Category Archives: Internet Presence

How does online or mobile learning affect infrastructure needs?

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This is a question that has been on my mind a lot, as one role the library fills for many people is to provide internet access. People use library wireless internet for work, job interviews, school work, and entertainment, to name just a few applications. Many patrons lack a computer, internet, or both at their home.

Some of the children I’m most concerned about are the ones that don’t have internet at home. The local school districts have been pretty able to supply Chromebooks and/or iPads to their students’ households, so though siblings may need to share, basic machines have been relatively available. The trouble is, those machines are useless without reliable internet access. Many libraries have kept their wifi on during their closures for our patrons of all ages to be able to access it from the parking lot or beside the building. Some have even increased their strength or improved their equipment, knowing people are unable to come inside to use the network.

Earthmovers at a construction site

Even for people that have high-speed internet at home, many are noticing the effects of more people in their neighborhood and their home being online at the same time. A colleague and I were discussing a couple months ago the impact her family was noticing with one or both parents and multiple children needing to access internet resources consistently throughout the day. Mobile and online learning occurs in formats that need solid and rapid internet access to be functional. Slow microlearning is a relatively useless offering, and being able to do mobile learning on the go implies agility and responsiveness, both of which suffer with insufficient bandwidth. 

Finally, reliability is also becoming more essential. In a world where we all depend on being able to pop online and run a quick search for the information we need in a given moment. When networks go down frequently, an entire system can suffer from a lack of reliability in accessing that knowledge, especially in workplaces that are trying to keep more of their procedural information in shared drives, blogs, or intranet pages where they can be updated once and reach everyone rather than tracking which version is currently making the rounds. We recently received a new internet network at the library, both as an upgrade, and so the previous one can now be our back-up option. Consistent access has become such a priority that they moved forward with the installation, even while we’re closed, usage is less and finances are more strained.

Social Media as Community Organizing

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I work in a small city of just under 30,000 people. In a lot of senses, it’s a bedroom community, as most people that live there commute to work in one of the much larger cities nearby. The city and residents pride themselves on a very strong sense of community, a vibrant downtown and excellent engagement in causes both local and global. As an example, within my workplace, we have nearly 300 active volunteers per year, which calculates out to an equivalent of approximately 1% of the city’s residents being active in the library, a rather impressive quantity, given that many other causes in town are also well-supported.

I have frequently observed the impact of social media on various causes and information-sharing in the city. I am aware of a minimum of three Facebook groups moderated by local citizens used to disseminate information, share opinions, publicize events, and elicit support for various causes. Various colleagues have joined them as an additional avenue to spread information about library offerings and have an eye on topics of local interest. I subscribe to one of the groups and can think of many times that I have seen its role in shaping public sentiment or garnering attendance for rallies, vigils, or City Council meetings.  It can be a dumping ground for people’s negative attitudes, complaints about traffic, bad manners, or local policies. However, it has also been used to get word out about local candidates and why they’re running, as well as campaign events for folks to learn more about them. I’ve seen organizers use it to get carpool arrangements started for more distant marches and rallies, and to share suggestions on how people can comment on upcoming legislation or potential City policies before they are voted on or enacted. Local hot topics include fracking, intergovernmental relations, and some of the local festivals. All of these have plenty of posts by people sharing their opinions with various levels of civility, and also give like-minded folks a place to hear about meetings or other gatherings where they can learn more about or further advance their causes.

We frequently think of social media being used to organize people that are geographically spread, and that is clearly a major impact it can have to unite people that may never meet. It’s interesting to see it also used to streamline communication for people that live in the same place and want to connect in person but may not know about their joint interests or local manifestations of those causes without the medium of these community stream-of-consciousness style conversations.

Who’s Pulling Your Strings?

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My fourth grade teacher was a novel experience for me in a lot of ways. He was my first male teacher and my first teacher to assign long-term projects. He taught a group of us to play guitar after school. As a first-year teacher assembling a classroom library from whatever he had at home that was remotely suitable for elementary students, he introduced me to several series and characters that I would otherwise not have met that early. (Thank you, Mr. Haas, for my enduring love of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Get Smart!) He helped our class write and compose two songs, and then record them in an actual studio. I presume that somewhere during that year, we covered the expected academic topics, as well, as we all seemed to be ready for fifth grade the following year.

