Category: Digital Culture

Permanent Record: Technology in Schools

That’s going on your permanent record is a phrase that people from my generation anyway are  likely to read as satirical.  We’d say it today in mocking reference to those anachronistic threats made by teachers or school administrators to record indelibly some transgression or truancy we committed as children. The permanent record, they said, would follow us throughout time.  College admissions boards would know the trajectory of every spitball ever fired, or future, prospective employers would read every intercepted love note ever passed.  Of course, unless a kid committed an actual crime (and sometimes even then), the proverbial permanent record was usually a monster in the closet to be ridiculed in hindsight. But today, as technology is increasingly integrated into K-12 schools around the country, the idea of the permanent record returns, not as a fictional specter, but as a very real and pervasive concern for parents and the current generation of school kids.

This past August, California became the first state to enact a law that prohibits educational websites, apps, or cloud services used by schools from selling or disclosing personal information about students; from using collected data to market to students; and/or from compiling dossiers about students.  According to Natasha Singer writing for The New York Times, “The law is a response to growing parental concern that sensitive information about children — like data about learning disabilities, disciplinary problems or family trauma — might be disseminated and disclosed, potentially hampering college or career prospects.”

California is not the only state to begin to address the issue of privacy or to impose regulations on data collection or data use via technologies deployed in schools; but this recent law does appear to be the most comprehensive to date and may serve as a roadmap for updating federal laws to address these concerns.  Critics say the existing Family Education Rights and Privacy Act is antiquated, “written for the file-cabinet era,” writes Singer. Other states have passed some narrowly targeted laws restricting, for instance, the use of biometric data collected in schools where student fingerprints or handprints are used to pay for cafeteria lunches.  Or as Singer’s article points out:  Kansas forbids districts from collecting biometric details on minors, and from surveying them about religious, moral or sexual beliefs, without parental consent.  And that sounds okay I suppose, but I’m trying to imagine the technology that is both an educational enhancement and a collection point of information about personal data like sexual orientation.  This does beg questions regarding which technologies are being deployed to what purpose, and what kind of student data is part of the interaction?

It goes without saying that state-by-state, district-by-district, we are bound to see a broad range of adoptions or rejections of various technologies used in schools, either for educational or administrative purposes.  And it’s a safe bet that the employment of each technology will be a manifestation of the often-absurd alchemy of politics and economics that drive all decisions within schools, usually with mixed academic results.  As is the case in all other aspects of modern life, I suspect certain technologies will help students succeed and others will help students fail even faster and more stunningly than ever before.  We won’t really know for a generation, at which point analysis becomes somewhat Heisenbergian as the observers themselves will have been altered by the catalysts, and the catalysts remain in constant motion.

Considering the broad spectrum of potential uses and abuses of the data associated with education technology, it seems essential that federal law mandate the broadest possible protections for students and their families.  Marketing to kids is a concern, but it’s penny-ante poker compared to the potential hazards of over-reliance on technologies to track behaviors, trends, or strengths and weaknesses of individual kids from kindergarten through high school.

In principle, I imagine the primary benefit of technology tools in education should be to make more efficient use of limited resources in order to increase benefits for more children; but these technologies should have to prove their effectiveness and should never come at the price of mass data collection for use by either the private or the public sector.  American education is already too bureaucratic.  Politicians hobble our best teachers and reward our laziest ones with state-mandated tests and curricula that have little to do with actual learning; students apply to college now via computer and are lucky if human contact is part of the application process; and certain regions and economic sectors are still diagnosis-heavy, overeager to rely on psychotropic pharmaceuticals to address behavioral challenges that might not warrant drug therapy.  With these and other trends, we often do treat contemporary students as compilations of data, sometimes forgetting to see the children. So, if we already take too much of a bean-counter’s approach to education, and we pair that with technologies sold by companies that commoditize the counting of beans, don’t we risk fostering a generation of bean dip?

Dawn of the Prankster

About two weeks ago, some disgruntled friends shared a story about Urban Outfitters apparently marketing a faded and blood-stained-looking Kent State college sweatshirt.  Then, in a follow-up story reported by Jordan Sargent in Gawker, an email sent by the retailer’s CEO Dick Haynes explains that the sweatshirt shown in their marketing materials was not representative of a new, purposely designed line of clothing but was a legitimately vintage item purchased at a Rose Bowl flea market and that the red stains on the shirt are not in fact blood.  The photo of the Kent State sweatshirt, according to the email, was being used to promote a new line of faded looks being offered by UO.  Assuming Mr. Haynes is telling the truth about the sweatshirt (and there is no reason to think he isn’t), the story is a pretty good example of so much that is wrong with marketing in the digital age.  In short, does the campaign reveal stupidity or ignorance?  And at what point do such distinctions cease to matter? Do the economics of the Internet expect everyone to become a prankster in order to win?

