Not that bioturbation was on your “To Think About” list for today… but you should think about bioturbation and its role in the larger biosphere. Fascinating stuff!
Mapping the seafloor sediment superhighway | YaleNews:
“Our analysis suggests that the present global network of marine protected areas does not sufficiently protect important seafloor processes like bioturbation, indicating that protection measures need to be better catered to promote ecosystem health,” Tarhan said.
Petersen here defies what many of us who have spent our lives in academia or adjacent to it in some way feel… the institutional impact of certain places on our careers, our self-judgements, and eventually our self-worth can be crucibles that define our lives for years. Seeing past that is indeed difficult work, especially when we want to confer respect for ourselves and our future students.
Worthy read here whether you’re a teacher, preacher, parent, or trying to figure things out at age 45 like me…
Ten Years Out of Academia – by Anne Helen Petersen:
When it comes to these students, the best gift we can give them — whether they are our children, our advisees, our peers, our employees, or just ourselves — is clear communication of worth. It’s spaces to fail with security and create and build community outside of resume-building. It’s ongoing assurance of their value: not because of their grades, or their ability to “work hard,” but simply because they are. It’s respect, which looks a lot different than surveillance. Creating these environments requires a lot of work, most of it invisible. It’s arduous in part because it requires refusing so many legible norms of “good” parenting or mentorship. But its eventual value is beyond measure.
I don’t have the same optimism that Thompson does here, but it’s a good read and worth the thought time!
The Great Flattening – Stratechery by Ben Thompson:
What is increasingly clear, though, is that Jobs’ prediction that future changes would be even more profound raise questions about the “bicycle for the mind” analogy itself: specifically, will AI be a bicycle that we control, or an unstoppable train to destinations unknown? To put it in the same terms as the ad, will human will and initiative be flattened, or expanded?
Reblog via Merianna Harrelson
Fifteen years ago, when I pursuing a Master’s in Literacy, we wondered and pondered about the impact of screens for readers. We questioned and discussed how literacy needed to be taught differently because of the availability of so much content and with so much reading occurring on a screen. I attended and participated in professional developments centered around “the screen between.” We discussed and debated how the screen between eliminated so many of the social cues and nonverbal communication that takes place between two people in person in conversations and in classrooms.
These discussions were way before so many people had a handheld device with a screen that fit in their pocket. Now as a minister, I find myself in conversations and debates about that same “screen between,” and how emboldened people feel to type something in a comment thread or text that they would never say to a person’s face.
And that’s just it. We don’t see each other anymore. The screen between us disconnects us from our joint humanity even as it advertises more connections and connetions from around the world.
As I have tried to be more intentional about my own use of screens, especially around our infant, I’ve noticed just how prevalent screens are. There is no small talk in the elevator or grocery store anymore because we are all looking down. Even restaurants have started to put screens on the tables and in their wait staff’s hands which I am sure streamlines the ordering process, but also interrupts the connection that you make with the person who is taking their time to serve you.
I can’t help but wonder when like Dorthy and her followers, we will discover the man behind the curtain or rather the fellow humans behind the screens. While these devices may seem just as great and powerful as the Wizard of Oz, there’s something missing and something we are all longing for. Eventually we are going to have to decide whether we want a screenshot of life, a projection of what appears to be or whether we want to live life with and among those that surround us.
We all want to be seen. We all want to know that we aren’t on this journey alone. But in order to do that, we are going to have to put away the screen between us and look each other in the eyes and say, “I am here. You are here. And here we are together.”
The post The Screen Between appeared first on Merianna Neely Harrelson.
I have lots more to say about this, but I wanted to share this vital part of a recent article about “dumbphones” in The New Yorker. I’ve been attempting to be much more deliberate about using technology and devices, especially in front of my children and students.
The Light Phone (and Camp Snap camera) have been a significant part of that effort. I’ve been in love with the Light Phone since converting from an iPhone earlier this year.
The Dumbphone Boom Is Real | The New Yorker:
Like Dumbwireless, Light Phone has recently been experiencing a surge in demand. From 2022 to 2023, its revenue doubled, and it is on track to double again in 2024, the founders told me. Hollier pointed to Jonathan Haidt’s new book, “The Anxious Generation,” about the adverse effects of smartphones on adolescents. Light Phone is receiving increased inquiries and bulk-order requests from churches, schools, and after-school programs. In September, 2022, the company began a partnership with a private school in Williamstown, Massachusetts, to provide Light Phones to the institution’s staff members and students; smartphones are now prohibited on campus. According to the school, the experiment has had a salutary effect both on student classroom productivity and on campus social life. Tang told me, “We’re talking to twenty to twenty-five schools now.”
The disappearing Insta grid – One Thing:
Snapchat and BeReal understood this preference shift long ago. And now, scrubbing your feed is a way of taking some control back, refusing to put your past on display. It’s a design choice. Embracing negative space. Making anti-brand the brand. Refusing to participate in the popularity contest and the attention economy.
I know… let’s go back to blogging on our own domains (no, seriously)!
I don’t want to end this on a bummer note, but I do think it’s probably time to accept that we have reached the limitations of the social web as it’s currently constructed. It’s likely that TikTok was the last “social” platform and even more likely that all the behaviors that we can do on these platforms have been mapped out already. We can rearrange them and try them out in different orders and react to slight algorithm tweaks, but this is it. This is how people will behave as long the company’s that own and operate the web continue to do so. And it’s probably time to start imagining something else — no, not AI — before we forget how to do it.
I’m not one to argue with Elvis Costello and I love re-reading this list every so often (especially in a new year). However, In My Life shoud be the #1 Beatles song.
Before that album, “We were just writing songs à la the Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly,” Lennon said, “pop songs with no more thought to them than that.” He rightly called “In My Life” “my first real, major piece of work. Up until then, it had all been glib and throwaway.”
“Sympathy, though gained as an instinct, is also much strengthened by exercise or habit.”
Darwin, Descent of Man, Ch. 4
I’ve just finished Robert Sapolsky’s (excellent) book, Determined. You should read it for yourself, obviously, but Sapolsky does an expert job of providing the argument that our conception of determinism and what we colloquially call “free will” are to be examined under a much stricter microscope society-wide.
These sorts of philosophical arguments rarely escape the ivory tower of The Academy. However, Sapolsky is a masterful speaker and has attracted a good deal of attention in the mainstream for his seemingly outlandish idea that we do not, in fact, possess free will.
I think he’s right and on to something monumental. If we took his admonishment with intention and began to examine the structures our society (especially our educational systems) place on behavioralism, exceptionalism, and perceived meritocracy… our society would look quite different. Dare I say it would be more just.
I picked up Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871) this morning and began reading. The beginnings of Chapter 4 here lay out a very similar thought construction about where we gather our conception of morality and sympathy in the context of what he labels natural history.
I was taken by his statement that:
“We are indeed all conscious that we do possess such sympathetic feelings, but our consciousness does not tell us whether they are instinctive, having originated long ago in the same manner as with the lower animals, or whether they have been acquired by each of us during our early years.”
Reading both of these texts together is an incredible thought experiment!
