Category: Digital Citizenship

Artificial Friends (AFs) and Simulacra

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Science fiction stories often predict or mirror life but sometimes in unique ways that differ from reality. In an age of XR, where simulacra becomes almost bigger than life, multiple realities make the physical world only one part of reality. AFs (artificial friends), like Klara in Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, are already here and his book speaks to us through the voice of an AI chatbot. Those of us who have spent a good deal of time in the metaverse have a glimpse into the future that AI is impacting through experiencing simulacra in real virtual environments. Many remain hopeful that we will make clear distinctions between AI agents, (AFs or chatbots) and human beings.

Stefan Beck, in his Klara and the Sun book review, stated, “AI categorically cannot become self-aware, though it may achieve a simulation of self-awareness sufficient to dupe a human.” Personally, I agree with his statement because AI is simply a house of content built by human language and can never have what we humans call a “soul”. Much argument about the capabilities of AI and the potential for becoming sentient is currently undergoing philosophical debate. (Note to self: AI is prompting me to help write this blog post and I am saying NO to that!)

Ishiguro gives Klara, as an artificial friend, a clear voice as the narrator and allows each reader to interpret the argument about “what makes a human being differ from an AI embodied chatbot”. Our human frailties are woven throughout the novel as seen through Klara’s (who obviously was programmed with Isaac Asimov’s three rules of robotics) eyes and Klara will make sacrifices for her human girl, Josie.

Humans, in the big picture, are small and insignificant with soft bodies and short life spans. Yet, we are capable of amazing ideas, strong wills, great faith, perseverance and incredible creativity. AI provides the illusion of having those traits by data mining our language and spitting back out a conglomeration of that data in whatever new formats we create: video, audio, text, and more. Simulacra has reached a new level which makes us doubt and question our humanity. The next generation is now challenged with sorting multiple realities and finding meaning in both the tangible context and the symbolic context of simulacra. What something means and represents goes beyond the physical world and is sometimes more powerful.

Recently, my daughter and I presented at a Virtual World Mental Health Symposium on the topic of “The Impact of Parasocial Relationships with AI on Mental Health”. I learned a lot about the current state of teens and AI from my daughter, Rose, who has worked in the mental health profession. This work and research on artificial intelligence aligns with my passion for digital citizenship as it is rapidly evolving (or perhaps exploding) and becoming popular.

The images in our presentation were created by AI using Midjourney (by my daughter Rose) and perhaps my favorite part of working with her on this “deep dive” into the current state of AI chatbots was her conclusion. Rose said, “What we have covered in this presentation around the landscape of AI chatbots is not about what is about to happen or what we think is going to happen. It’s about what is already happening right now. Teens are right this moment developing emotionally deep relationships with AI. And most adults are still struggling to wrap their minds around what exists”. This isn’t going away and is certainly going to play a part of essential digital citizenship.

Realizing AI is Already Here

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Everybody is talking about AI, ChatGPT, and the widespread mainstream adoption of artificial intelligence. Big data has been using AI algorithms and feeding our human knowledge into AI nonstop for a long time. Since I have looked at the negative side of social media for years, the talk from Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin from the Center for Human Technology seemed to hit the nail right on the head. Social media won the “race for attention” and we have certainly outsourced our knowledge and creativity to technology. That has already happened. The speakers called social media “1st contact” and “2nd contact” has been made with AI. The impact is huge and perhaps unstoppable. The need for legislation is apparent and the time for it has come. But do we even understand what it means?

March 2023 (may be out of date soon!)

So, what can we do to remain human in the post truth world around us?

Every part of our lives is now impacted by AI and the next generation may never know a world that valued privacy, authenticity, accuracy and the richness of human history. My personal passion since the smart phone gave us the “endless scroll” of personal incoming information has been to advocate for a personal responsibility for digital citizenship. If each one of us doesn’t understand that we are personally responsible, nothing can be done and my blog tagline “navigating the sea of chaos” in digital culture becomes impossible. Our dependence on technology is obviously beyond the scope of our understanding and there is no going back.

Examples of AI Creativity (can we call it creativity?)

Artificial intelligence applications like Midjourney and Dalle-E are gaining popularity. In a recent photography competition, Boris Eldagsen (the winner) declined to accept the prize and revealed that the photograph had been created by AI. He argued that AI is not photography and calls it #promptography.