As Sargent rightly implies, the marketing team at Urban Outfitters almost certainly knew they were courting negative reactions by using the image of this sweatshirt because in the age of social media, controversy can be a great way to get campaigns to go viral. Still, it is not yet clear that “any press is good press” is a universally wise tactic for all brands.  Certainly, a brand can align itself on the side of certain issues, which can be a great link to customers whose values correspond with the brand.  But in the bizarre dynamics of social media, even a hater becomes an evangelist of sorts when he/she shares a story for the purpose of denouncing it.  If the story or campaign offends ten thousand people but appeals to one thousand customers, cha ching.  Not only does this achieve market penetration for pennies, but the people who hate your brand did your selling for you for free.  That said, this can be dangerous territory for a brand looking to build customer relationships over time. Being a shock-jock can backfire.  More importantly, brands and their marketing campaigns are themselves creators of culture and thus feed public consciousness, which is part of why I believe our reaction is so strong against this apparent trivializing of the Kent State shootings.  It becomes a form of revisionist history, which brings us to the question of ignorance in this story.

Jordan Sargent raises the possibility with regard to this sweatshirt campaign that “…various people involved in the transaction were too young to even realize the implications of selling a Kent State sweatshirt that looked like it was bloodstained”  This may be true, and if so, it is yet another unfortunate phenomenon of our times.  Despite the fact that we treated the dawn of Internet access as a great boon to education, we do seem to encounter frequent examples of digital natives achieving adulthood woefully ignorant of some rather significant cultural icons and events.  That anyone in the United States might enter the workforce, let alone in a communications role, without ever hearing of the 1970 shootings at Kent State is both extraordinary and, at this point, not the least bit surprising.  In fact, I personally wondered many years ago whether or not a glut of data (which is not necessarily information) might result in a decline in general cultural literacy.

It was the late 1990s, and I was creative director on a photo shoot in New York.  The photographer and I were joking around, making references to the Marx Brothers, and our comments were sailing over the heads of the models and assistants who were a good decade or so younger.  Who doesn’t know The Marx Brothers, I thought?  Their films were hardly contemporary when I was growing up; they were 40 years old.  Driving home from the shoot, I wondered if the volume and rate at which we were increasingly consuming sounds, words, and images might not have a deleterious effect on long-term memory of important cultural and historical items.  Add to this the ease with which information can be manipulated through the web, coincident with a general distrust of traditional news sources, along with marketers willing to gin up controversy to sell tee shirts, and you get a digital age Tower of Babel.

Perhaps one of the worst phenomena to manifest from all this is that it feeds moral absolutism, which believes the ends justify the means.  For a business owner, those ends might be selling some product, but in the world of civic affairs, this psychology produces more serious results.  We’ve occasionally seen hacktivists identifying as Anonymous meddling self-righteously in politics or in events like the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, and they’re free to make a mess of things once in a while because they can’t be held accountable.  It is the same psychology that produces the bottom-feeders at Reddit and 4Chan who would share stolen nude celebrity photos and produce rape and death imagery of Emma Watson in response to her speech at the UN on feminism.  But, interestingly enough, it is also the same psychology that produced a bizarre attempt to attack 4Chan.

In case you missed it, a site was created called emmawatsonyournext.com, which was purported to be the work of anonymous users at 4Chan and appeared to be hosting a countdown to the distribution of revealing photos of the actress.  But according to this story by Rich McCormick in The Verge, the countdown site was in fact a hoax and PR ploy designed to drive traffic toward a campaign to take down the 4Chan site for its exploitation of women.  Now, I personally don’t care if 4Chan disappears; it is of no value to anyone, and the only people who spend time on the site are either losers or FBI agents.  But this hoax of a campaign against the site is likewise exploitative of Miss Watson and the values of feminism, and even if its rather murky ends are anti-misogynist, its means are unacceptable.  Coincidentally, according to McCormick, it was Redditors who apparently identified the companies behind the hoax.

“Some Reddit users were able to sniff out the hoax before its countdown expired, and linked the company behind it to FoxWeekly, a site that plagiarizes from other news sources to solicit views and Facebook likes, and Swenzy, a company that sells followers, likes, and views.”

BUT . . .

According to other sources like The Huffington Post, the organization behind the Emma Watson leak hoax is called Rantic Marketing, except that there doesn’t appear to be any such company because, writes James Cook for Business Insider, “Rantic Marketing is a fake company run by a gang of prolific internet spammers used to quickly capitalize on internet trends for page views.”

So…

I guess what I’m driving at is that the Internet can be kind of a cesspool of idiocy, self-aggrandized hackers, and exploitative opportunists all filtered through the manipulative algorithms of social media’s walled gardens.  And I think the truth is that, even as adults, we are not innately good curators or editors of the fragments of information with which we choose to be bombarded. If nothing else, who has the time?  When I think about the digital native generation growing up in this environment, it’s hard not to wonder if the biggest hoax of all might not be credited to whichever prankster first called this “the information age.”

