Technology

information & communication technology

adapting to the network era

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The TIMN model developed by David Ronfeldt states that people have only organized in three basic forms — Tribes, Institutions, Markets — and that a fourth form appears to be developing in societies — Networks. I have suggested that new forms appear and are adopted when the dominant form of communication changes. Institutions developed with the advent of Writing. Markets grew to dominance with Printing. It looks like digital (electric) communications are pushing us toward Network forms.

I use Marshall McLuhan’s Laws of Media and his tetrad for sensemaking to understand the effects of new communication technologies.

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the house always wins

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Terry Yu discusses the perils of creating online content and distributing it via consumer social media platforms. Here are the highlights of Yu’s Twitter thread discussing survey data from 150 ‘creators’.

  • 90% are burnt out
  • 71% are considering leaving social media
  • 51% say it is taxing to make a living on social media

The main contributor to this pressure is of course — the algorithm. Creating on social media media looks very easy at first but then the pressures of competition and changes to the algorithm ensure that the platform makes the most profit. With consumer social media, the house always wins.

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facebook is not a trusted space

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The time has come. Facebook is in the news today and not as the tech media darling it likes to portray itself as.

“Former Facebook (FB.O) employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen will urge the U.S. Congress on Tuesday to regulate the social media giant, which she plans to liken to tobacco companies that for decades denied that smoking damaged health, according to prepared testimony seen by Reuters.” —Reuters 2021-10-04

In 2007, I asked if we need an alternative to Facebook — As we become more interconnected and use the Web for problem solving, finding love and sharing our sorrow, we should seriously consider public infrastructure as the backbone for social networking. Just as we have funded roads and airports, we need to provide safe and open platforms for online community forming.

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top tools 2021

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Every year, Jane Hart asks, “What are the most popular digital tools for learning and why?”. This is the fifteenth year Jane asked this question — and compiled the results into a valuable resource — and this is my tenth year responding.

Once again my responses have not changed much from my 2020 tools list. I explained last year why I used these tools.

Zoom has moved up, for obvious reasons given the pandemic and lockdowns. WordPress remains on top as it powers this blog, my online workshops, and our community. I have been listening to more podcasts this past year, so Overcast has moved into 10th place.

Two important sensemaking types of tools that everyone should use are feed aggregators and social bookmarks. Though the specific tools may change, everyone needs a way to control the push of information and a way to save, categorize, and annotate resources for later use. For the last two years I have I used Feedly and Pinboard.

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we need simulation!

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The background to this story, explaining the difficulties I had in trying to establish a methodology to select simulation in the support of training programs is here — L&D Outside the Box. That story started in 1994 and ended in 2013. I do not know what has transpired since then, but I do hope that the training field has developed an informed process to select and use simulation to support learning. Somehow, I have doubts, and would love to be proven wrong.

In that article I concluded that L&D professionals have to master their own field as well the business they support. In addition, they have to understand that few outside L&D think that what they do is important. It’s a big challenge, and learning is becoming critical to all businesses. It is up to L&D to be part of this by developing science-based and practice-based methods.

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a global clown show

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In 2007 I was concerned that Facebook was selling personal data. That same year I asked if there could be a public alternative to Facebook. By 2010 I had left the platform.

This year, after our local newspaper closed, I commented that we are now dependent on this global corporation — that uses our data to manipulate us — as our main form of communication. It is as if we live in a company-owned town, and buy all of our goods from the company store, using a party telephone line that the bosses listen in on. This is directly the fault of government, organizational, and community leaders who have either been lazy, ignorant, or perhaps malicious in promoting this control platform to engage others.

I have faulted our common natural stupidity for following along with the costly convenience of using Facebook as the default communications medium. Christopher Wylie, the whistle-blower for the Cambridge Analytica scandal, said that, “The internet is part and parcel of democracy now, whether you like it or not … Do we need rules that we as a society agree on, with independent regulators who are on our side, not on shareholders’ side?”

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blocking the trackers

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It’s hard to stay clean in a dirty world. I have been trying to keep my site clean and not help the surveillance capitalists (e.g. Google, Facebook, etc.) to extract data about visitors to this site. I started by getting rid of Google Analytics. It was actually liberating to no longer focus on vanity metrics. Recently I have made changes like adding plugins to my WordPress site, such as Disable Google Fonts & Disable User Gravatar. But I was still helping the silicon valley ad-tracking business.

So I used a real-time website privacy inspector, Blacklight, to show me what I was missing.

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dwindling jobs

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In Only Humans Need Apply, the authors note that one phenomenon of machine automation and augmentation is a decrease in entry-level jobs.

“We seem to have automated away the first few rungs of the traditional career ladder. In automating the routinized work that people used to cut their teeth on, they have also eliminated the means to pick up ‘soft skills’ to be effective with customers and within a large organization … In order to enter step-in jobs at early levels in their careers, students will need to acquire as much knowledge as they possibly can while in school, and as much on-the-job training while in internships.”

Tom Graves, in — Where have all the good jobs gone? — digs deeper into this phenomenon in a recent blog post.

“But as machines and IT-systems take on more and more of the routine rule-based and analytic decisions – the ‘easily repeatable processes’, the ‘automatable’ aspects of business – a key side-effect is, almost by definition, that the skill-levels needed to resolve the ‘non-automatable’ decisions will increase … To put it the other way round, the machines do all of the easy work, and (usually) do it well: but that means that all the hard work is left to the humans.”

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power shifts

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“The illiterate of the 21st Century are not those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.” ―Alvin Toffler,

I read Toffler’s book, Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century, shortly after it was published in 1990. He saw a shift in power developing due to advances in technology — from force and wealth — to knowledge.

It means that we are creating new networks of knowledge … linking concepts to one another in startling ways … building up amazing hierarchies of inference … spawning new theories, hypotheses, and images, based on novel assumptions, new languages, codes, and logics. Businesses, governments, and individuals are collecting and storing more sheer data than any previous generation in history (creating a massive, confusing gold mine for tomorrow’s historians).

But more important, we are interrelating data in more ways, giving them context, and thus forming them into information; and we are assembling chunks of information into larger and larger models and architectures of knowledge.

None of this implies that the data are correct; information, true; and knowledge, wise. But it does imply vast changes in the way we see the world, create wealth, and exercise power.

Not all this new knowledge is factual or even explicit. Much knowledge, as the term is used here, is unspoken, consisting of assumptions piled atop assumptions, of fragmentary models, of unnoticed analogies, and it includes not simply logical and seemingly unemotional information data, but values, the products of passion and emotion, not to mention imagination and intuition.

It is today’s gigantic upheaval in the knowledge base of society — not computer hype or mere financial manipulation — that explains the rise of a super-symbolic economy.

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top tools 2020

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Every year, Jane Hart asks, “What are the most popular, useful, valuable, digital tools for learning?” and this year has added, “How has lockdown affected the tools used for learning and development in 2020?” Everyone can add their voice, and voting ends 21 August.

In my case, the tools I use for learning have not changed much since I posted top tools for 2019.

One change I have made is to use Pinboard for my social bookmarks. It is a move I am making toward paying for my online services.

Even though I have been working remotely for most of the past 17 years, I saw an increase in Zoom meetings. I have used Zoom for five years but the past six months have been kind of crazy with meeting requests. I have collected a few social bookmarks on distributed work in the process.

Top Tools for Learning 2020

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