Serendipity35

Facebook's "supreme court" decided recently to uphold the ban on Donald Trump. For Trump, Facebook was never his vector of choice to get out his messages. He used Twitter and they banned him for life.

The Faceboard board upheld the company's decision to remove Trump. The ban had come after the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Their claim had been that he had broken Facebook's rules about praising violence.

The board actually criticized the company for the indefinite suspension. They recommended that the company either ban Trump permanently or set a time frame for when he can return. Facebook said it's now considering the ruling and will determine a "clear and proportionate" action.

The problem is one for a number of social sites that have unmoderated content. So why not moderate user content? For one thing, it is difficult and labor-intensive (though companies are trying have AI help. But another thing concerns Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which was passed in 1996. It says that an “interactive computer service” can’t be treated as the publisher or speaker of third-party content. This protects websites from lawsuits if a user posts something illegal (there are exceptions for copyright violations, sex work-related material, and violations of federal criminal law). Section 230 was written so website owners could moderate sites without worrying about legal liability and it is critical for social media networks, though it applies to many sites and services, including news outlets with comment sections. The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls it “the most important law protecting internet speech.”

The decision the board handed down is more about Facebook than it is about Trump and it was more critical about the way Facebook enforces its rules in what it sees as an arbitrary way. Not so much in support of Trump, the board felt that an indefinite suspension appeared nowhere in Facebook's rules and violates principles of freedom of expression.

Interestingly, President Donald Trump released an executive order targeting Section 230 and social media back in May 2020 and he ly backed Republican efforts to change the law in Congress. After President Biden’s election, he has pushed for the abolition of Section 230 abolition.

We haven't heard the last of Trump, Facebook, or Section 230.

A podcast from Marketplace offered this question: Should kids be taking Fake News 101? My first thought was that they are already getting that class. I based that on my friends who teach in K-12 schools and who have information literacy as part of their curriculum. Validating sources and information has been part of the curriculum for a very long time. It was there when I started teaching almost fifty years ago. Of course, the Internet as a news source is a more recent issue. Has information literacy changed?

The headline says "kids" which suggests K-12 but the "Fake News 101" sounds like an introductory college course. I know that information literacy online and offline was required at a community college I worked at, and validating sources online was part of my social media and communications courses I taught at the undergraduate and graduate level. 

The term "fake news" came into the discussion with President Trump who used it to attack media reports he didn't like and broadly all mainstream media. That isn't something you want to teach. But news that was inaccurate has been around as long as there has been news. I'm sure town criers sometimes called out things that turned out not to be true. 

The term "fake" isn't really the correct term. "Fake" means a thing that is not genuine or a forgery. The news items often being labeled fake in those Trump days were not being singled out because they were not really news. It was news. It generally came from a credible news outlet, such as The New York Times or Washington Post, and in the majority of instances had facts to back it up. 

But, as the podcast points out, from politics to COVID-19, there is a lot of false and inaccurate information on the internet. I would be very reluctant to tell students that Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are credible news sources, but we know that many people get their "news" from these places rather than newspapers.

Helen Lee Bouygues was the guest on that podcast and she is the founder and president of the Reboot Foundation, which teaches critical thinking skills to combat fake news. She says we’re just not inclined to second-guess information when it’s flooding our social media feeds.

Some points she makes:

"It’s actually just a natural human reaction to not want to seek challenging views. And then the second point, there have been studies already conducted that if you are pounded by lies about the information, over time you actually do start believing it."

She prefers that rather than just having teachers "give the facts and get to the answer" that teachers and parents of children, especially of younger age, have children challenge what they’re reading on websites."

She is correct that "this is a skill that can be taught, but it’s not something that [is] innate."

Lee Bouygues based is based in France and she says that there is a standard pedagogy to have students writing papers differently. Students are told to "hone in on your own convictions and the way you write a paper is by thinking about opposing views and counter-arguments that will help you better refine your own thinking. So by looking at counter-arguments, you’re actually doing more metacognition also, which is obviously thinking about your own thinking, which is so important for critical thinking."

Certainly, this skill needs to be honed in older students and in entire communities. I taught an undergraduate critical thinking course and was continually surprised at the gaps I saw in my students' ability to do more critical thinking.

Teaching how to question assumptions, reason through logic, separate facts from opinions and emotions, validate sources, and seek out a diversity of thoughts, facts and opinions are life skills that need to be learned and relearned as the world of information changes.

You are still going to hear more and more this summer and fall about the "new normal" or the "next normal" as we hopefully move out of the pandemic and return to something similar to but not the same as what we called normal in 2019.

Isn't normal always changing? What is normal anyway?

Normality for an individual is when your behavior is consistent with the most common behavior for that person. But normal is also used to describe individual behavior that conforms to the most common behavior in a society. Normal is also at times only recognized in contrast to abnormality.

In schools, we talk about individual student behaviors that are not normal because they contrast with the majority of students. We can talk about an entire college as not following the normal behavior of other colleges.

In March 2021, Rutgers University was the first university I heard announce that all students would be required to be vaccinated in order to be back on campus in September. I am a Rutgers College alum and I was happy to hear the announcement, but it was met with agreement and disagreement immediately. I thought back to when I attended Rutgers in the last century, and to when my sons went off to college in this century. Some vaccinations were required for me and for my sons. The meningitis vaccine was required and is typically given to preteens and teens at 11 to 12 years old with a booster dose at 16 years old. I don't recall any protests about vaccinations for students in K-12 and college being public events before. Typically, vaccinations are recommended for college for measles, mumps, and rubella, meningococcal, human papillomavirus, and influenza.

Talk about "vaccination passports" is a discussion well beyond school campuses.

