Really Sadistic Syndication (Jones and Hafner, Ch. 2)

I’m flattered when anyone thinks they know me well enough to recommend something.  It tells me that someone has considered my interests, and thinks that there’s something out there that I will enjoy.  Who doesn’t want an enjoyable distraction delivered to them without having to search for it?  What if it’s being delivered by an algorithm?  Is this similar to human behavior?  How useful is it?  Jones and Hafner’s exploration of how technology collects, organizes, and delivers data in (hopefully) useful information caused me to reflect on all of the media that’s being fed to me daily.

I think I’ve got a better-than-average control of my digital diet, but there is some spam that gets in.  What’s interesting is that it’s mostly of my own doing.  The authors explain several different types of algorithms (29).  I don’t have much trouble with social algorithms, which trawl social media for my supposed interests.  I certainly see the ads that pop up in my Facebook feed, and I’m amused at the sudden appearance of ads for Adobe software that I happen to have just started using and seeking tutorials on.  Maybe some of it is getting through subconsciously, but I’m too cynical to click on practically any of these ads.  They seem like noise to me.

In this way, I’m using what Jones and Hafner refer to as a mental algorithm (30), letting only the data I consider relevant to filter through.  The rest really does get treated like background noise.  But I’ve also set up my own personalized algorithms to aid my sense of digital discovery.  I love the podcast app on my smartphone.  I have a library of podcast feeds that I can refresh at my leisure and instantly have all of the latest episodes.

I tend to collect podcasts by stumbling across one episode, deciding I enjoy it, and hitting “Subscribe.”  It’s simple to press that button.  But it can turn out to be kind of a commitment.  What if I don’t enjoy subsequent episodes quite as much?  What if the feed updates too frequently for me to keep up with the latest episodes?  Or maybe I’ve just got so many feeds updating that I fall behind on some.  Does that mean I don’t enjoy them enough to keep?  Is this the kind of anxiety that replaces the daily fight for survival of most people in human history?

Yeah, probably.

I find I just have to occasionally cull my podcast feeds.  This is another use of mental algorithms on my part.  It’s not too different from what we do in our non-digital lives.  We even sort through personal relationships and decide whether to keep or discard them.  What’s different is where the recommendations are coming from, and how they’re being made.  It’s very easy for me to press a button and give an algorithm the power to push data to me.  Even though I can end that by just as easily pressing a button, it’s not that easy in practice.  My mental algorithm needs a lot of experience to decide when data that I chose to receive stops being useful information.  Hitting “Unsubscribe” isn’t quite like saying goodbye to a friend, but it is taking action to put an end to something.  Then again, I can always hit “Subscribe” again.

Jones, Rodney H., and Christoph A. Hafner.  Understanding Digital Literacies: A Practical Introduction.  London: Routledge, 2012.

Affordances and Constraints of Commerce (Jones & Hafner)

Civilization rests on tools to do things and mediate actions between people.  That’s probably a truism, but it’s a broad concept that lets us examine just about everything that people do and every way we do those things.  Jones and Hafner state that all cultural tools come with built-in affordances and constraints (3).  Fire affords us heat for our camp.  It can also burn our camp to the ground. 

Two cultural tools with possibly less-dramatic affordances and constraints are smart cards and cash registers.  They also happen to work quite well together in something called electronic commerce, which is of some importance to 21^st century life.  A “smart card” resembles a typical credit card, but with a computer chip embedded in it.  This gives it more uses than the old-fashioned magnetic-stripe credit card.  In full disclosure, I should state that I work on the technology side of the credit card processing industry, and know more about the subject than I ever wanted to.

Credit cards in general mark a shift in mediation comparable to Jones and Hafner’s example of the wristwatch.  Instead of the physical weight of cash or change in your wallet or purse, your entire budget might be represented in one flimsy piece of plastic.  That plastic is easy to whip out and swipe.  By removing the physical awkwardness of counting out money, it takes away a psychological barrier as well, making it easier to spend money.  Smart cards chip away a little more at those barriers.  Some can be waved in front of a device that reads the card data in radio waves.  No swiping required, and usually not even a signature or a PIN.  This affords a great degree of convenience, but constrains our need or ability to consider how significant the bytes we just waved away were to our budget. 

The devices that read smart cards will increasingly be found on cash registers.  These devices have gone from being mere repositories of cash and coins to computer terminals linked to inventory systems, banks, and even marketing software.  Souped-up cash registers, or point-of-sale (POS) devices, afford businesses the ability to instantly update their inventory as it changes, move customers quickly through purchases, and monitor their buying habits.

