the roads look like?

Caulfield focuses on two what is the site and is this new correct true. In a world where abundance is only a click away, maybe we are at a point where it is time to reassess what that actually means.

Liked Bad news: there’s no solution to false information online by Ben WerdmüllerBen Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)

Imagine, instead, if I could highlight a stated fact I disagree with in an article, and annotate it by linking that exact segment from my website, from a post on a social network, from an annotations platform, or from a dedicated rating site like Tribeworthy. As a first step, it could be enough to link to the page as a whole. Browsers could then find backlinks to that segment or page and help me understand the conversation around it from everywhere on the web. There’s no censoring body, and decentralized technologies work well enough today that we wouldn’t need to trust any single company to host all of these backlinks. Each browser could then use its own algorithms to figure out which backlinks to display and how best to make sense of the information, making space for them to find a competitive advantage around providing context.

Watched
danah boyd discusses concerns about the weaponising of media literacy through denalism and says that there is a need for cognitive strengthening. This includes:

  1. “Actively taking things out of context can be helpful for analysis”
  2. “help students truly appreciate epistemological differences”
  3. “help students see how they fill in gaps when the information presented to them is sparse and how hard it is to overcome priors [confirmation bias and selective attention]”

Benjamin Doxtdator raises the concern that focusing on the individual:

Would boyd’s cognitive strength training exercises have helped here? No. Turning inwards to psychology, rather outwards to the political context, is precisely what gives us ‘lone wolf’ analyses of white supremacy.

Instead Doxtdator suggests considering the technical infrastructure. Interestingly, she does touch on platforms in the Q&A at the end:

One of the things that is funny is that these technologies get designed for a very particular idea of what they could be used for and then they twist in different ways.source

The original text that the keynote was based on can be found here, while a response to some of the criticism can be found here.

Bookmarked Why we need to understand misinformation through visuals by Hannah Guy (First Draft News)

Following the London Westminster terrorist attack in March of this year, an image representing the strength and solidarity of Londoners emerged on Twitter. It’s not uncommon for workers on the London Underground to write messages of national unity on tube signs following tragic events, and the March terrorist attack seemed no different. The image proceeded …

Hannah Guy discusses the impact of images on misinformation. This is not just about fake photographs, but graphics too. She provides a particular focus on memes, something danah boyd also covered.