Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

More Deliciouser and Readerable

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Ever since last month when delicious FINALLY did an upgrade, I’ve been digging into it pretty heavily and really liking the result. That’s not to say that there is anything especially new here; there isn’t aside from the 1000 character description upgrade which, to me anyway, is a big deal. But for some reason it’s been working better for me on a number of levels.

In fact, all that new space has made me change some of my delicious habits on both ends of the spectrum. It’s made me sure to add a good deal of annotation to most of the bookmarks I save, and it’s made me start to expect others to do the same. Kudos to Alan Levine, Howard Rheingold and others, who fill up my daily morning newspaper with enough link detail to let me make faster decisions about what they are sharing. Here’s hoping more folks in my network will follow suit. It really has become the place that I start my reading, and I’m finding that it’s making me think even harder about my own organizational structure and how all of this flow of information works best for me. And by the way, the new Google Reader preview extension for Firefox that I just added has really made all of this much easier for me as well. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like for anyone interested; the fact that I can comment directly from Reader is chaning that part of my practice as well…more comments.

I’m finding as I experiment with my delicious network that as I tweak it and try to hone it, I’m getting more good information than I used to. More relevant. More thought-provoking, than simply reading through my blogroll of usual suspects. It’s expanding my sources of information, and it’s making even more clear the potentials of user-generated connections. But I’m also finding the process of identifying those who make up my network interesting. I’ve been spending a great deal of time looking at the networks of those in my network, finding others who I might want to add based on the tags that they use (like do they have an “education” tag, or do they have some uniquely formed ones like “mediagoesaway“), the frequency with which they save things (30 a day = not good as does 30 a year), the amount of annotation, and who they might be networked in with.

I still struggle with the organization of all of this, but I’ve pretty much now decided to forego the tagging and sharing features in Reader for attempting to make it all work in just one place in delicious. Not sure why I haven’t caught the Diigo bug as others have, but on some level, it just feels too overwhelming in terms of the amount of stuff you can do, although from a collaborative standpoint, there is no question Diigo has some compelling advantages. delicious just feels more manageable for me at this point.

Anyway, just an update on the evolution of my info management process for anyone that’s interested. Would love to hear others to deconstruct their own processes in similar ways.

Believe What You Want: Finding Truth 2.0

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I’m in one of those phases where I’m reading about six books at once, just grazing through ideas that catch me, diving into chapters out of order, etc. Might be an indication of just how much the online world has affected my reading habits. Sometimes I feel like my brain starts to twitch if I turn too many pages in a row. Sometimes.

Anyway, picked up True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society by Farhad Manjoo and got pulled in right away. The thesis here is that Stephen Colbert’s idea of “truthiness” isn’t that far off, that “new technologies are promoting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact.” (Does that scare you as much as it does me?) Manjoo, a blogger at Salon, dives into the whole “Swift Boat” story at the outset, and he provides some really fascinating research that suggests that liberals and conservatives have very different tendencies when it comes to believing what they see and hear. (The short version: conservatives are much more willing to consume media that “toes the ideological line” (19), and they are more apt to “steer clear of information that contradicts what [they] think [they] know” (30). Guess you’ll believe that if you want to, huh?)

For as much as I love what’s happening now in terms of our ability to produce and share information, I keep reminding myself to pay good attention to the huge challenges here as well. As Manjoo says,

While new technology eases connections between people, it also, paradoxically, facilitates a closeted view of the world, keeping us coiled tightly with those that share our ideas.

Nothing really new in that statement; we talk about the echo chamber all the time. But the stories he tells here are on some level pretty scary in terms of the much more entrenching impact the chamber has on us all, and I have to say the challenges we face as educators to prepare our kids for it all feel really daunting.

Anyway, to the money quote, so far at least. While Manjoo discusses the reams of research that suggest that our own ideas of truth are defined through our interactions with other people, what’s interesting is the role that physical proximity, or propinquity has played in those interactions. We become friends with, and in large measure, marry people who at some point share our physical space, whether in an office or an apartment building or even classroom. But now, the fact that these technologies are freeing us from propinquity is what we find to be so exhilarating about it. And, what is so problematic about it.

