Tech, culture, democracy. Scope, scale, speed. Loyal but disobedient.
It is time to put a surgeon general's warning on social media platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents. […]
Last fall, I gathered with students to talk about mental health and loneliness. As often happens in such gatherings, they raised the issue of social media.
After they talked about what they liked about social media — a way to stay in touch with old friends, find communities of shared interests and express themselves creatively — a young woman named Tina raised her hand. “I just don’t feel good when I use social media,” she said softly, a hint of embarrassment in her voice. One by one, they spoke about their experiences with social media: the endless comparison with other people that shredded their self-esteem, the feeling of being addicted and unable to set limits and the difficulty having real conversations on platforms that too often fostered outrage and bullying. There was a sadness in their voices, as if they knew what was happening to them but felt powerless to change it. […]
The moral test of any society is how well it protect its children. Students like Tina and mothers like Lori do not want to be told that change takes time, that the issue is too complicated or that the status quo is too hard to alter.
One of the most important lessons I learned in medical school was that in an emergency you don't have the luxury to wait for perfect information. You assess the available facts, you use your best judgment, and you act quickly.
Jim Richardson and Tim Deakin published a long interview with me on the MuseumNext website in advance of the Green Museum Summit.
This week I’ll be speaking at the MuseumNext Green Museums Summit and Computers In Libraries (two separate conferences) about “digitality” and climate action in the cultural sector.
Here’s the gist of it: The climate emergency asks museums, libraries, and other heritage, knowledge, and memory institutions a series of tough questions about their purpose and relevance in society. How big can they work? Who do they involve? Who do they serve?
Compared to the scale and speed of the climate crisis and the mind-blowing scope of what we must accomplish together in the next 10, 20, and 30 years, what can the cultural sector do?
These questions are hard to discuss within the cultural sector. Though the humanistic, prosocial values in the sector are strong the sector’s institutions, in particular, are wary of disruption and have evolved to think in conservative, risk-averse ways. But the climate emergency acts like an X-ray or lie detector on institutional thinking, revealing gaps between values and practice that might go unnoticed when working on smaller concerns.
One of those gaps has to do with digital. Digital is currently a blind spot in our thinking about climate action, and in both of these talks I’ll argue that the museum and library sectors are operating with a confused and outdated concept of digitality that impedes our ability to think clearly about the kinds of impact we are obligated to create. An updated concept of what “digital” means in the 2020s — new tools, new skills (and learning to appreciate neglected old tools and skills) and a new understanding of the digital public sphere are all needed to help us find a new direction and unlock new capabilities within the sector and in the communities we serve.
But (or perhaps, and), going there — having a solid conversation about what digital is and can do requires us to question some tightly held assumptions about trust, disruption, and power.
Below are links to slides, references, and other useful/relevant information cited in the talks.
I’ll post slides transcripts from these talks ASAP.
From the Computers in Libraries Q&A:
Complicating the Narratives: What if journalists covered controversial issues differently — based on how humans actually behave when they are polarized and suspicious? Amanda Ripley, Solutions Journalism Network, 2018.
Long Twitter Thread: “I’ve been thinking a lot about digitality recently…”
The Year Man Becomes Immortal, Time.com (2019) — The Law of Accelerating Returns
A Weasel Just Shut Down The Large Hadron Collider, Business Insider, 2016)
The Big Frikin’ Wall, Adapted from Kathy Sierra. Notes here.
Serious in Singapore, New York Times, Tom Friedman (2011)
Winning Slowly Is the Same as Losing, Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone (2017)
Only 11 Years Left to Prevent Irreversible Damage from Climate Change, Speakers Warn during General Assembly High-Level Meeting. General Assembly, High-Level Meeting on Climate and Sustainable Development (2018)
No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, Greta Thunberg (2021, also cited below)
When It’s Too Late to Stop Fascism, According to Stefan Zweig, George Prochnik, New Yorker (2017)
Aditi Juneja: “If you’ve wondered what you would’ve done during slavery, the Holocaust…you’re doing it now” (2017)
The European Commission has put €1.8 trillion on the table for the next 6 years’ work on The New European Bauhaus, pandemic recovery, and European Green Deal.
New European Bauhaus
A new EU initiative launched in 2021 to be the cultural front-end for the European Green Deal. “The New European Bauhaus initiative calls on all of us to imagine and build together a sustainable and inclusive future that is beautiful for our eyes, minds, and souls. Beautiful are the places, practices, and experiences that are: Enriching, inspired by art and culture, responding to needs beyond functionality; Sustainable, in harmony with nature, the environment, and our planet; Inclusive, encouraging a dialogue across cultures, disciplines, genders and ages.”