Boris Eldagsen, The Electrician

We all now have seen AI apps write in many styles and now AI can replicate voices and create music in any particular style. A recent rap song caused an Internet flurry because apparently the voices and style of Drake and The Weeknd were AI generated.

https://youtu.be/mYlKFa5p6Kg
AI Generated Rap song (original was removed but this one loops)

The irony (or perhaps hypocrisy) of writing on a social media site (my blog) about the perils of social media has never been ignored in my mind. We can’t escape digital culture. I must investigate the future if I care about the next generation. There is hope. My only hope in this life has always been my faith. AI has no soul and even though we cannot explain what a soul even is…. you and I both know we have one.

Metaverse Librarian and Veteran Colleagues

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Seattle Times article by Christy Karras called us “Veterans of the Metaverse” and I suppose that is true having worked there for 15 years! Definitions of the metaverse are not yet set in stone and can be confusing. My own definition of the metaverse is “a computer generated simulation of reality in which one interacts with others through embodiment using an avatar”. Without the use of the avatar, we can certainly interact online but are simply using Internet applications without a sense of presence together in a shared “place”. Webcam tools, like ZOOM, have their place and have helped us all during the isolation of Covid, but virtual worlds make distance irrelevant when used purposefully.

Valerie Hill (aka Valibrarian) at the Community Virtual Library

Exploring the metaverse is quite a task as there are hundreds of immersive environments and new ones quickly evolving. The original “metaverse” (suggested by Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash) is the virtual world of Second Life and the Community Virtual Library has a main branch there along with the Virtual Worlds Education Consortium.

Librarians are exploring these environments and after a long career as a librarian, I find a virtual world to be a perfect fit for providing resources to learning communities. In fact, digital citizenship and metaliteracy can be taught in the metaverse and are rapidly becoming essential life skills. What an exciting time to be a librarian!

What Does Your Personal Dashboard Look Like?

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It’s personal! Each of us gets to set up our personal dashboard on digital devices (computer screens, smartphones, tablets and more) with our own color schemes, favorite apps, and background pics. Students may have the icon for their classroom learning management program, shoppers have their favorite apps to stores, and we all have favorite creative apps, health apps or travel and weather apps.

Personal screen dashboard

So what’s the big dashboard deal?

In the past, prior to the digital age, sources of information were limited. We had few channels of incoming information, such as radio, television and the books. Research meant heading to the library! Now, the library is in our pockets and so are a million apps that we can personally choose.

My personal dashboard is great, right?

Maybe not so great! This personalization of our incoming and outgoing information (as prosumers: both producers and consumers of content) means that our sources of information are unique and there is no more “shared culture of information”. Each of us lives in our own digital bubble of so-called friends and each of us follows a unique personally chosen never ending stream of information.

And what’s wrong with that? Well, big data companies impact what we see by tracking our preferences, for one thing. If I am seeing completely different information than you are…do we really live in the same world?

Is Confirmation Bias a real concern?

From https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-confirmation-bias-2795024

Our personal dashboards are impacting the way we think. Back when we had limited sources of information there were gatekeepers (librarians, researchers, reporters, historians, etc.) who helped weed out inaccuracies and helped us trust information. That responsibility for evaluation has been handed to each of us- or should I say thrown on us like a ton of bricks since the Internet has millions of pieces of information bombarding us every minute of the day. Unless we are alert and aware, we easily fall into confirmation bias and our dashboards are turned into narrow-focused channels that do not provide opposing views. Our “friends” become our information sources and we choose them because they think like we do. Without critical thinking and the debate between opposing viewpoints, real learning cannot take place.

There’s Still Hope

Being alert and aware of our thinking, of our dashboards, and of our personal responsibility for metaliteracy is essential. If we can embrace that personal responsibility, we have hope for our well-being, for empathy toward others, for valuing the need to listen to other perspectives and for the (dare I say) need for compromise. Social media has the tendency to promote emotionally charged shares, tweets and posts. When we are emotionally involved with viewpoints (often viewpoints we know little about), our chosen ideologies become more important than listening to others. Hope for our future and for the generations to follow us may rest on metaliteracy and the willingness to listen, to agree to disagree and to give our dashboards some real thought. Perhaps hope for the future may even rest on deliberately choosing to pause and reflect, to resist the share button, and even learn how to keep silent.

Meta-Death: Not Facebook Metaverse (Please)

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Literacy in digital culture has been my passion for decades now. And the prefix META has played a big role in my research as I adopted the terms metaliteracy in our metamodern era. In addition, my colleagues have spent years learning best practices for teaching in the metaverse, yet Facebook is just now spotlighting that word and changing the company’s name to META!


Meta! Meta! Meta!

