Clay Shirky, new media analyst extraordinaire, on why new media sometimes make it harder to learn.

I can't imagine bothering to do lectures if I let people read other stuff while I was talking, whether that other stuff was books or magazines or Facebook or Snapchat. I think Clay was being far too tolerant before.

R U Reading This?

This week, we were asked to respond to Motoko Rich's 2008 NY Times article "R U Reading".

As I must, I approached it as a scientist. That's my background and training and aspiration. From that angle, Ms. Rich's effort comes across as not fully thought out. She tries to evaluate the relative value of "old style" reading vs. newer styles, but fails to define either very well. New reading apparently is anything that isn't novels or long (New York Times-style?) articles. Examples given include fanfiction, text messaging, and social media. Given the rapidly-changing media landscape, it's not even clear that this selection is relevant. Younger people still text, but Rich didn't consider Twitter, much less Snapchat or Tumblr. She doesn't even mention blogs!

In addition to not defining the types of reading, she doesn't define the measure of "better." Does she mean school performance? Job performance? Personal satisfaction? Entertainment? Cultural continuity? She mentions or hints at them all without fixing on one or a set to guide her writing, making it oddly unfocused.

She also avoids citing any evidence. She mentions test scores twice, but no numbers are in the article, very odd to a science-trained person like me. She just quotes various academics and other authority figures giving their opinions.

In the end, the article is valuable for the questions it raises, but does its best never to answer any.

The Changing Face of Success: Evolutionary perspective on new literacy

So, as I understand the intent here, this course considers "literacies" to refer to different modalities to process or learn information, and "new literacies" to refer to modalities that are enabled by relatively recent technologies, especially digital ones.

Taking the idea of "new literacy" as given for the moment (though I doubt its utility and reality and will write about that later), what are the pitfalls of, say, "Google literacy", the ability to find out almost anything in seconds with universal web search? Well ... Socrates got that right. People will have the appearance of wisdom but with no knowledge actually "in their heads", can they think usefully about a subject? Obviously there are huge benefits to learning facts as needed from your smartphone or other screen, but very few good things come unmixed with benefits.

I consider email a "new literacy", although obviously it's a development of paper mail and the telegraph before it. Email taught us to value immediacy (which led to texting and thus Twitter), and led to the development of a new skill: rapidly sorting "junk" text from valuable. Someone routinely receives 500 emails per day, of which 5 are personally important, 45 may be of some actual signifance, and 400 should be deleted unread. We all know someone who hasn't learned the skill of deleting unread, and wastes much time and cognition on worthless email. I'm not speaking of spam here, just email that has zero relevance to the reader. 

So one thing a new literacy does is select people (in the evolutionary sense) based on new criteria. Slow readers will find most office jobs very hard to do in the 21'st Century. Slow "filterers" who can't quickly recognize useless items will likewise be less efficient, not just in a business setting but trying to use new media such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or Snapchat. The criteria for social as well as financial success have changed.

I contend, therefore, that "filtering selections rapidly" is a new evolutionary driver, which was far less important before the invention of email and its children.