📺 What Hath We Wrought? | SXSW EDU 2018

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.