MISC Monday: MLK media literacy; social media stress; the attention economy, and more

• Almetria Vaba of PBS Learning Media has posted a collection of resources for exploring media literacy through the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, jr.:

Examine the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement with hundreds of PBS LearningMedia resources.  Here is a sampling of resources from the extensive offering in PBS LearningMedia. Use these resources to explore media literacy from historical documentaries to media coverage of social movements.

• Sonia Paul at PBS MediaShift reported on a recent Pew Research study on social media, stress, and the "cost of caring":

Among the survey’s major findings is that women are much more likely than men to feel stressed after becoming aware of stressful events in the lives of others in their networks.

“Stress is kind of contagious in that way,” said Keith Hampton, an associate professor at Rutgers University and the chief author of the report. “There’s a circle of sharing and caring and stress.”

• Lily Hay Newman reported on the survey for Slate:

In a survey of 1,801 adults, Pew found that frequent engagement with digital services wasn’t directly correlated to increased stress. Women who used social media heavily even recorded lower stress. The survey relied on the Perceived Stress Scale, a widely used stress-measurement tool developed in the early 1980s.

“We began to work fully expecting that the conventional wisdom was right, that these technologies add to stress,” said Lee Rainie, the director of Internet, science, and technology research at Pew. “So it was a real shock when [we] first looked at the data and ... there was no association between technology use, especially heavy technology use, and stress.”

• LiveScience writer Elizabeth Palermo looked at the gendered differences found by the study:

The higher incidence of stress among the subset of technology users who are aware of stressful events in the lives of others is something that Hampton and his colleagues call "the cost of caring."

"You can use these technologies and, as a woman, it's probably going to be beneficial for your level of stress. But every now and then, bad things are going to happen to people you know, and there's going to be a cost for that," Hampton said.

• Nicholas Carr recently penned an editorial for The Guardian considering whether we are becoming too reliant on computers:

The real danger we face from computer automation is dependency. Our inclination to assume that computers provide a sufficient substitute for our own intelligence has made us all too eager to hand important work over to software and accept a subservient role for ourselves. In designing automated systems, engineers and programmers also tend to put the interests of technology ahead of the interests of people. They transfer as much work as possible to the software, leaving us humans with passive and routine tasks, such as entering data and monitoring readouts. Recent studies of the effects of automation on work reveal how easily even very skilled people can develop a deadening reliance on computers. Trusting the software to handle any challenges that may arise, the workers fall victim to a phenomenon called “automation complacency”.

• David Whelan at Vice interviewed Carr on the issue of technology dependency: 

Should we be scared of the future?
I think we should be worried of the future. We are putting ourselves passively into the hands of those who design the systems. We need to think critically about that, even as we maintain our enthusiasm of the great inventions that are happening. I'm not a Luddite. I'm not saying we should trash our laptops and run off to the woods.

We're basically living out Freud's death drive, trying our best to turn ourselves into inorganic lumps.
Even before Freud, Marx made the point that the underlying desire of technology seemed to be to create animate technology and inanimate humans. If you look at the original radios, they were transmission as well as reception devices, but before long most people just stopped transmitting and started listening.

• Writing at Figure/Ground, John Dowd argues that being there still matters for teaching and learning in the digital age:

From an educational perspective, what we must understand is the relationship between information and meaning. Meaning is not an inevitable outcome of access to information but rather, emerges slowly when one has cultivated his or her abilities to incorporate that information in purposeful and ethical ways. Very often this process requires a slowdown rather than a speedup, the latter of which being a primary bias of many digital technologies. The most powerful educational experiences stem from the relationships formed between teacher and student, peer and peer. A smart classroom isn’t necessarily one that includes the latest technologies, but one that facilitates greater interaction among teachers and students, and responsibility for the environment within which one learns. A smart classroom is thus spatially, not primarily technologically, smart. While the two are certainly not mutually exclusive (and much has been written on both), we do ourselves a disservice when privileging the latter over the former.

• Dowd's argument here is similar to Carr's thoughts on MOOCs:

In education, computers are also falling short of expectations. Just a couple of years ago, everyone thought that massive open online courses – Moocs – would revolutionise universities. Classrooms and teachers seemed horribly outdated when compared to the precision and efficiency of computerised lessons. And yet Moocs have largely been a flop. We seem to have underestimated the intangible benefits of bringing students together with a real teacher in a real place. Inspiration and learning don’t flow so well through fibre-optic cables.

