Do New Media Detain Literacy or create New Literacy?

I have been very critical with New Media in the past in the way they affect tween and teenage literacy and communication capabilities. The limited way in which tools like Twitter, Facebook, and SMS support inter-human communication and the way in which young audiences respond to those limitations by adopting an abbreviated, cryptic and highly ambiguous code as language seems frightening. Especially, when this code then also makes it into the traditional written language: A few months back I received a pile of thank you letters from my son's class for a Show&Tell I had given. To my surprise, the letters of these then 7-graders was full of orthographic and grammatical errors. Moreover, many of the orthographic mistakes the students made were clearly related to the way they communicate if aforementioned New Media, 'bcause', 'wat', and 'yu' just being a few of them.

However, maybe I am thinking to narrow-mindedly? Clive Thompson on the New Literacy references Andrea Lunsford, a Stanford University professors, who is studying this phenomenon and is actually postulating that the New Media makes children write more, more voluntarily and for an existing audience instead of the teacher alone. All of these findings are clearly positive trends that might in the long term improve children's cognitive, communication and problem-solving abilities.

If this is the case then does the language really matter as long as everybody agrees on it?

Or is there a limit to the depth of thinking and articulation that the New Media language imposes on us, which is only suited for news casting but not critical analysis and opinionated discussions?

I guess, only time will show. In the meantime, I am going the safe way, exposing my children to New Media tools while encouraging and supporting them in enjoying old media such as books and dinner table conversations.

Dull Networks – How microblogging might turn the wisdom pyramid upside down

According to Russell Ackoff, a systems theorist and professor of organizational change, the way humans process input from their environment can be classified into five categories:

• Data represents a fact or statement of event without relation to other things.
  Ex: It is raining.
• Information embodies the understanding of a relationship of some sort, possibly cause and effect.
  Ex: The temperature dropped 15 degrees and then it started raining.
• Knowledge represents a pattern that connects and generally provides a high level of predictability as to what is described or what will happen next.
  Ex: If the humidity is very high and the temperature drops substantially the atmosphere is often unlikely to be able to hold the moisture so it rains.
• Wisdom embodies more of an understanding of fundamental principles embodied within the knowledge and is essentially systemic.

Underlying this theory is the assumption that there is enough content in each of the related input streams to create relationships, identify patterns as well as identify and understand principles.

Recently, microblogging tools like Twitter emerged, which forcefully restrict users’ input to 140 characters, while still allowing for references to original authors’ tagging of keywords and providing URLs for content and location.

News channels like CNN, celebrities like Oprah and many companies are embarking into the microblogging adventure up to a point, where it seems that we often can read about people’s comments before they had the time to think about them.

Recently, a colleague attended his first event at which heavy underground twittering accompanied a formal presentation-style conference. He claimed, that the dynamics that this underground chatter – combined with occasional public outbursts of emerging self-proclaimed representatives of the twitter community – added a completely new and possibly valuable dimension to the knowledge exchange at these types of professional gatherings.

Well, I don’t know…

While I am sure there are some smart uses of microblogging tools, let me here inspect specifically Twitter’s use for knowledge transfer and knowledge augmentation:

Let’s look at it more closely: The knowledge and wisdom that a well-prepared speaker is communicating to the crowd based on a lifetime of experience in the form of simplified slides, multimedia materials, his or her voice, mimicry and gestures are absorbed by a most likely less experienced attendee whose mind is in parallel occupied by competing with others in the crowd commenting on the input in rapid sequence – 140 characters or less at a time.

Experiment: Turn on the TV, take a sheet of paper and capture what’s being said…. Done? Easy, isn’t it !

Now: Instead of capturing content, comment on what you hear while listening to the TV show. Still easy? What if I asked you now about details of the show? Most likely, you would draw a blank, since your mind was so occupied with creating an opinion and putting it to paper, that you had to stop following the show. We humans are just not good in parallel processing once we turn on our cognitive abilities and start thinking about the data we are absorbing.

In addition, since there is not enough space to put any contextual information and most twitterers don’t know each other personally, the communicated information is reduced down to bits and chunks of data flying through the twittersphere. Since the speaker might not have had his twitter address on the first slide, he might not even get referenced appropriately for the space, thus removing the last hope for the data being interpreted in context.

So we have just reduced the wisdom of an individual down to a multitude of data chunks being broadcasted through the networks. What makes matters worse is the way some people use microblogging tools like Twitter to seek information and build knowledge. Busy with keeping up with their legions of followees (people they are following) and trying to make sense out of the multitude of parallel discussion threads they are engaged in, many people don’t seem to have the time anymore to reflect while critically inspecting the origin and context in which the data was presented. However, this process is crucial to finding relationships between data samples in order to turn them into information.

In consequence, any data is elevated to the level of being trustworthy information, which then makes pattern recognition easy: Knowledge is what is read more than once from different sources. However, usually that should mean – for instance also in serious journalism practice – from independent sources. Unfortunately, microblogging sites are also social networking sites. The social networks propagate information multiple times and it is very hard to ensure independence. Surowieki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds emphasized that such wisdom requires independent knowledge contribution and aggregation rather than the unfiltered propagation of word of mouth data.

Don’t you think there are better ways to gain information and build knowledge?

And what’s wrong with listening to and trusting the wisdom of an expert?

How to Lose Friends with Social Media

Recently a colleague complained to me that I’m not following him back on Twitter. Another one posted a comment to a Facebook application, offended that my wall was not accessible to her. And another one got annoyed when comments to my online status stayed unanswered for long periods of time, although there seemed to be plenty of activity on my profile.

Which made me think about the different uses people apply to their online social networks and tools – and their personal expectations.