Suddenly the world is criticizing this prefix, probably because many people dislike Facebook but feel compelled to use it. Apparently, META means “dead” in Hebrew! Yet, Meta has Greek roots that often translate as “after, beyond, about or among”. For instance, metacognition concerns thinking about thinking. But let’s consider this idea of meta = death.

Metaliteracy and the Death of Print

I witnessed the close of the Gutenberg Parenthesis (the period when the book was king format of the information hierarchy for 500 years from about the 1500-2000 AD) during my career as a librarian. What a fascinating journey it was! It felt like the library floor was shifting beneath my feet and I jumped into digital culture to figure out how information could be navigated after the death of fixed media. Yes…the word death may fit with metaliteracy! Death of print as king (yet long live print) as well as “beyond print” or thinking “about literacy” after the impact of the Internet.

Of course, a book in print is still a viable format and many people still prefer print books to digital formats or ebooks. Perhaps print will survive long into our future (of course a librarian would hope). But most content today is born digital, creating the need to investigate archival of changing formats as they evolve and the hardware used to access them becomes obsolete.

Metamodernism and the Death of Dystopia

Postmodernism ushered in a period of irony and cynicism as grand narratives were broken down and truth became illusive. A new period is arising beyond postmodernism which may allow room for sincerity, hope, and a balance of tradition and innovation. Postmodern literature brought volumes of dystopian fiction which many found bleak and desolate (even though much of it was quite good and who doesn’t like a good zombie story?).

The name of our current philosophical moment is not yet set in stone, but many, like myself, are proponents of the term metamodernism. In my recent book, Metamodernism and Changing Literacy, I investigate the intersection of our era in time with the need to revisit literacy as it has been revolutionized.

The Metaverse and the Death of a Single Reality

The hype over Facebook’s name change may bring the term “the metaverse” into popular culture, but it has been around since Neal Stephenson coined it way back in 1992 when he wrote Snow Crash. Facebook proports to give everyone a voice and connect them across the globe, which suggests that the company’s vision of virtual reality will build upon those connections. Jaron Lanier (often touted as the Father of Virtual Reality) opposes social media in his book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now and the idea of Facebook creating a VR world seems the antithesis of his philosophical view of a metaverse.

The Metaverse (with a capital M as an interoperable space connecting all virtual worlds) has not evolved, but the many metaverse-esque virtual worlds that I have visited for education are a far cry from what I imagine FB is developing. Space for cartoonish avatars playing social games and dancing around has little educational value and there are many high quality virtual spaces in which one can share a sense of presence for high quality immersive learning. No doubt, multiple realities are on the horizon and my passion for digital citizenship expands alongside them.

What does this jump into metamodernism mean for us? Much of our way of life is different now, perhaps dead to us! Some people say privacy is dead. A “shared culture” of music and media with our own generation may be dead as we each create and curate our own personal dashboard. A new way of living has emerged and we are personally responsible to make it healthy, happy and ethical.

Death is a part of the circle of life and plays a role in the cycle of information and libraries. If META means dead in Hebrew, we are given yet another connotation for our philosophical time, our evolving communication tools, and the way we will live in the future. As winter brings the death to our natural world, spring burst forth anew and we oscillate among the opposites we encounter on this planet. That’s about as metamodern as it gets.

Yikes! Metaliteracy Needed Now: Young, Old and In-Between!

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My recent article in College and Research Libraries News shares the importance of embedding metaliteracy in higher education but, if you really think about it, metaliteracy is for all of us from tiny tots to the elderly. Have you seen little ones accessing fun games and videos (hopefully somewhat educational) on their parents mobile devices? My four year old grandson recently picked up a wrapper from a kids’ treat and said, “Look there’s a QR code. Let’s see what it does on your phone!” His parents are aware of the importance of limiting screen time and provide him with lots of outdoor activities, but there is no escaping digital culture. Yes, literacy has changed and even the youngest among us juggles multiple formats of information as he becomes a prosumer– both consuming and producing digital content.

Augmented Reality apps are available now for toddlers!

ApplyDu for kids

Elderly Folks have Metaliteracy Needs

Working with elderly people in the library, I am reminded that we all have personal literacy needs. An 85 year old grandmother may want to learn ZOOM or Facetime to connect with family. Choosing which application and which device for communication is part of metaliteracy and the apps keep changing. One elderly woman asked for help setting up her new smart phone and it was her first time using a touch screen device. “Is it me or is this phone really confusing and difficult?” she asked. Learning to swipe up, down and side to side or to gently tap instead of push the screen frustrated her but her phone company told her that the flip phone she had was obsolete and sent her a new model. We have met several times in the library to help her get more comfortable. Metaliteracy includes constant changes in the way we communicate and adapting to changes in digital tools can be uniquely personal for each of us.

