Bending The Arc April 2024
A Social Justice Newsletter for Educators
Whether you believe in flying saucers or the free market or just about anything else, you are (if you are human) prone to using certainty to avoid facing up to the fact that you could be wrong. That’s why, when we feel ourselves losing ground in a fight, we often grow more rather than less adamant about our claims - not because we are so sure that we are right, but because we fear that we are not.
Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error (2010), p. 179
Seeing is believing (or not)
In the first year of the pandemic when walks outdoors became precious opportunities to safely socialize or also spend time alone, I remember taking a new interest in the nature right outside my doorstep. I wondered about the names of trees and even considered embarking on a quest to recognize birds and their unique songs. Although I did not pursue either of those paths, I gradually became a more astute observer of my surroundings.
It recently dawned on me that early spring is an ideal time to pay attention to birds in trees and bushes. Branches are not yet covered in leaves but birds of several types are abundant and loud. I’ve found that a pause to look up and follow the call is often rewarded with a sighting that may last longer than a moment. Locating one bird convinces me that I’ll find the next, and so on. Naming them is not yet my charge but I can at least notice an unfamiliar bird. That’s progress and I’ll take it.
Meanwhile, after reading and re-reading a novel about labor made invisible, my mind has been wrestling with ideas around what we see, what we believe we’re seeing, what is hidden and how the powerful make decisions about what is shown, seen and consumed. Add to that the flurry of generative AI hype and resulting discourse about its capabilities, risks, illusions and costs and I have found it challenging to not feel overwhelmed by our current information/attention economy.
The good news: You and I do not have to navigate these treacherous waters on our own. We do in fact have agency and intelligence and experience which can help us form communities of trust and shared strength. This is the primary message I gleaned from Tricia Friedman’s keynote at the 2024 CEESA Conference in Malta. She spoke about surviving the “infocalypse” and facing our fears about our futures in the context of rapidly evolving technological, social and cultural shifts. Fundamentally, she highlighted the primacy of people connecting with other people, sharing critical perspectives and being open to possibly being wrong. Drawing on the work of Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, Tricia pointed us towards “intellectual humility” as central to staying alert and flexible in our approaches to new information. If I struggle with being hopeful these days, Tricia’s keynote gave me some promising handles to grab onto and that it would be a crime not to share. (The linked and beautifully formulated SHAPE infographic can be found HERE).
I would also encourage folks to check out Dannagal Goldthwaite Young’s work. I have not yet read her most recent book, Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive our Appetite for Misinformation, but it’s high on my TBR list. As an intro, I listened to this insightful conversation with news anchor, Cherri Gregg. I invite you to take the time because Young digs into the history of political discourse leading to the current American quagmire of deep polarization, disappointing electoral options, and a billionaire-owned media landscape.
Countering Mis- and Disinformation
Another book that relates to mis- and disinformation recently arrived: Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions About What to Believe Online by Mike Caulfield and Sam Wineburg. I strongly encourage libraries to procure one or a couple of copies for their patrons. In a note to students about engaging with large language models (LLMs), the authors ask them to bear this in mind:
You know what ideas you’re trying to express. Your research prepares you to evaluate, revise, extend. Asked to defend a particular point, you know where you found the evidence to support your claims. ChatGPT severs that linkage; claims arrive naked of footnotes. The result? Free-floating information - whether true or downright false. (p. 220)
You may have already encountered Caulfield’s streamlined process for a first assessment of online information, SIFT: Stop, Investigate the source, Find other coverage, Trace the claim, quote or media to the original context. Again, in a media environment increasingly prone to offer synthetic images and text, our capacity to pause long enough to consider the source and the item’s potential veracity will need support, to say the least.
Pulling back the curtain on Gen AI
It frustrates me to spend as much time as I do reading about generative AI and its uses. I would rather not be interested or bothered. I’m happy to do my own writing and seek out photos that someone has actually taken. Yes, and. As an educator and learner, it feels irresponsible to ignore or tune out a tech hype cycle with such far reaching consequences and costs, as well as possible benefits. So I keep reading.
One resource I have found both compelling, well researched and highly accessible is a Cartography of Generative AI produced by an arts collective, Estampa:
Estampa is a collective of programmers, filmmakers and researchers working in the fields of audiovisual media and digital environments. Our practice is based on a critical and archaeological approach to audiovisual technologies, on researching the tools and ideologies of artificial intelligence and on the resources of experimental animation.
Tune in to this conversation between tech critics, Paris Marx and Joanne McNeil on Tech Won’t Save Us. They talk about McNeil’s new novel, Wrong Way (the book I have read twice now), self-driving cars and the human labor on the underside of AI powered systems.
Or listen to researcher Mary L. Gray, co-author of Ghost Work, describing the invisible labor that enables service gadgets and platforms to produce their desired results seemingly automagically. I especially appreciated her talk with Adam Gamwell on This Anthro Life where she demystifies the assumptions behind automating tasks, referring specifically to “the paradox of automation’s last mile.”
I do think we should be bringing a very critical lens to the things we build are often with the assumption: I want somebody else to do it, and I don't even want to have to ask. That as a starting point shuts down a host of other possibilities for technologies that are supportive, facilitate help us attend to each other rather than tune each other out that's what frustrates the heck out of me about, um the course where we continue to find ourselves, which is what we call the paradox of automation's last mile.
Every time we aim to put automation in place so that we don't have to do something as humans we are reproducing this set of assumptions that there's something obvious or something unskilled about connecting with each other.
Mary L. Gray on This Anthro Life Podcast, Apr. 8, 2021
What I’m really trying to say is: please, please, we cannot afford to be lulled into sleep at the wheel. The majority of our modern conveniences, whether it’s summoning Alexa, or booking an Uber almost anywhere in the world, or using a no-checkout supermarket - all of these rely on far more human labor than we can (and/or choose not to) fathom. In cleaning up data sets, moderating content, completing checkpoint security within a system of transactions, there are legions of usually precarious workers involved in making our various transactions appear virtually frictionless.
About here is where I should stop. Surely I’ve said enough. All of this with barely a mention of schools, classrooms, students. Yes, and that’s exactly it. Our schools, students and colleagues and systems are operating in this informational and technological context. You are here. We are here. We have to acknowledge that much.
Look up, look into, look around, look out, look over. Look.
Thanks for being here and I’ll look for you in May!
Sherri
Oh, as always, your newsletters are the best part of my day. Thank you for this!
As always such a beautiful and thought provoking newsletter. I love the cycle of you looking at the opening of this and the call to action to continue noticing at the end. Thank you so much for giving my ceesa talk the think time. I appreciate you so so so much.