Media and Us – for better or worse

Right. I have a difficult time with the word trust, not because of trust itself, but because the word has many different meanings. And in an awful lot of my consulting work that I did, people would lean on trust because it is a very powerful word. Around 2008, 2009, I started banning the word trust and you had to use other words.

One of them was comfort. I find there’s comfort that I have confidence in what they’re saying. There’s about 10 to 12 different terms that people were using regularly. Essentially in working with online environments and social computing and social technologies, I started using social comfort as one of the questions. Are you comfortable using this tool? What are the things that make you uncomfortable? And I could get really good responses. If I asked somebody, do you trust the system? Do you trust other people in the system? They couldn’t really give a good answer, but they could surely tell you that they had comfort or they did not have comfort and where they found comfort and why and where they did not have comfort and why.

Pieter was on the front lines of the Fukushima nuclear accident caused by the earthquake and tsunami. This event was the beginning of the creation of Safecast, now considered one of the world’s most effective citizen science initiatives.

People measured the degree of radiation for people in the area….They created kind of a bias-free network of measurements, where people selected themselves where they wanted to measure.
That was actually what gave us the power. And once you have that, then people can build trust in that data set because if it’s biased, the trust is gone and people will say, “No, but you only measured areas with high radiation,” and blah blah, blah, and vice versa. “You’re greenwashing here and you’re measuring only what is happy and fine.” We didn’t do that. We absolutely left it to our participants to decide where they’re going, zero moderation whatsoever. And that allowed the data set to be very reliable and trusted. And I think that is kind of an element in citizen science that depending on what you do is very important to make sure that the way you organize it doesn’t allow bias to drive the end result.

It’s definitely got worse. Social media is an intensifier of disinformation, misinformation, so I’d say that’s how it’s got worse. And I think there’s been a breakdown in trust in general in all kinds of different areas, but also towards doctors. I mean, the position of your average doctor in society, there’s less trust, put it that way, but not only in doctors, also in teachers in other professions as well. And so we’ve got a whole project, we call it the Dismiss Projects; Disinformation Misinformation project. And yes, we’ve got communications departments and teams to work and counter and put out the message as we have for years, but I think what it really comes back to is we want to maintain our integrity about the information that we communicate.

There’s two ways of doing that. The first is to let the patient speak for themselves and give them a platform to speak, and so it comes directly from the source as opposed to speaking on their behalf or having spokespersons on their behalf. And so we try to do that. The default situation is that. When you look at the MSF websites, what I hope you’ll see is patients speaking out about what they’re experiencing rather than MSF staff interpreting what they think the patients are thinking

Climate education is really needed. Not just topics on climate change because we had those topics, but they didn’t show that this was a crisis. They didn’t empower us to do something. They didn’t empower us to raise awareness. And I think that is what is really missing when it comes to students. If only we have more activists in this spaces speaking to students and motivating them to do something.

I’ve had the opportunity to speak to students of different ages, even students from ages of three to six, and you realize that their thinking is different. The way you speak to a child who is five is not the same as to a child who is nine. A child who is five won’t understand the climate crisis, but they’ll understand their favorite animal, and many of them grow up with the love of ensuring that their favorite animal is protected. And that is what eventually grows into what now you teach a nine-year-old who knows that a water bottle is important because they understand that if I carry my water bottle, then I’m not going to have to buy water in a plastic bottle.

With the different ages, the way you speak and educate is important. Yes, it’s very important to start from a young age because you’re setting the foundation of what these young people are going to be as they continue to grow up. That foundation may be from starting to talk about the importance of protecting your favorite animal. That is what they understand, and can comprehend. But eventually that grows into someone who is really vocal about the environment.

Well, first thing, bring the internet into the education system right now. Bring it in every possible way. To every question that you want to ask a learner, ask them, “Can you figure it out?” I once said jokingly in a school, in those old Victorian schools, there used to be an archway on which the school motto would be written, and it was usually something in Latin. Hic, hoc or something or the other, and it was the school’s model. I think we need to change that model. We need to change it to “figure it out”. That’s what the school should be for. That’s what learners should be encouraged to do. Go ahead, look up the internet, talk to yourselves, talk to each other and tell me the answer. You figure it out.

Why do we have to do that? Because we have no way in which our past is going to be similar to our children’s future. Currently, I think we are preparing our children for our past.

So unanticipation is a really important, I think, strategy of strategies that is, ultimately, it’s about making more things possible. Rather than trying to limit the future to the one that you want, instead you try to broaden it as much as possible by making what you’ve done, including, is another example of the education thing by way. By making what you’ve done, what you’ve learned as widely as available to people without knowing, being able to predict, anticipate what they’re going to do with it.

The imperative is to, Make. More. Future. Which goes back to the role of elderly and adult people and choosing what the future is going to be for our children. And since we cannot anticipate what they are going to want or what the world will be, I think the best thing to do is to open up as many possibilities as we can.

It’s our responsibility. We’re the ones that made the mess. So I think I would love for our generation to take more responsibility, allowing the young generation to have a childhood with free of worry and strife, and you only have to read the news to see how mental health in the younger generation is an increasing issue. So yeah, no, I think it’s on us. Of course, us, when I say us, it’s on everybody. But wouldn’t it be nice to leave the younger generation to have a decent childhood?

We can foresee it coming that AI might be the thing that can reunite us human as a species, as a civilization, together. So this is so important because always in history, when you look back in time, we need some false enemy. Right now we need something so distinguishable, distinguished from human. So the others, they’re so different from our own kind, but this is what threatening us. Maybe it’s not for real, but we need that kind of thing, we need that external crisis to push us to think, to act, to united as one again.

So maybe this is a Chinese crisis, which can be translated into two characters. One is  is crisis. Another means opportunity or chance. So in Chinese, the two together always means two parts of the reality.

The willingness to engage in challenge, in hard things, in difficult problems I think is critical right now and yeah, it’s a bit of a clarion call especially to younger generations to say, and this again goes into that conversation around achievement because I think we’ve prepared a lot of young people to just build that golden resume and they’re afraid that anything that looks to hard or to contentious will get them into trouble and then somehow smudge their record.

I say go looking for a teacher, not a fight because all the hardest things in the world are the best teachers. All the challenging conversations, the thorny problems, the stuff that requires you to pour over it for a while, those are the places where you learn and you grow and I think, because where we’re being replaced by robots as we’re told every single day now, our ability to problem solve, our ability to create, our ability to connect as humans is going to become and is right now evermore important.

Embedding learning, embedding change, embedding adaptation into your worldview and into your approach to how you move forward is absolutely critical. I’m speaking a lot to young people about that: don’t feel like there’s something wrong if everything doesn’t lead seamlessly one thing to the next. You don’t necessarily want it to. And by the way, it’s probably not going to. That might not be the way your generations lives look.