Bernie Sanders has emerged as the Democratic front-runner in the race for the presidential nomination.
Yet even some left-leaning pundits and publications are concerned about what they see as Sanders’s potential lack of electability.
Sanders is a Democratic Socialist. And the label “socialist” is a political liability in American culture. According to a Gallup poll released on February 11, 2020, only 45% of Americans would vote for a socialist.
I am a scholar of American culture with an interest in the relationship between political ideologies and popular culture. In my research, I have found that this antipathy toward socialism may not be an accident: American identity today is strongly tied to an image of capitalism crafted and advertised by the Ad Council and American corporate interests over decades, often with the support of the U.S. government.
A screenshot from one of the corporate Cold War-era cartoons linking the Bill of Rights to free-enterprise ideology. [Image: Internet Archive, Prelinger Collection]
BUSINESS AND GOVERNMENT SOLIDARITY
In 1942, a group of advertising and industry executives created the War Advertising Council, to promote the war effort. The government compensated the companies that created or donated ads by allowing them to deduct some of their costs from their taxable incomes.
Renamed the Ad Council in 1943, the organization applied the same wartime persuasive techniques of advertising and psychological manipulation during the Cold War years, the post-war period when the geopolitical rivalry between the U.S., the USSR, and their respective allies raged. One of their goals: promoting the virtues of capitalism and free enterprise in America while simultaneously demonizing the alternative—socialism—which was often conflated with communism.
This link between capitalism and American national identity was advertised through a sophisticated, corporate effort as efficient and ubiquitous as state-driven propaganda behind the Iron Curtain.
The campaigns used the ideological divisions of the Cold War to emphasize the relevance of their message. In a 1948 report, the Ad Council explained its goal to the public: “The world today is engaged in a colossal struggle to determine whether freedom or statism will dominate.”
EXTOLLING CAPITALISM’S VIRTUES
The campaigns started as a public-private partnership. At the end of World War II, the government worried about the spread of communism at home. Business interests worried about government regulations and about the rising popularity of unions. The Cold War provided both parties with a shared enemy.
In 1947, President Truman asked the Ad Council to organize the Freedom Train Campaign, focusing on the history of America’s political freedoms. Paramount Pictures, U.S. Steel, DuPont, General Electric, and Standard Oil provided financial support. For two years the train crisscrossed the nation, carrying original documents that included the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.
The following year, the Ad Council launched a business-led campaign, called “The Miracle of America,” intended to foster support for the American model of capitalism, as distinct from its Western European version, which was more friendly to government intervention. It urged increased productivity by U.S. workers, linked economic and political freedom, and, paradoxically, asserted capitalism’s collaborative nature.
“Sure, America is going ahead if we all pull together,” read a brochure. Another flyer, “Comes the Revolution!,” cast its support of American capitalism in the language of global struggle: “If we continue to make that system work . . . then other nations will follow us. If we don’t, then they’ll probably go communist or fascist.”
American factory workers received about half of the 1.84 million copies of the free pamphlet “The Miracle of America.” One-quarter were distributed free of charge to schools, and 76 universities ordered the booklet.
This pro-business propaganda, expressed in the language of Cold War patriotism, had reached roughly 70% of the American population by the end of the campaign.
CARTOON CAPITALISM
The efforts produced more than just print and billboard messages.
In 1946, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, founded by the former head of General Motors, paid the evangelical Harding College to produce “Fun and Facts about American Business,” a series of educational cartoon videos about capitalism, produced by a former Disney employee.
The films promoted the same messages as the Ad Council campaigns, although they were not part of the project. They continued a decade-long effort by the Sloan Foundation to start, in the words of its executive director, “a bombardment of the American mind with elementary economic principles through partnering with educational institutions.”
To both Sloan and the movement’s backers, business interests were synonymous with the national interest. The free-enterprise system was a shorthand for freedom, democracy, and patriotism. Unlike in Europe, the videos suggested, class struggle—of the kind that required unions—did not exist in the U.S.
In the cartoon “Meet the King,” Joe, the archetypal American worker, realizes he is not an exploited proletarian. Instead, he’s a king, “because he can buy more with his wages than any other worker on the globe.”
Conversely, government regulations of, or interventions in, the economy were described in the cartoons as socialist tendencies, bound to lead to communism and tyranny.
According to an estimate from Fortune magazine, by 1952, American businesses spent $100 million each year, independent from any Ad Council campaigns, promoting free enterprise.
“PEANUTS” PUSHES FREEDOM
In the early 1970s, business responded to rising negativity about corporate power with a new campaign coordinated by the Ad Council.