Pandemic recovery
€807 billion for 7 priority areas, including cohesion, resilience, natural resources/environment.
Green Deal
Targets 55% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and by 2050: “economic growth decoupled from resource use”, carbon neutral, and “no person and no place left behind”.
Product Pinocchio, via GameStorming
Why Tech Is Starting to Make Me Uneasy, Farhad Manjoo, 11 October 2017.
“In 2007, when Mr jobs unveiled the iPhone, just about everyone greeted the new device as an unalloyed good. That's no longer true. The state-of-the-art, today, is a bag of mixed emotions. Check might improve everything. And it's probably all so terrible in ways we're only starting to understand.”
Trump Will Withdraw U.S. From Paris Climate Agreement, New York Times, 1 June 2017.
Symposium: What is the museum’s role in a burning world? Politiken, 27 June 2017 (see also slides in bullet below)
Field Museum and Natural History Museum response — see slide 89 of Shaking Hands with the Future: Museums and Heritage at a Moment Full of Change (this link will take you right there)
Teen Vogue, Weather Channel, Steak-Umm — slides 90 - 100. Here’s an interview with Steak-Umm Social Media Manager Nathan Allebach (2018)
Museums and libraries fight ‘alternative facts’ with a #DayofFacts, Washington Post, 17 February 2017
I cranked through about 10 years of Pew Research Center reports in trying to figure out the evolution of our concept of digitality over the years. The first link, Visions of the Internet in 2035 | Pew Research Center, was particularly useful for gaining some insight into how “experts” conceptualize the role of information technology in society. That being said, I was dismayed, but not surprised, to see so few mentions of the climate emergency in any of these reports. Overall, these Pew reports reminded me of how essential and empowering the Internet is in so many people’s lives.
Here are a handful of the most useful reports. The full list is on this spreadsheet.
Visions of the Internet in 2035 | Pew Research Center (2022)
How Gen Zers, Millennials react to climate change content on social media | Pew Research Center (2021)
The future of democracy and civic innovation | Pew Research Center (2020)
Predictions from experts about the next 50 years of digital life | Pew Research Center (2019)
Activism in the Social Media Age | Pew Research Center (2018)
I put this spreadsheet together after reviewing 1000 pages of my own notes on digitality, 30+ reports from the Pew Research Center from the last 10 years, and notes from our November 2021 workshop on cultural-sector climate action.
There are three tabs
References lists 323 digital-related sites, apps, technologies, concepts, patterns, phenomena, and attributes that I’ve tagged, subjectively, with some adjectives like prosocial, civic, empowering, and dangerous.
Sorted by tag count shows each tag on its own column, and then a list of all the digital-related things that have that tag. You can hover your mouse over each cell to see a note and link (if there is one)
Link to sources shows a list of 89 articles, books, and references mentioned on the References tab
See the “empowering” projects in the first column here (Google Sheets).
Slides: Dark Matter (2014)
Slides: The Age of Scale (2013)
Slides (with lots of links and references): The Web We Want, Dealing with the Dark Side of Social Media (2020).
Also this Ignite Talk for the Museum Computer Network conference (video, 2019)
What Is Disruptive Innovation? Christensen, Raynor, McDonald, Harvard Business Review (2015)
The Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton Christensen, (2003 reprint)
Video book summary: The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen (2015)
Lecture: Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma (2016)
A big long list of relevant resources in this spreadsheet here, and a handful of the most relevant below.
No One is Too Small to Make a Difference, Greta Thunberg (2021)
Hot Money, Naomi Klein (2021)
Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics: How the Internet Era is Transforming Politics in Kenya, Nanjala Nyabola (2018)
What is Web 2.0? Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software, Tim O’Reilly (2005)
The Wikipedia Revolution: How A Bunch of Nobodies Created The World's Greatest Encyclopedia, Andrew Lih (2009)
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Clay Shirkey (2008)
Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, Zeynep Tufekci (2018)
How to Create a City of Science, a keynote by Meta Knol & me for the KM World 2021 conference back in November, is about the development of the digital/physical concept for the Leiden 2022 European City of Science initiative, which Meta directs.
Aside from the revelation of her team’s astonishing, 365-days of community-owned and community-led programming, two key moments from Meta’s remarks really stand out for me.