The conveniences of electronic commerce also constrain us.  If a server goes down, and every POS device in the store loses its connection, what happens?  How many times has a customer heard a cashier lament “the system” being down or having problems?  It’s understandable in that the conveniences that both the customer and the cashier are used to have vanished, and both seem helpless.  On the other hand, the same transaction used to be handled with an exchange of cash or coins and some calculations.  How would our ancestors have felt if, after a half-day trek across the prairie to the general store, the clerk told them he couldn’t make a sale because he ran out of paper to record their purchases?

In the same way that we don’t really “know” the time before looking at watch, we’re not really exchanging money with a card the same way we do with cash.  We’re using a different tool to mediate a similar action.  We’re also mediating different relationships with each other.  Customers and merchants don’t have to exchange many words—if any—to make a transaction.  By removing physical money and mental calculations, there’s hardly any time to converse.  Without falling too deeply into dystopian laments of budget-ignorant consumers silently shuffling through checkout lines, the affordance of speedy and accurate transactions are real.  I’ve been to countries where haggling is expected.  The rustic charm of playing psychological games every time you want to buy something wears off eventually.

Socrates was wrong when he worried that writing would turn our minds to mush (11).  But it did fundamentally change civilization; a less robust memory may have freed up a more creative mind.  Likewise, removing more and more thought from the exchange of money will leave lasting changes to society.

Jones, Rodney H., and Christoph A. Hafner.  Understanding Digital Literacies: A Practical Introduction.  London: Routledge, 2012.

How many Literacies can there be?

My grandma likes to treat the comment box on Facebook posts as an open forum.  A photo of my cousin riding a bike will elicit the comment “Did you get a job yet?”  A music video posted by my mom prompts the comment “Did you get those coupons I sent you?”  She doesn’t throw out such non sequiturs in normal conversation.  What’s going on here?  Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel might say she’s lacking in a certain digital literacy, specifically for social media.  Or does she just have a completely different digital literacy from me?

In the introduction to Digital Literacies: Concepts, Policies and Practices, Lankshear and Knobel argue that there are many digital literacies.  The clearest dividing line is between functional and sociocultural literacies.  Grandma’s got the functionality down: she can boot up a computer, open an internet browser, log into Facebook, and type out a message.  The disconnect must be in the sociocultural realm.  As the editors argue, literacy is more than just encoding and decoding something.  That something must also be understood in its context.

The digital world provides many contexts.  Lankshear and Knobel give a non-exhaustive list of “blogs, video games, text messages, online social network pages, discussion forums, internet memes, FAQs, [and] online search results” (5).  Posting a plea for help to a veterinary advice forum about your cat’s sudden hair loss takes a different mindset from searching for funny photos of hairless cats.  The editors argue that there are not just different digital contexts, but different digital literacies.  They define literacies as “different ways of reading and writing and the ‘enculturations' that lead to becoming proficient in them” and state that, because we are all “apprenticed” more than one, we must speak of literacies, in the plural (7).

I can’t object to drawing a line between reading something and understanding it.  I’m also on board with the idea that we’re all interpreting media in wildly different contexts, with varying proficiencies.  I’m just not sure it necessarily follows that this constitutes different literacies.  Why isn’t just as valid to say that there is only one concept of digital literacy and we all use it in different contexts to different degrees?  Perhaps anticipating this question, Lankshear and Knobel chose for the first chapter of their collection a work by David Bawden called “Origins and Concepts of Digital Literacy.”  That’s literacy, singular.

Bawden builds up a definition of digital literacy from the fundamental ideas of literacy itself.  He gives an overview of the concept of “information literacy” as opposed to “computer literacy.”  While the latter is almost purely functional, information literacy involves “the evaluation of information, and an appreciation of the nature of information resources” (21).  These are broad concepts, but the division mirrors Lankshear and Knobel’s separation of functional and sociocultural literacies, applied specifically to the digital world.

In collecting components of definitions from different authors, Bawden can’t help but repeatedly note the definition offered by Paul Gilster: “digital literacy is about mastering ideas, not keystrokes.”  It is, Bawden says, “the current form of the traditional idea of literacy per se—the ability to read, write and otherwise deal with information using the technologies and formats of the time—and an essential life skill” (18). 

I can get behind “ideas, not keystrokes.”  It’s broad, but if one division matters most, it’s between functional and sociocultural literacies.  Grandma might be a smidge less digitally-literate than others, but if it’s an essential life skill, she’s doing alright.

Lankshear, Colin, and Michele Knobel, eds. Digital Literacies: Concepts, Policies and Practices.  New York: Peter Lang, 2008.