• MediaPost editor Steve Smith writes about his relationship with his iPhone, calling it life's new remote:

The idea that the cell phone is an extension of the self is about as old as the device itself. We all recall the hackneyed “pass your phone to the person next to you” thought experiment at trade shows four or five years ago. It was designed to make the point of how “personally” we take these devices.

And now the extraordinary and unprecedented intimacy of these media devices is a part of legal precedent. The recent Supreme Court ruling limiting searches of cell phone contents grounded the unanimous opinion on an extraordinary observation. Chief Justice John Roberts described these devices as being “such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy.”

We are only beginning to understand the extent to which these devices are blending the functionality of media with that of real world tools. And it is in line with one of Marshall McLuhan’s core observations in his "Understanding Media" book decades ago.

• Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic contributed a piece to The Guardian referencing Carr to consider how technology has downgraded attention:

As early as 1971 Herbert Simon observed that “what information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it”. Thus instead of reaping the benefits of the digital revolution we are intellectually deprived by our inability to filter out sensory junk in order to translate information into knowledge. As a result, we are collectively wiser, in that we can retrieve all the wisdom of the world in a few minutes, but individually more ignorant, because we lack the time, self-control, or curiosity to do it.

There are also psychological consequences of the distraction economy. Although it is too soon to observe any significant effects from technology on our brains, it is plausible to imagine that long-term effects will occur. As Nicholas Carr noted in The Shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains, repeated exposure to online media demands a cognitive change from deeper intellectual processing, such as focused and critical thinking, to fast autopilot processes, such as skimming and scanning, shifting neural activity from the hippocampus (the area of the brain involved in deep thinking) to the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain engaged in rapid, subconscious transactions). In other words, we are trading speed for accuracy and prioritise impulsive decision-making over deliberate judgment. In the words of Carr: “The internet is an interruption system. It seizes our attention only to scramble it”.

• James Vincent at The Verge covered a recent study that links nighttime screen use with less REM sleep:

The research carried out by the Harvard Medical School and published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences studied the sleeping patterns of 12 volunteers over a two-week period. Each individual read a book before their strict 10PM bedtime — spending five days with an iPad and five days with a paper book. The scientists found that when reading on a lit screen, volunteers took an average of 10 minutes longer to fall asleep and received 10 minutes less REM sleep. Regular blood samples showed they also had lower levels of the sleep hormone melatonin consistent with a circadian cycle delayed by one and a half hour. 

• At AdBusters, Douglas Haddow writes that sleep is the enemy of capital:

Ever since the frequent cocaine user and hater of sleep Thomas Edison flicked on the first commercially-viable electric lightbulb, a process has taken hold through which the darkness of sleep time has been systematically deconstructed and illuminated.

Most of us now live in insomniac cities with starless skies, full of twinkling neon signage and flickering gadgets that beg us to stay awake longer and longer. But for all this technological innovation, we still must submit to our diurnal rhythm if we want to stay alive.

And even though sleep may “frustrate and confound strategies to exploit and reshape it,” as Crary says, it, like anything, remains a target of exploitation and reshaping - and in some cases, all-out elimination.

• In an interview with TruthOut to discuss his latest book, Robert McChesney addresses telecommunications monopolies, net neutrality, and advocates radical solutions to systemic problems: 

What is striking about this corporate monopolization of the internet is that all the wealth and power has gone to a small number of absolutely enormous firms. As we enter 2015, 13 of the 33 most valuable corporations in the United States are internet firms, and nearly all of them enjoy monopolistic market power as economists have traditionally used the term. If you continue to scan down the list there are precious few internet firms to be found. There is not much of a middle class or even an upper-middle class of internet corporations to be found.

This poses a fundamental problem for democracy, though it is one that mainstream commentators and scholars appear reluctant to acknowledge: If economic power is concentrated in a few powerful hands you have the political economy for feudalism, or authoritarianism, not democracy. Concentrated economic power invariably overwhelms the political equality democracy requires, leading to routinized corruption and an end of the rule of law. That is where we are today in the United States.