In general, people don’t seem to realize, that most social technologies, including Twitter and Facebook, are asynchronous communication tools. That means, that they are meant to post information now that people pick up at a later point in time at their own discretion. Consequently, the builders of those tools have built in mechanisms and algorithms which – in an attempt to manage the communication load – often arbitrarily display the newest status updates, photos, news on the various ‘friends’ you follow; the newest ones first but in no particular order and without any particular ranking. Therefore, your profile may look active today when your updates are actually from a while ago. What makes matters worse is the fact, that your profile also displays replies, posts, comments by your friends – dependent on your preference settings. So, there may be recent activity on your profile although you haven’t logged in for weeks.

What we need to remember is that people use these tools in different ways, which is dependent on how they are able to access them throughout the day. For example, due to company security restrictions, I can only access most social media sites from my iPod touch during the day and from my home desktop at night. Consequently, I try to manage my Twitter stream by:

• only following people that talk about things of interest to me (which at this point does not include when they go to the shower or watch the sun rise) :)
• only posting information and links on Twitter that I find particularly intriguing from a professional and intellectual perspective

Some good additional suggestions on social media etiquette were posted by Chris Brogan.

Consequently, I don’t prohibit anybody from following me but choose who to follow based on the above criteria. Unfortunately but not surprisingly, other people use Twitter in different ways which includes building an online reputation as connectors or distributors of any kind of information, measured by a ratio of followers to followees (called tweeciprocity on Twitter) or alike.

Sorry, guys, for virtually screwing up your cyber-reputation. I hope that the intellectual and informative value that my posts provide to you compensate for that. :)

But back to asynchronous communication tools, old-fashioned Email being one of them... They allow you to access and respond in a different-place/different-time manner and thus the expectation for somebody waiting for a response should adjust accordingly. Even though you may instantaneously see my post doesn’t create the need or ability for me to immediately respond; nor does it require me to respond at all. :)

In contrast, synchronous communication gives you instant feedback but requires you to also immediately respond. This direct feedback loop, however, helps to quickly overcome ambiguity, reach agreement, minimize time, and is, therefore, a much better way to arrive at mutual consent and to make decisions.

So, why not pick up the phone if you actually want to accomplish something?

Or, if the person you want to talk to is actually sitting in the cubicle across the aisle: Why not get up, walk over, and talk to him or her?

You might actually make a real friend …

Attention Deficit Disorder: Personal Demise or the Next Step of Human Evolution?

According to modern evolutionary theories, evolution is based on two fundamental changes in life forms, both of which adhere to the process of natural selection: arbitrary mutation and adaptation to the environment.

Recent years have seen a remarkable increase in children diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD) often in conjunction with hyperactivity (ADHD). ADHD is now thought to occur in 3-5% of school-age children and is more common in boys. It is not yet known what causes ADD, but there does seem to be a genetic influence.

As a condition, ADD is considered to be a deviation from 'normal' capabilities (which constitutes a challenge for educators and a burden for many parents). But what if, in classifying ADD exclusively as a state of reduced mental capacity, chemical imbalance or 'different wiring' (as often alluded to), we’ve gotten it all wrong? What if ADD was actually an adaptation to dealing with an increasingly complex environment? An environment where children grow up exposed to increased levels of external stimuli and information, at an ever-increasing pace. And an environment that presents them with an increased number of multimodal communication channels to be processed in parallel.

Some scientists even correlate rises in ADD among children to a nature-deficit disorder, i.e. the lack of exposure of today’s children to the need for involuntary attention processes as required in natural environments.

At the same time, popular new-age beliefs are on the rise about the power of subconscious decision-making over thorough scientific proof (see e.g. Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink!) paving the way for societal acceptance of short-term focus and spontaneous, uninformed snap judgments.

Not surprisingly, this theory of “Thinking without thinking” has been sharply criticized by supporters of evidence-based decision making such as Michael LeGault in Th!nk, advocating the continuous need for critical thinking and problem-solving strategies as well as emphasizing a concerning decline of related capabilities among the young generations.

So, are we dealing with a classic dichotomy of contrasting trends and opinions, both of which would be supporting the hypothesis of natural selection through adaptation, with one, however, providing hope and justification for phenomena like ADD, the other dooming us to look at a future of self-inflicted mental decline?

Many aspects of the modern information society bear the risk of information overload for the human recipient and the need for them to quickly filter huge amounts of references rather than store significant amounts of information for longer periods of time.

Effectively navigating through the jungle of online media has become essential to gain and maintain social connectivity and acceptance. Crouching through a multitude of opinions in the form of blogs and discussion forums, while engaging in duels of rapidly fired bursts of micro blogs to create situational awareness in an increasingly complex world has replaced externally led knowledge acquisition and indoctrination. It is now truer than ever: "It's who you know, not what you know!"

So, are modern IT-based communication tools and techniques our response to reduced human capacity in focusing, critical thinking and long-term memorization or are those societal trends and challenges the result of the new and celebrated technologies?

Is, consequently, the best medicine in this case possibly no medicine at all, but a matter of better diagnosis resulting in differentiation between true ADD/ADHD and different learning styles and cognitive specialization of today's children?

Might it, therefore, require a revised educational system that embraces mental diversity in order not to be in the way of human evolution and adaptation to ITC innovation?

Or should we – God forbid – be a little more critical towards the adoption of modern technologies and should we study and consider their impact more thoroughly before exposing future generations?

The Dynamics of Viral Information Dissemination in Social Networks

Researchers from Carnegie Mellen, U. Michigan and HP Labs have done some interesting research on how purchasing behavior spreads by means of recommendations through online retail social networks such as Amazon and came up with some very interesting and partly counter-intuitive outcomes. An insightful read for people interested in using online social network dynamics to influence people's real world behavior.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jure/pubs/viral-ec06.pdf