The failure to recognise the ongoing severity of COVID-19 is creating a reality gap that is being filled by groups peddling misinformation.
“You don’t want to get this disease once if you can avoid it, and you don’t want to get it four times for sure.”
— Dr Mike Ryan, Executive Director of the World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Programme
👀
I recently encountered somewhat shocking — though not necessarily surprising — data about the average person’s computer skills. The vast majority of people are not able to complete complex tasks on a computer. Only five percent of Americans had high level computer skills that allowed them to do things like troubleshoot or analyze data using multiple tools.
These data are from 2011-2015, so the numbers have certainly changed. I would definitely guess there are fewer people who are unable to use a computer at all. But, I was discussing with a friend that we doubted there’s been a substantial increase in the number of people able to complete complicated, multi-step, multi-program tasks. Over the past ten years, technology and user interfaces have trended towards simplification and single-task software (there’s an app for that!). Reducing friction for common tasks removes challenges people might have needed to troubleshoot in the past — and if you don’t ever face problems accomplishing what you need to, you never get to practice or even develop troubleshooting skills.
And basic computer literacy isn’t enough to get by in the internet age. Someone learning how to use the internet today needs to also learn a broad range of skills to protect themselves, communicate effectively, and obtain trustworthy information. Too many people are credulous and uncritical in what they believe. There are so many dark design patterns (or are we not calling it that anymore?) and bad actors attempting to manipulate you that it requires a bulwark of skills to defend against having your time and money stolen, or even worse, indoctrination.
Many of these skills are personal responses to systemic problems that some regulation might assist with. Not that regulation is easy: GDPR wound up giving us all obnoxious popup cookie banners instead of reducing the cookies websites use or data corporations collect — but at least some websites do now allow you to reject non-essential cookies.
Our two literary theory concepts—paratext and transmedia storytelling—map nicely onto alternative approaches for WonkComms.
The big, honking report is The Thing. The blog posts, the op-eds, the roundtable forum, the tweets, the media write ups, the infographics…
all function as paratexts, as “extra stuff” that’s great to have but not always a requirement.
That “extra stuff” exists to “hype, promote, introduce, and discuss” the main text—which is probably a big PDF FILE.
Versus the transmedia model:
This is the CONTENT EVERYWHERE model. It’s one in which you create MODULAR CONTENT that you can remix and push out across multiple channels. No single output is a “main” thing. Rather, each blog post, each tweet, each infographic, each op-ed tells part of the story.
To consider as I start working on reports and plans in government: what is the best format and approach to information? As a long-form print designer I am a fan of making reports better, but alternative formats like websites could be something to consider too.
Murray Adcock. (theadhocracy.co.uk)I am a big fan of categorisation debates, so the concept of trying to define what a “blog” is (or isn’t) piqued my interest.
Further exploring what makes a blog a blog — which I agree I haven’t quite landed on yet:
The fact that blogs take the form of a building argument, not necessarily voicing their intent or conclusion immediately, but instead guiding the reader through the narrative to naturally arrive at that conclusion. I agree wholeheartedly with this take, but I’m not sure that this is the essence of “blog-ness”. I think that’s just how people actually talk when given a platform.
(Emphasis mine.)
This connects back to the democratization of self-publishing, leading to greater influence of oral culture (as you point out).
The word “given” here got me thinking — like the soapbox example, blogging is when people create and claim a platform for themselves. The work is self-motivated. No one’s telling us what to blog about. It’s not fulfilling an assignment. The things people blog about are the things they care about enough to spend their free time considering.
And because it’s not “for a purpose,” because it’s self-directed, a blog post needn’t fit a formal format. A lot of blogging really is ‘talking through ideas’ in text, in real time — the thinking and writing happen together. (Or at least it is for me, though I’m sure it’s not the universal blogging experience 😉) Even when a post is edited before publishing to center a specific conclusion reached through the drafting, a tenor of curious exploration or earnest passion often carries through.
by Brian Southwell at RTI International
What is scientific misinformation? from Southwell et al for The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science:
What’s the problem with misinformation?
by Paj Nandi at DH
We need more people challenging the way we think about our work. We’ve fallen in love with “practical steps.”
But even the most confident of steps don’t… | 19 comments on LinkedIn
Treat your writing as a means to try and understand — not a way to share what you already do.