• In light of recent terrorist attacks and renewed hysteria about fundamentalist ideologies, I revisited Mark Manson's essay probing why there seems to be more fundamentalism in the world today:

The short answer is technology. Yes, Facebook really did ruin everything. The explosion in communication technologies over the past decades has re-oriented society and put more psychological strain on us all to find our identities and meaning. For some people, the way to ease this strain is to actually reject complexity and ambiguity for absolutist beliefs and traditional ideals.

Philosopher Charles Taylor wrote that it would be just as difficult to not believe in God in 1500 as it is to believe in God in the year 2000. Obviously, most of humanity believes in God today, but it’s certainly become a much more complicated endeavor. With the emergence of modern science, evolution, liberal democracy, and worldwide 24-hour news coverage of corruption, atrocities, war and religious hypocrisy, today a person of faith has their beliefs challenged more in a week than a person a few generations ago would have in half a lifetime.

POTUS on Net Neutrality: treat Internet as a utility

• Yesterday President Barack Obama released a statement on the future of the Internet. In a written statement and accompanying 2-minute video, Obama outlined an approach to Internet policy that supports net neutrality provisions and suggests reclassifying the Internet as a utility. It's an encouraging show of support for net neutrality advocates, but as Obama makes clear in the statement, it is ultimately up to the FCC as an independent regulatory agency to decide the future of Internet regulation. From Don Reisinger and Roger Cheng's CNET writeup:

Obama wades into a contentious debate that has raged over how to treat Internet traffic, which has only heated up as the FCC works to prepare an official guideline. Those rules were expected to be made available later this year, though reports now claim they may be delayed until early 2015. The debate has centered on whether broadband should be placed under Title II regulation under the Telecommunications Act, which already tightly controls phone services.

Proponents believes Title II regulation would ensure the free and fair flow of traffic across the Internet. Opponents, however, believe the onerous rules would limit investment in the infrastructure and new services, and that toll roads of sorts would provide better service to companies that can support their higher traffic volumes. That has created widespread concern that ISPs could throttle service in some instance, intentionally slowing down some content streams and speeding up others.

• From Jacob Kastrenakes at The Verge's article on the statement:

In a statement outlining what he'd like internet service to look like, Obama highlights four major points: internet providers wouldn't be allowed to block websites offering legal content, they wouldn't be allowed to intentionally slow down or speed up certain websites or services based on their own preferences, and they wouldn't be able to offer paid fast lanes. Obama also asks that the FCC investigate and potentially apply net neutrality rules to the interconnect points that sit between service providers, like Comcast and Verizon, and content providers, like Netflix. That's potentially huge news for Netflix, which has been arguing that this area of the internet should be covered by net neutrality all year.

Obama also asks that the commission apply these rules to mobile internet service. That would be a significant change as well, as mobile service hasn't previously been subject to the same net neutrality rules that wired connections have been. That said, Obama does leave a significant amount of room for exceptions in the wireless space, potentially allowing some amount of throttling so that providers can manage their networks when under heavy use. Notably, his proposal also asks the FCC not to enforce rate regulations on internet service.

• Alex Hern at the Guardian writes that regardless of the effect Obama's statement may have on FCC policy, the President's support for net neutrality sets precedent for the rest of the world:

The president said broadband service was “of the same importance, and must carry the same obligations” as services such as the telephone network, and asked the FCC to classify it as such. For proponents of net neutrality in Britain and elsewhere, having such a powerful supporter to point to is important.

It also bolsters the case for considering internet access as a right that should be safeguarded by government, something suggested by Britain’s Labour Digital group, which proposed that “government should assess the viability of providing free basic internet access to all citizens, possibly as a requirement for participation in 5G auctions, or targeted at children eligible for free school meals”.

• Last week, Jenny Davis at Cyborgology wrote about commodifying voice in the net neutrality debate:

If money is speech, then the poor have the softest voices. A deregulated Internet extends this logic, and cultural logic is what is at stake. The maintenance of net neutrality would exist in tension with the SCOTUS election campaign decision, maintaining a battleground on which the speech-money relationship remains fraught. Net non-neutrality, in whatever form, would combine with the SCOTUS decision, tipping the cultural scales in a sharply capitalistic direction; A direction in which the economic system drives the political system, and rights are things to be earned, bought, and sold.