At 18:44, Meta talks about her realization (sparked by some research and thinking I did in response to this tweet) that the messy stuff — content and engagement that is authentic, original, and intuitive — wins out over the steady and predictable “fixed formats” often preferred by traditional organizations.
The other moment that sticks out for me comes at 21:10 where Meta talks about abandoning the traditional frameworks of target groups and “pre-fixed media strategies.”
The Leiden 2022 European City of Science formally opens in a public webcast at 2pm CET Saturday.
I just posted a new essay, I Went To A Bar For Time Travelers, subtitled “Can museums save the world'?
It’s an un-edited, pre-publication draft of a piece for for Seize the Moment: Rethinking the Museum (Marsha Semmel, Ken Yellis, Avi Decter, ed.) to be published in early 2022 by Rowman and Littlefield. It is also an expansion of a short piece I wrote with the same title for Ten Perspectives on the Future of Digital Culture, a 2018 publication commemorating the 10th anniversary of Europeana.
The basic idea of the essay is to use a very modest, first-person time-travel narrative as a way to speak bluntly about what I see as the cultural sector’s reticence to get much involved in climate action and social justice.
In one passage I find myself standing at my office window looking out at the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the Smithsonian Institution in the days, months, and years following 9-11 (a very real memory for me and one that has shaped much of my work over the last 20 years).
How would these three, august institutions help us understand what had happened to us as a nation? What would they do to help us chart our way forward in this complex and dangerous world?
As I stared into my beer, I couldn’t think of a single thing that any of these institutions, or even museums in general, had done to help Americans think clearer thoughts or make better decisions after 9/11. It wasn’t a museum’s job, or so we thought. Just hunker down, entertain the guests, conserve the collections and don’t rock the boat. So we lost our minds and went to war for 20 years without even an exhibition catalog as a souvenir.
More at I Went To A Bar For Time Travelers (Can museums save the world?).
* * * On a related note, in November, 2021 I’m organizing a workshop and strategy charrette to try and do something to jumpstart real action from the cultural sector. We need help funding travel for participants. Please give us a hand!
GoFundMe: Help Send Climate Activists To The Hague
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-send-climate-activists-to-the-hague
Image credits: Remix of ‘The Boyfriend’ by Alžbeta Halušková. CC BY-SA. Source material: Za frajerom | Hanula, Jozef. Slovak National Gallery. Public domain. Creator: Alžbeta Halušková. Date: 2018. Country: Slovakia. CC BY-SA
Robert Kagan’s gut-wrenching essay in the Washington Post on Sunday about the crisis in American democracy (see below) reminded me of this 2018 piece by Zeynep Tufekci in the MIT Technology Review, How social media Took us from Tahir Square to Donald Trump.
At the end, Tufekci argues that while corporate social media and Russian election interference were a horrible influence on democratic processes, Russian trolls didn’t get us to where we are by themselves.
“This has been a striking repudiation of the idea that there is an online and an offline world, and that what is said online is in some way kept online. I hope that this eliminates the conception from people’s minds.”
There is perhaps no better place to witness what the culture of disinformation has already wrought in America than a Trump campaign rally.
Tony Willnow, a 34-year-old maintenance worker who had an American flag wrapped around his head, observed that Trump had won because he said things no other politician would say. When I asked him if it mattered whether those things were true, he thought for a moment before answering. “He tells you what you want to hear,” Willnow said. “And I don’t know if it’s true or not — but it sounds good, so fuck it.”
The political theorist Hannah Arendt once wrote that the most successful totalitarian leaders of the 20th century instilled in their followers “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism.” When they were lied to, they chose to believe it. When a lie was debunked, they claimed they’d known all along — and would then “admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” Over time, Arendt wrote, the onslaught of propaganda conditioned people to “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”
Leaving the rally, I thought about Arendt, and the swaths of the country that are already gripped by the ethos she described. Should it prevail in 2020, the election’s legacy will be clear — not a choice between parties or candidates or policy platforms, but a referendum on reality itself.
In a Facebook experiment published in Nature that was conducted on a whopping 61 million people, some randomly selected portion of this group received a neutral message to “go vote,” while others, also randomly selected, saw slightly more social version of the encouragement: small thumbnail pictures of a few of their friends who reported having voted were shown within the “go vote” pop-up.
The researchers measured that this slight tweak — completely within Facebook's control and conducted without the consent or notification of any of the millions of Facebook users — caused about 340,000 additional people to turn out to vote in the 2010 U.S. congressional elections.