The Web, talk radio, cable news–they connect us to others who are like us but are far away. They provide a haven from the oppressiveness of the nearby. Instead of getting together with people who are close to us physically, now we can get together with people who are close to us ideologically, psychically, emotionally, aesthetically. In other words, rather than through propinquity, we find our social groups nowadays through selective exposure. And it’s in that fact that the world splits apart: it’s here that you see why new possibilities to choose what you read, what you watch, and what you listen to can fracture the culture’s sense of what’s real and what’s not. Selective exposure is not important only because it lets you choose the information that suits you; it’s important because it lets you choose people who suit you (54).

A lot of this connects directly with what Ulises Mejias has been saying in terms of how our concepts of nearness and farness are changing. Both point to something that is obviously worth our attention as educators. It’s a huge shift that has huge ramifications, and it’s not hard to see a number of examples playing out in this current election cycle. The “debate” about human activity contributing to global warming is a great example. The truth is there, if we want to believe it, yet it feels like a whole heck of a lot of people choose not to.

So, how do we guard ourselves against the real dangers of “selective exposure?” And, more importantly, how do we address these issues as a part of the the literacies we teach our kids in the curriculum so they can accurately assess what is real and what is not?

On "Infovores" and "Infofighters"

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My aggregator is piling up and I’m in one of those “no-time-to-read-my-feeds” stretches, especially when I get a new book in my hands that really makes me think. Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody” is probably about the most level headed deconstruction of what’s happening with the Web that I’ve read yet, and, while it’s not nearly as sexy as Pink or Friedman, so far it’s pretty brilliant and much more grounded. He’s one educator who “gets it” in a very measured way. I’ve been marking it up like crazy and want to revisit a lot of it before I attempt some longer thoughts here, but there was one section that connected for me when I somehow landed on “Why We’re Powerless to Resist Grazing on Endless Web Data” from the Wall Street Journal last week.

In short, the article says that neuroscientists are finding evidence that we are addicted to new information, and in an era where new information is everywhere, that can be a problem:

In other words, coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom. It is something we seem hard-wired to do, says Dr. Biederman. When you find new information, you get an opioid hit, and we are junkies for those. You might call us ‘infovores.’ ” For most of human history, there was little chance of overdosing on information, because any one day in the Olduvai Gorge was a lot like any other. Today, though, we can find in the course of a few hours online more information than our ancient ancestors could in their whole lives…We are programmed for scarcity and can’t dial back when something is abundant.

Hmmm…Twitter like opium, huh?

Believe it or not, I can relate to that “junkie for new information” description. (No, really.) And I really like that term, “infovore”. Definitely works. And it adds another layer to the whole balance issue. If we really are addicted to this, what does that say about how we teach our kids?

Shirky comes at it from the “creator of new information” stance and supplies a nice brain hit as well. In a chapter titled “Personal Motivation Meets Collaborative Production,” he talks at length about what makes Wikipedia work, that it’s more than simply a desire to work together. In fact, he says, Wikipedia “exists not as an edifice, but as an act of love.”

Wikipedia exists because enough people love it and, more important, love one another in its context. This does not mean that the people constructing it always agree, but loving someone doesn’t preclude arguing with them… What love does for Wikipedia is provide the motivation both for improvement and defense (141).

And it’s that last part where the info opiates kick in for me. The reason that vandals fail on Wikipedia is

because Wikipedia as a tool provides them with the weapons to fight those groups. Those weapons are taken up only by people who are willing to fight. Were that willingness to fade, the most contentious articles in Wikipedia, the articles on abortion and Islam and evolution, would be gone within hours, and it’s unlikely that the whole enterprise would survive a week (141)

And finally, there is this concluding paragraph to the chapter:

We don’t often talk about love when trying to describe the public world, because love seems to squishy and private. What has happened, though, and what is still happening in our historical moment, is that love has become a lot less squishy and a lot less private. Love has a half=life too, as well as a radius, and we’re used to both of those being small. We can affect the people we love, but the longevity and social distance of love are both constrained. Or were constrained–now we can do things for strangers who do things for us, at a low enough cost to make that kind of behavior attractive, and those effects can last well beyond our original contribution. Our social tools are turning love into a renewable building material. When people care enough, they can come together and accomplish things of a scope and a longevity that were previously impossible; they can do big things for love (142).

I know…quite a Kumbaya moment. But he’s right. Wikipedia was simply not possible before. So much more is possible today and will be possible for my kids, and I want them to feel the love, not just of learning new things, but of doing new things as well.