Metamodern Students “walk through” Instructional Design

Metaliteracy can be taught in any setting including a virtual world! To help a class of students in Dublin understand their own need for metaliteracy, I “sat on top” of my slides as the students walked through them (which is way less boring than listening to a lecture). Utilizing new digital tools may be fascinating but it requires understanding that metaliteracy is a personal responsibility. Parents, educators, and people of all ages need to think about their changing literacy skills and having conversations about it makes for a good start on becoming metaliterate.

Digital Citizens need Metaliteracy

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Digital Citizenship has become my passion over the past few years. Watching the world’s obsession with digital devices and constant connectivity has been fascinating as it coincided with the toppling of the information hierarchy. I still use the word library even though library schools are now called schools of information science. When I visited with some University of Washington iSchool students a few years ago, a young male student asked about my background. I told him I was a librarian and he smiled and said, “How quaint!” I smiled back thinking there is just something about the word library I don’t want to give up.

Of course, I know we carry our libraries in our pockets now! We are globally networked prosumers– both consuming and producing content on digital apps through virtual communities. This change was revolutionary and I am thankful to have witnessed it as a librarian at the turn of the century. I often remember a moment when I stood in my school library and felt the change that was happening. Early one morning, before the students and teachers arrived, I stood looking at the library shelves and tables thinking, “What will become of all this?” It felt as if the floor was shaking because I knew the library was rapidly about to change…. and it did. The library became a “digital hub” and a makerspace filled with laptops and devices, interactive whiteboards and Skype sessions with authors.

These changes brought my passion for digital citizenship to the forefront and, as a writing trainer with a love for literature, emphasized the need to explore how literacy was changing. When I found Mackey and Jacobson’s (2011) term metaliteracy, I instantly knew it was important. Recently, I wrote a guest blog post on the Metaliteracy.org site.

My interest in digital citizenship and changing literacy has intersected with our current philosophical era, in part due to that revolutionary moment I felt in my school library. I sensed that nothing would ever be the same. Yet, I still have such love for the core values of librarianship. I felt this oscillation between a respect for tradition and acceptance of revolutionary changes for the past decade.

A new term, which I discovered while investigating postmodernism, hit me like a bolt of lightning. Just when I began to understand postmodernism, I learned that it is over! We are living in a new era which has yet to be named. One of the terms for our current philosophical moment is metamodernism (Vermeulen and van Den Akker, 2010).

Collaborating with these scholars illustrates metaliteracy in the sense of networking across distance to access, produce and share information. The foundation for my book, Metamodernism and Changing Literacy, is the merge of two theoretical frameworks: the philosophical framework of metamodernism and the information science framework of metaliteracy.

What’s in a name? “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Was Shakespeare right? Perhaps it doesn’t matter what you call it because we all sense that our lives have changed along with the information revolution. Yet, agreeing on common terms helps us better understand and communicate our ideas. Giving credit to our sources still matters and realizing that we must be responsible for digital citizenship has become critical. I have great appreciation for colleagues (Mackey and Jacobson, Vermeulen and van Den Akker) for offering new nomenclature that advocates digital citizenship for us all.

Mackey, T., & Jacobson, T. (2011). “Reframing information literacy as a metaliteracy”, C&RL News 72: 62-78.

Hill, V. J. Metamodernism and Changing Literacy: Emerging Research and Opportunities. (2020) Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 1-283.

Vermeulen, T. & Van den Akker, R. (2010). Notes on metamodernism. Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 2, 1-14.

Sharing Digital Citizenship #iLRN 2020

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This year’s #iLRN 2020 Conference is about to begin! On Sunday June 21, I will lead tours at the Community Virtual Library Digital Citizenship Museum in Kitely. The museum houses room after room of content on elements of digital citizenship in global participatory culture. Included are topics such as artificial intelligence, digital archival, cybersecurity, and even a room about metamodernism and metaliteracy (featuring my new book)!

A project showcase will include an immersive learning project showcase featuring virtual reality spaces. I created a FrameVR room for the Community Virtual Library which can be accessed on the web-page or on a VR headset. These virtual learning spaces are rapidly expanding and the #iLRN Conference 2020 will be a great opportunity to network with educators who are exploring and using them with high quality content.