"Are You Being Watched?" Sign
Sign at tiger exhibit, Denver Zoo

One of his most lasting impacts on my thought patterns was the unit we did on advertising. We looked at various strategies used for selling, including both what they looked like and why they worked. We were sent home to find examples of each and describe the components of the ads. I can’t say advertising doesn’t work on me, but I can say that I tend to notice and attempt to deconstruct its methods and goals more often than some folks I observe.  That unit was what caused a flash of recognition in me for Tristan Harris’ line, “what we don’t talk about is how the handful of people working at a handful of technology companies through their choices will steer what a billion people are thinking today.” (Harris, 2017) There are plenty of methods of advertising, and the internet is not the only outlet. It’s just one of the most potent and omnipresent. With a relatively small number of individuals at the helm and making many of the decisions about what we see, how we see it, and whose viewpoints get heard, it’s still a good idea to have some idea about how our experience on the internet is curated and shaped before we even encounter it.  As I investigated the question, I encountered a 2015 multi-part report from MIT Technology Review, entitled “Persuasive Technology.”  It was their May/June 2015 Business Report section. In an article entitled “Technology and Persuasion,” (Byrnes, 2015,) the researcher describes methods to keep people hooked on a particular game by recognizing behaviors that might mean they are getting bored and responding to those, or how a corporate wellness provider group uses data and game designers to maintain engagement from the workforce at a higher level than previously achieved. The researcher also cited an ad firm’s use of tracking data to better choose more effective advertising for individual users. Another article entitled, “New Technologies Persuade in Old Ways,” (Anders, 2015) specifically called out some of the strategies that have been used in some form to guide people’s behavior since times long before the internet was a consideration. Anders described these strategies as: “reciprocity, likeability, authority, scarcity, consistency, and social proof.”(Anders, 2015) If you think about those for a few minutes, you will readily see them at work all around you. Most of us would rather buy from or participate with a company that we see as friendly to us and/or our causes. We like to follow people’s feeds that may respond to us and boost our profile. We readily follow other users’ or experts’ advice and reviews on products and services, and items that sell out or advertise a limited number of opportunities are catering to our need for things that we see as limited.

If you’re interested in how companies may be programming you, take a look at one of these articles, or some of the others in the edition. They all seem to be short and easily digested. What did you learn, and how will it affect your outlook or behavior moving forward?

Anders, G. (2015, March 23). New technologies persuade in old ways. MIT Technology Review, Volume 110, No. 3. Retrieved from: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/535831/new-technologies-persuade-in-old-ways/?set=535816.  

Byrnes, N. (2015, March 23). Technology and persuasion. MIT Technology Review, Volume 110, No. 3. Retrieved from: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/535826/technology-and-persuasion/?set=535816.  

TED. (2017, July 28). How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day | Tristan Harris. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C74amJRp730.

Some upsides of connection

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Hands clasped with interlocked fingers

