Tag: pinterest

#fakenews – symptom or disease?

Last week I attended a “#Call to Action: Fake News, Misinformation and Post-Truth” held by the SMU libraries in  Singapore. Library network groups are full of requests for student appropriate examples of fake news. Most librarians have a stock list starting from the spaghetti harvest (1957) / tree octopus (1988). And we’ve unfortunately become over excited that #fakenews will be the saviour of librarianship. Because yay – we’re good at research, we’re good at teaching and applying the C.R.A.A.P / E.S.C.A.P.E tests, we’re about literacy, we’ve got all these captive young minds in front of us.

But between the insightful comments of very intelligent people like Eugene Tan and Gulcin Cribb at this seminar, where one had to conclude that the usual antidotes – trying to outcrowd “fake” news with “good /solid” news, padding news consumption with self-imposed digital/information literacy filters like the above mentioned CRAAP/ESCAPE tests or attempting to regulate it, will only work selectively or not at all.

haythamcom_02a
Best quote of the seminar – indeed there is nothing new under the sun

Caulfield in his blog has been hammering on about being able to distinguish between fake and real images, sourcing quotes,  but his latest post was one that threw the switch for me, on digital polarization on pinterest. (An aside, I gave up on pinterest because I can’t be bothered to log in every time I need to go past the first page and I prefer Evernote as a curation tool anyway). If you do nothing else in the fake news landscape ever, just watch this video he made.

And that, combined with the very disturbing article by James Bridle on Kid’s YouTube, following all the work that MathBabe, Cathy O’Neil, has been doing on web algorithms, and watching YouTube with my teenage son who is innately simultaneously curious about all sorts of scary (to mom) teenage stuff, combined with a reluctance to research beyond YouTube and Infographics* has made me really think about the way we’re approaching this conversation.

Let’s follow this thing upstream. Bear with me as I bring a couple of concepts that I think are related into this. A few things that have a lot to do with some human traits. The need to tell and listen to stories, The difficulty and recency of reading. The concept of the Gutenberg parenthesis. And last but not least, modern capitalism and/or the seven deadly sins (a concept I needed to explain to my kids the other night).

gutenberg parenthesis

So where does that veritable soup land one? Well, exactly where Mike Caulfield found himself as he clicked along in Pinterest, and like Alice in Wonderland found himself in a different universe to the one he started out in.  Pinterest is perhaps one of more extreme examples of algorithms at work. But the same is going on in Twitter (I was browsing through some UX stuff this morning and my feed and suggested people to follow changed suit in a matter of minutes) and Facebook and Instagram.

We have to face that honesty and a quest for truth doesn’t give one a monopoly on creating world class videos and infographics. That is the realm of those with a big enough budget to do it professionally. And that is how people like their information. So is the cure an infographic cold war, where every side builds up their arsenal of clickbait and point form iconic bite-sized digests? Or do we demand that algorithms are audited? Do we stop being curious and resist what we think is the “road less travelled” and the urge to click down paths that are actually carefully manipulated to pre-purchased outcomes?

So #fakenews is just a symptom. And by trying to treat the symptoms are going to get us nowhere. But unfortunately the disease is being human, and their is no vaccine against that. Except consciousness. Extreme consciousness. And consciousness takes time, and time is what technology is robbing us of. The irony.

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* Shoot me – I’m human. That saying about cobblers and shoes? He came home the other day and told me his English teacher said reading was important for vocabulary and a whole host of things and that “just 20 minutes a day would make a difference” 

Social networking – the dark side

I’ve been on the internet a long, long time.  There was some primitive stuff going on when I did my first degree around the mid-80’s (that’s 1980’s) but we only really got it going at home in 1994 – and then we were living in Brazil, where and when at that time, even having a home phone line was a luxury.  I remember hours and hours trying to get things up and running with a techie mate of mine, both of us with broken Portuguese, the old black screens with green writing and lots of C backslashes.  Besides email, social media for me only started in 2006 when we moved from Spain to Hong Kong and I started blogging.   And I discovered the wonderful community you could create through blogging, but I also found the dark side of trolls and anonymous comments that didn’t add much to the conversation except to satisfy some need in the writer.   Finally, when things got too personal and my thick skin had been worn down enough, it just didn’t seem worth carrying on, and besides that we’d moved countries and a lot of what I’d written was no longer interesting or relevant or current, so I just shut it down.  But I did make some truely wonderful friends through the experience, and they’ve remained friends, so the virtual to the reality.

Fast forward to now, and I’m using Pinterest and Flipboard for my work, and also dabbling in them a little privately.  Full disclosure – I have a child with ADHD.  It’s not a secret.  I’m not ashamed of it.  So when I come across things on ADHD or related matters, I flip them into an ADHD flipboard, and I keep track of nice infographics and articles and graphics and things on it in Pinterest.    Out of politeness and in the spirit of the social side of the internet, and being supportive of other people who take the time and trouble to curate things on the matter, I also “follow” their boards if I’ve pinned something from it.

And they follow me back.  But it can be dark.  So, recently one of the people I followed on the matter then followed me back and started inviting me to all sorts of boards along the lines of domestic violence, abused people, children of abuse and all sorts of psychological matters that, while I’m sympathetic to, just doesn’t have relevance to my life.  I had one of those “oops” moments, and kind of felt like I was being stalked, or having a bible basher (sorry, value judgement) put their foot into my living room door.

Will it stop me using social media?  No.  It just makes me more aware, and maybe I won’t follow someone quite so quickly without looking at the context of their other pins first.  Am I glad it happened? Yes.  Because I’m the parent of two pre-adolescents.  And it can and will happen to them, and I’m real glad it happened to me first, so we can talk about it, and they’ll know what it is, how it can happen and how to respond to it when it does.

Reading and Weeding social media

It’s terribly addictive, I’ve just spent an hour hopping from blog to blog to Pinterest to Facebook entry and back again.  And added a couple of pretty good blogs to my Blogfeed (The Daring Librarian, and DaveCaleb).  It wasn’t all for nothing.  I had a good lesson on infographics from Library Grits, along with some concrete hints on how to get started and what to use.  Katie, our school librarian, has put down the tricks and secrets of getting stuff out of the catalogue into social media in her The Librarian Edge blog and I found a good book to pin for getting adolescents to read (Book Love) and found a cute poster on the rights of readers for my daughter.

I also decided that anyone who hasn’t posted for 2 years doesn’t deserve to be in my feed, no matter if he’s on the CSU recommended reading list or not … 2 years is a century in social media.  But on the other hand, here is a provocative new book (Writing on the Wall by Tom Standage) on the fact that social media has always been with us it just keeps changing clothes.