I read something online (I'm not linking to it) connecting the post-pandemic normal to the New World Order (NWO), which is a conspiracy theory that hypothesizes a secretly emerging totalitarian world government. It's not a new conspiracy. Believers will point to "evidence" such as the reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States having the Latin phrase "novus ordo seclorum", since 1782 and on the back of the U.S. one-dollar bill since 1935. That translates to "New Order of the Ages." It is generally considered to allude to the beginning of the era where the United States of America became an independent nation-state. Conspiracy theorists claim this is an allusion to the "New World Order."

I also read online that PEW research feels that "A plurality of experts think sweeping societal change will make life worse for most people as greater inequality, rising authoritarianism and rampant misinformation take hold in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak." That is a harsh prediction. They do add that "a portion believe life will be better in a ‘tele-everything’ world where workplaces, health care and social activity improve."

Their research found that the next normal may "worsen economic inequality as those who are highly connected and the tech-savvy pull further ahead of those who have less access to digital tools and less training or aptitude for exploiting them." They also feel that the changes that may occur will include the elimination of some jobs and enhance the power of big technology firms. Some of that power was growing pre-pandemic through market advantages and using artificial intelligence (AI) in ways that seem likely to further erode the privacy and autonomy of their users.

Likewise, the spread of misinformation online was happening well before the pandemic, so I don't view this as a pandemic-caused issue. Some of the PEW respondents saw the manipulation of public perception, emotion and action via online disinformation as the greatest threat.

The WHO (World Health Organization) is talking about moving from the "new normal" to a "new future" in a "sustainable response to COVID-19." Some of their recommendations about global health could easily be recommendations for global education.

Recognizing that the virus will be with us for a long time, governments should also use this opportunity to invest in health systems, which can benefit all populations beyond COVID-19, as well as prepare for future public health emergencies. These investments may include: 1) capitalizing on COVID-19 enhancements to surveillance, lab, risk communications and other core capacities, 2) back casting to identify gaps and steer resources to future health needs like genetic sequencing and contact tracing with Information Technology, 3) building on COVID-19 innovations to accelerate recovery and address other pressing health problems, and 4) strengthening multi-sector collaboration to improve health services and reduce health inequity.

EDUCAUSE suggests that part of that next normal in education will be improved student engagement through lessons learned during the pandemic. For example, during COVID-19 teaching, breakout rooms emerged as one way to offer environments for collaborative learning. Their use both emerged from perceived "Zoom fatigue" and also contributed to that fatigue depending on how it was implemented.

Globally, writing on the World Economic Forum website suggests that this idea of a New Normal "must not be the lens through which we examine our changed world." Why? One reason is that what we call "normal" has not worked for a majority of the world's population. "So why would it start working now?" Then what should we do? The writer suggests that we "should use our discomfort to forge a new paradigm instead."

Large scale change - a new paradigm - is a lofty goal and what that new paradigm would be is still far from clear. Stay tuned.

My title - The Last Bookstore on Earth - sounds like science-fiction. In 2021, it is sci-fi future thinking, but it might well be true in 2071 and I wouldn't be shocked if it turns out to be true much sooner. We know that physical bookstores have been closing ever since Amazon and the age of online booksellers began.

This past weekend was Independent Bookstore Day and brick and mortar bookstores still have ardent supporters - me included - but it's tough to keep a store going just selling books. The pandemic didn't help them, but the pandemic did help online book sales.

There is a whole bookshelf worth of "the end of" books. I have read three: The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking), The End of History, and The End of Science. Of course, all those things are still going

Some young people may not know that Amazon.com started as a bookstore, but it fairly quickly expanded and now (especially by using third-party suppliers) it seems to sell everything and threatens not only bookstores but all kinds of stores.

My inspiration to write today came from watching the documentary The Last Blockbuster on Netflix. It tells the story of Blockbuster Video, the video rental company that put many independent video rental stores out of business. One way it did that was by making distribution deals with film studios.

It is an interesting history because movies on video were at first seen as a threat to movie theaters. That initial fear turned out to be less threatening than first thought because there were still plenty of people who wanted to see movies on a big screen and when they were released rather than months later when they hit video. This path has been traveled again, especially in the past pandemic year, with closed theaters and greatly increased streaming video use.

There were several indie video stores in my neighborhood when Blockbuster opened a large store. The indies could not compete with the wide selection and many deals. (About the only thing the indies could offer was pornography which was not in Blockbuster.)  Blockbuster had made revenue-share deals and so could negotiate lower prices than their local stores in exchange for a cut of the rental fees.

There is a nice irony in The Last Blockbuster being released by Netflix which wiped out the video stores of all sizes and helped wipe out the DVD market too.

But Netflix doesn't own the streaming business anymore. Hulu, Apple, Disney and Amazon Prime are examples of services that not only offer subscriptions but also additional rentals and, most significantly, are funding original content that they will own exclusively. Media companies, such as CBS, Paramount, that sold content to places like Netflix have now started their own streaming services and let their deals with the older services lapse.

VCRs were replaced by DVRs which are being pushed aside by streaming. Netflix pushed aside stores and DVDs. Online booksellers hurt bookstores, though most now offer online purchasing and during the pandemic offered curbside pickup and some offered virtual author events and readings.

People will return to movie theaters as pandemic restrictions disappear. People who went to bookstores to browse will return too. Students who were learning online for the past year are returning to their classrooms and predictions are that they will be back to a kind of normal this fall. But all of these institutions and businesses are changing because of moves online that occurred either because of technological evolution or pandemic necessity.

I hope the idea of the "last bookstore" is just an idea and that some online service will never be able to make a video about it.