An interesting juxtaposition recently happened for me between class work and my outside reading. I have been working my way through a pair of books that both explore human capabilities and roles in the current era as they relate to each other, machines, society, and the world. The books are Range: Why generalists triumph in a specialized world, by David Epstein and Thank you for being late: An optimist’s guide to thriving in the age of acceleration, by Thomas Friedman. Both are written from a more optimistic point of view than many other current releases, and both offered some different approaches to thinking about social media and its impact, among many other topics. Plenty has been written about the negative aspects of connectivity and social media, and many good points have been made regarding addictiveness and resource waste, destruction of focus, anxiety caused by comparison with others’ curated lives, and lack of real connection between people. These books highlighted some of the more positive effects that can also come about in the current world of connection. In Chapter 5 of his book, Friedman talks about some of the ways in which easy and fast communication is changing the world. His examples include the fact that when he wrote the book, 914 million people had at least one international connection on social media and at least 50 percent of Facebook users had at least one international friend. (Friedman, 2016) I will readily agree that many of these “friends” may not be close, but they do at least give us some more access to outside viewpoints. Through Facebook, I get to maintain some level of contact with cousins in Norway, in addition to friends in England and Peru. There is almost no chance I would stay in any form of contact with these people without social media, but with the connections, when they come to town (or the country) for a visit, we may choose to meet up and continue our social ties in person. Friedman also devotes a fair bit of space to a discussion on ways that internet and social media offer people in developing countries better access to education, new philosophies, and a new audience for their thoughts and problem-solving ideas. David Epstein’s book is largely about the benefits inherent in approaching learning and problem-solving from disparate angles and disciplines in order to arrive at novel solutions. In chapter 8, he highlights some crowdsourcing programs including Innocentive and Kaggle that pose questions on the internet, and ask for solutions. These solutions usually come from a wide range of areas of expertise, and typically arise from well outside the expected backgrounds. These programs work by giving a large number of people access and a sense of community to work on problems together, learning from each other, and making contributions within a specific context. These are a little beyond the typical realm of the social media landscape that most of us inhabit, but they are another form of personal learning network and social interaction across large gaps in distance and time. As Paul Miller pointed out in the video and article, while these tools can easily drive wedges between people and interfere with in-person contact, they can also be invaluable for organizing more contact between people and better communication, if we choose to use them in that way.     

Epstein, D. (2019) Range: Why generalists triumph in a specialized world. New York, NY: Riverhead Books.

Friedman, T. L. (2016) Thank you for being late: An optimist’s guide to thriving in the age of accelerations. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Miller, P. (2013, May) I’m still here: back online after a year without the internet. The Verge. Retrieved from: https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/1/4279674/im-still-here-back-online-after-a-year-without-the-internet.

Miller, P. (2013, September 13)A year offline, what I have learned. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=30&v=trVzyG4zFMU.

Spiders, the web, and me

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Spider on the ceiling in the corner

I am pretty phobic about spiders, so when I saw one hanging out (literally) in the shower as I started to step in, it occurred to me that my uphill battle against spiders in the house has some parallels to my efforts to maintain decent barriers within my internet and social media usage. (I would say I’m slightly less paranoid about the internet tracking.) First, autumn seems to be on its way, and the spiders are either moving in to the house, or just being more visible. We’ve dealt with a minimum of a dozen spiders in the last week. I think spiders are marvelous outside the house, which I consider to be their proper setting. I enjoy watching them scramble around in our garden space, eating pests and keeping their numbers in check. They have amazing physical characteristics and an ability to go almost anywhere. Various internet providers, online services, and social networks can also be extremely useful and have a similar, more metaphorical ability to be everywhere. I recognize that my house will never be spider-free, and my network interactions will never be surveillance-free.  On the other hand, I’m willing to go to some effort to minimize both spiders and data surrender. We try to minimize obvious cracks and food sources for arachnids in the house, and online, I pay attention to what information I’m willing to share and how I access various sites.

As I’ve read through various resources about what gets shared, stored, and tracked, I was edified to see that there wasn’t a ton of information that was entirely new to me. I use minimal profiles and background on my social media that I use for truly social purposes, like Facebook. For my more professional usage, I focus on more narrow, work-oriented background and contacts. I use multiple email addresses, including an essentially throw-away option for signing up for online services and the occasional online purchase, which I also try to minimize. I started using DuckDuckGo as my search engine a few years ago, and prefer the interface and results lists to Google. I clear history and cookies with some regularity, and the fact that my job as a librarian has me using multiple different computers in the course of a day or week, and searching for a wide variety of topics and products well outside my actual interests feels like a bit of extra camouflage as well.  

There are certainly levels of privacy protection that I’m not ready to tackle yet and don’t really feel a need to utilize. I’ve been tempted to play with Tor browsing on occasion, but I am not really interested in the attention that can also arise from that usage or that of some of the more anonymous email providers. I’m also not ready to go to a progression of burner phones or drop boxes that start to feel more like I’m playing a role in a spy thriller than managing communication. Since so many industries and jobs expect some form of an internet presence, I’d rather manage and curate one that sends a message I want rather than be completely invisible to potential colleagues and employers.