I have different Net Neutrality worries.

I admit to being somewhat confused about net neutrality, but that probably means I’m only slightly less confused than any of my friends who feel confident they understand it.  My instinct is that (once again) the Internet industry is sowing a bit of fear that (once again) the Internet is in grave danger of not working as it should for “the people.”  I say this because the headlines, cartoons, and editorials most often shared by my generally progressive-leaning friends all convey some variation on the theme that without net neutrality, we will wind up with two Internets — a very very fast Internet for big entities with deep pockets, and a very very slow Internet for the rest of us.  On this matter of the extremely bifurcated web alone, I say hogwash if for no other reason than the fact that no entity stands to benefit from “slowing us down” as it were.  Instead, it is more likely that the fear of being disenfranchised is being dangled in front of consumers because Silicon Valley corporations would like us to subsidize their enterprises — that is more than we already do.  Writes the Chairman of NewCompetition Scott Cleland in an editorial on The Daily Calller:

“The rub here is that what big video streamers, like Google-YouTube & Netflix, really want is for the FCC to ban “paid prioritization” — i.e., the prioritizing of Internet traffic that depends on real-time delivery ahead of traffic that does not.

Translation: Silicon Valley covets a proverbial free lunch on Internet consumers’ tab.”

So, regarding the prospect of the “two Internets” rhetoric, suppose we have an entity called Netflix, which is presently the largest consumer of bandwidth worldwide.  And suppose there are other services just like Netflix, all of which expect to grow in terms of volume, in terms of image and sound quality, and in terms of consumer demand.  Now, suppose we have an ISP or some other entity considering the prospect of making stranded investments in the infrastructure required to enable continued delivery to meet increasing demand for more data-intensive content (e.g. 4K video).  The first question is why it would be unreasonable to propose that the Netflixes or the YouTubes or the Hulus of the world pay rates commensurate with their demand on this infrastructure; and the more important question for consumers is why such a proposal would necessarily result in a lack of access to high-speed connections at affordable prices?  In such a scenario, both the Netflix (content distributor) and the ISP (infrastructure investor) will lose their shirts.  It is in nobody’s interests anywhere to disenfranchise consumers from high-speed access to the web; it would be like filling a store full of expensive inventory, locking the doors, and expecting to make sales.

We do see stories from time to time of a more conspiratorial nature, invoking ideological motivations when implying that a not-for-profit or a start-up will be slowed into extinction on the dusty wagon trail of the “slow” Internet while the big, corporate interests and well-funded political organizations race along the sleek superhighway.  But, again, this doesn’t make any sense from a technical or a policy perspective per se.  The mall across the river from my house has a whopping electric bill in contrast to mine because it demands much more from the power plant than my house ever could.  Nevertheless, the lights in my house come on just as instantly as the lights in the mall.  There is no reason why a major user of bandwidth paying more for that use should slow down a relatively small user of bandwidth.  Moreover, we already have a precedent for “uneven” access in place, and it’s actually more fair than in years past.  ISPs in most, if not all, markets offer tiered pricing for access at different speeds, and this makes sense.  If your neighbor wants to play video games online and needs top speed, why should you subsidize his use, if all you want is email and basic website loading?  We can argue whether or not the prices in place are reasonable, but the principle that consumers pay for what they actually need or want or can afford is hardly unfair. And, again as Cleland points out, this is how the technology works:

‘”Virtually every Internet user also understands that different broadband technologies — fiber, coax, copper, satellite, fixed wireless or mobile wireless — all naturally generate a range of broadband speed lanes because of physics.

The technology one chooses to use naturally creates faster and slower Internet lanes.”

Setting aside overlapping concerns about mega-mergers (I honestly believe that’s a separate issue), one of the interesting aspects of this hotly-contested kerfuffle over net neutrality is that it is so typically American with its many ideological contradictions.  One the one hand, we like to believe that “the internet belongs to everyone,” but of course the only way to make that manifest with regard to investment in maintaining and upgrading the system would be to do so exclusively with public funds.  Such an approach would likely rankle conservatives and progressives for different reasons — free-market, anti-socialist arguments on one side, and keeping the government from “controlling the Internet” on the other.  Thus, ironically enough, by insisting that the “internet belongs to the people,” we functionally insist that it belongs to private enterprise and hope that the people’s government can create a regulatory structure to protect our common interest in having a “free and open internet,” whatever that means.  But not too much regulation, mind you, because again, we don’t want the government to have control;  but we also don’t want the corporations in charge either because all they care about is money and ruling the universe.

So, if you think you’ve got net neutrality all sussed, my hat’s off to you; but if you prefer as I do not to have your day ruined trying to track the many players and their various agendas, my instinct is that I wouldn’t worry too much about the “fast lane/slow lane” thing because none of the big stakeholders has anything to gain from this outcome.  I’d be much more concerned about who’s disseminating this over-simple explanation and what it is they’re after.