(The true number may even be higher since the method of matching voter files to Facebook names only works for exact matches.)
That significant effect—from a one-time, single tweak—is more than four times the number of votes that determined that Donald Trump would be the winner of the 2016 election for presidency in the United States.
On the evening of August 13 [2014], the police appeared on the streets of Ferguson in armored vehicles and wearing military gear, with snipers poised in position and pointing guns at the protesters. That is when I first noticed the news of Ferguson on Twitter—and was startled at such a massive overuse of police force in a suburban area in the United States.
On Twitter, among about a thousand people around the world that I follow, and which was still sorted chronologically at the time, the topic became dominant.
On Facebook's algorithmically controlled news feed, however, it was as if nothing had happened.
As I inquired more broadly, it appeared that Facebook’s algorithm may have decided that the Ferguson stories were lower priority to show to many users than other, more algorithm-friendly ones.
Instead of news of the Ferguson protests, my own Facebook's news feed was dominated by the “ice-bucket challenge,” a worthy cause in which people poured buckets of cold water over their heads and, in some cases, donated to an amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) charity. Many other people were reporting a similar phenomenon.
Facebook's algorithm was not prioritizing posts about the “Ice Bucket Challenge” rather than Ferguson posts because of a nefarious plot by Facebook's programmers or marketing department to bury the nascent social movement. The algorithm they designed and whose priorities they set, combined with the signals they allowed users on the platform to send, created that result.
Selected passages and quotes from Ryan Mac and Craig Silverman’s outstanding piece in Buzzfeed News, Hurting People At Scale: Facebook’s Employees Reckon With The Social Network They’ve Built
On July 1, Max Wang, a Boston-based software engineer who was leaving Facebook after more than seven years, shared a video on the company’s internal discussion board that was meant to serve as a warning.
“I think Facebook is hurting people at scale,” he wrote in a note accompanying the video. “If you think so too, maybe give this a watch.”
Most employees on their way out of the “Mark Zuckerberg production” typically post photos of their company badges along with farewell notes thanking their colleagues. Wang opted for a clip of himself speaking directly to the camera. What followed was a 24-minute clear-eyed hammering of Facebook’s leadership and decision-making over the previous year.
Yaël Eisenstat, Facebook's former election ads integrity lead, said the employees’ concerns reflect her experience at the company, which she believes is on a dangerous path heading into the election.
“All of these steps are leading up to a situation where, come November, a portion of Facebook users will not trust the outcome of the election because they have been bombarded with messages on Facebook preparing them to not trust it,” she told BuzzFeed News.
She said the company’s policy team in Washington, DC, led by Joel Kaplan, sought to unduly influence decisions made by her team, and the company’s recent failure to take appropriate action on posts from President Trump shows employees are right to be upset and concerned.
“These were very clear examples that didn't just upset me, they upset Facebook’s employees, they upset the entire civil rights community, they upset Facebook’s advertisers. If you still refuse to listen to all those voices, then you're proving that your decision-making is being guided by some other voice,” she said.
Replying to Wang’s video and comments, Facebook’s head of artificial intelligence Yann LeCun wrote,
Other employees, like [engineer Dan Abramov], the engineer, have seized the moment to argue that Facebook has never been neutral, despite leadership’s repeated attempts to convince employees otherwise, and as such needed to make decisions to limit harm. Facebook has proactively taken down nudity, hate speech, and extremist content, while also encouraging people to participate in elections — an act that favors democracy, he wrote.
“As employees, we can’t entertain this illusion,” he said in his June 26 memo titled “Facebook Is Not Neutral.” “There is nothing neutral about connecting people together. It’s literally the opposite of the status quo.”
Zuckerberg seems to disagree. On June 5, he wrote that Facebook errs on the “side of free expression” and made a series of promises that his company would push for racial justice and fight for voter engagement.
The sentiment, while encouraging, arrived unaccompanied by any concrete plans. On Facebook’s internal discussion board, the replies rolled in.
“Social media is a nuance destruction machine…”
The full quote, in response to a question about so-called “cancel culture”, was, “What I find a little discouraging is that it appears to me that social media is a nuance destruction machine, and I don’t think that’s helpful for a democracy.”
“Welcome to 2020, time travelers, where white grandads fighting for racial equity mid pandemic are equipped with n95s and super charged leaf blowers to ‘blow the tear gas away.’”