Stop acting like an expert. Start acting like an investigator.
Replace things you “must” know with things you’re curious to know.
In the end, How-To is the commodity of our lifetime. Expertise and experts are amazingly ubiquitous and accessible. More than ever, the ability to produce How-To-Think content which challenges the status quo and solves meaningful problems for people is how we stop transacting the audience and start transforming them.
This is what I want to do with environmental communication: I want to guide the government environmental outreach community, sharing what I’ve learned in local government while drawing on the ideas I’ve absorbed from other realms of interest — accessibility and community building and co-design. This is why I left my old job: to influence strategy and advocate for more effective, evidence-driven approaches to behavior change.
Chief among those in the environmental behavior change realm is working upstream to improve systems to reduce how much people need to think about. It is ironic for a communicator to realize that the most effective tool is eliminating the need to communicate as much as possible 😎
Also, he’s spot on about quitting reading marketing content. 90% of it is regurgitated hollowness.
Via Tara McMullin who added the commentary:
Expertise is marketable, for sure. And that’s fine if [your] aim is “authority,” which is just another way of saying domination.
Curiosity and openness are marketable, too, in their own ways.
Tree planting in Portland, Oregon is associated with decreases in non-accidental and cardiovascular mortality, and the magnitude of this association increased as trees aged and grew.
Look, I’m a huge proponent of planting trees but you gotta be careful about correlation and causation. The article itself admits that “It is an observational study, so it cannot establish a causal relationship between trees and mortality.” Yet you’d believe the study established causation based on the monetary claims about the value of tree planting if you only read the abstract, which claims, “Using US EPA estimates of a value of a statistical life, we estimated that planting a tree in each of Portland’s 140 Census tracts would generate $14.2 million in annual benefits (95 % CI: $8.0 million to $20.4 million).” You cannot make this estimate if you do not know it to be a causal relationship.
I get really pissed when environmentalists mislead the public towards their preferred outcome using faulty or over-interpreted data*. I wrote a report about single-use items a few years ago, and the deeper I dug into statements about straws and such that were listed on environmental advocacy sites, the more of a sham they turned out to be. I wound up doing a literature review to find valid, empirical evidence in support of our paper, and uncovered that compostable packaging actually has greater impacts when it is not composted — which is often!
Tell people to plant trees because they clean the air, provide shade, and reduce flooding, but don’t lie and tell them planting a tree will make them live longer.
*There are many reasons for this in the scientific literature, but at the core comes down to two challenges: science is insufficiently funded and researchers are rewarded for significant findings. See also: Imagining a better way — for everything
The anxiety that word-people feel about the end of Twitter isn’t just about Twitter (tho it is that too!) — it’s also about our declining relevance on an internet that has turned largely visual with a side-helping of audio.
— Alexis C. Madrigal (@alexismadrigal) November 3, 2022
Via Lucy Bellwood.
It’s interesting to divide the internet into Word People and Image People because the Internet is a modern evolution of oral culture — and technological/bandwidth limitations have enabled text to serve as the leading means to transfer information online up till now, when more direct oral presentations (podcasts, video streaming, video) become a feasible way to distribute more of the pool of information.
I’m reading The Shallows, which highlighted our modern era of mass reading as an outlier that may fade away:
We are now seeing such reading return to its former social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class.
— Griswold, McDonnell and Wright, “Reading and the Reading Class in the Twenty-First Century,” Annual Review of Sociology (2005)
They see two options for readers in society:
Recent Pew research on media trends:
More Americans are getting news on TikTok, bucking the trend on other social media sites
One thing that keeps me up at night right now is the possibility that Twitter’s potential death spiral will coincide with a major regional/national/global crisis. For better or worse, Twitter is a crucial disaster comms tool, and we don’t have a replacement for it. 1/
— Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D (@RVAwonk) November 15, 2022
Using Twitter for crisis communications in a natural disaster: Hurricane Harvey — Vera-Burgos & Padgett, 2020
My colleagues and I recently wrote/presented a paper on this very topic (I will share it when it’s published), and one of our findings was that Twitter actually shapes the course and outcome of crises. It can literally mean the difference between life and death. 10/ pic.twitter.com/4QrsrYLB6s
— Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D (@RVAwonk) November 15, 2022
See also: What happens to activism after Twitter?