Part of a page from the 1970s booklet that used Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strips to explain the benefits of America’s economic system. [Image: Amazon]
The media industry donated $40 million in free space and air time in the first year of the campaign. The Department of Commerce and the Department of Labor contributed about half a million dollars toward the production costs for a 20-page booklet.
That booklet used data provided by the departments of Commerce and Labor and Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strips to explain the benefits of America’s economic system. The system was again presented as a foundational freedom protected by a Constitution whose goal was to “maintain a climate in which people could work, invest, and prosper.”
By 1979, 13 million copies had been distributed to schools, universities, libraries, civic organizations, and workplaces.
ECHOES NOW?
For four decades, the Cold War provided a simple good-versus-evil axis that consolidated the association between freedom, American-ness, and free-enterprise capitalism.
The business community, independently and through the Ad Council, funded massive top-down economic education programs which shaped American perceptions of business and government and of capitalism and socialism.
The Cold War ended 30 years ago, but its cultural structures and divisions endure—perhaps, even, in the responses of some Americans to Bernie Sanders’s socialism.
What do effective teamwork and Russian literature have in common? Why is successful teamwork so much like a happy marriage? How can you make teamwork more effective?
Let’s start with this premise:
Happy teams are all alike; every unhappy team is unhappy in its own way.
Have you heard of the Anna Karenina principle? It’s derived from the famous first sentence of Leo Tolstoy’s seminal novel: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
The principle is as follows: in order for a marriage to thrive, it must succeed in many different respects. If you and your partner argue about money, clash about parenting, or differ in political ideology, you’re doomed to unhappiness — no matter how happy you are in other areas of your relationship. Back in 340 BC, Aristotle emphasized the same principle a bit differently: “Men are good in but one way, but bad in many.”
In other words, success is not about doing just one thing correctly, but about avoiding many possible ways to fail. The Anna Karenina principle, popular in science and math, holds true for a lot of things in life — including effective teamwork.
If teams want to hit their goals, meet their deadlines, and surpass their KPIs, they need to succeed in all the critical ways — and avoid all the common pitfalls.
So what exactly is this magical recipe for effective teamwork? In the early days of building monday.com, we spoke with hundreds of managers and discussed all the unique reasons that teams are unhappy. We discovered seven factors that make or break a team’s success.
7 secrets to effective teamwork:
1. Set clear goals
Imagine you and your team are climbing Mount Everest. But instead of prepping your team in advance about what you’ll be doing and why you’re doing it, you simply tell them to start hiking. And then direct them where to step next. Step after step. Your team becomes disoriented and unmotivated, ready to give up when the ascent gets difficult.
This is exactly what it’s like if you don’t set clear goals. As a manager, you end up handing out task after task. People don’t understand the greater context of their work and why it’s important, so they feel that their work is endless, pointless, and exhausting. Your team needs a specific, measurable goal to help them prioritize what’s important, drive them towards a definitive result, and give them a sense of achievement when they reach it. This leads us to point number two…
2. Create transparency
If we had to describe what we’re trying to achieve at monday.com in one word, it would be “transparency.” Transparency means making everything — all information, numbers, plans, and challenges — readily accessible to everyone on your team.
When you create transparency, you can harness the full intelligence and motivation of your team. Everyone not only knows what you’re doing but why you’re doing it, and they understand how even the smallest task fits into the bigger picture. With transparency, you can set clear goals and get everyone on your team on board. They have all the information they need to do their part to contribute, and may even be inspired to find innovative and creative ways to reach your goal.
In monday.com, transparency is the essence of effective teamwork. The board is the place for you to set a goal, map out a process, assign ownership, and track where everything stands. One simple board holds all the information, and it’s there for everyone to see. No confusion and no meetings!
3. Decide what you’ll complete each week
No one can make sense of where a three-month long project stands from the tasks it’s composed of. You lose connection from reality when you start to obsess over a detailed project hierarchy and which subtask falls where. In real life, actual work is always planned by dates, deadlines, and assignment of responsibility.
Managing by time is simple as making a detailed list of all the tasks your team will complete this week. Assign ownership to make it clear who’s doing what. Reemphasize your goal, and then get to work. Working towards a concrete deadline creates a sense of urgency and forces your team to make smart decisions to reach your goals. As a team, you can then review what you’ve achieved and celebrate your shared success.
4. Recognize people’s accomplishments
Loads of scientific studies show that people’s single biggest motivator is not money, but recognition. Being congratulated with a simple, “Great job for completing [fill in the blank]!” increases employee productivity ten-fold.
But when you mark a task as “complete” in a traditional project management tool, what happens? It disappears. No one knows. This kills people’s motivation. That’s the power of “done” in monday.com: when you complete a task, you can mark it as a green. It’s incredibly satisfying, and even addictive, to mark everything as green and see all your accomplishments line up at the end of each week. And when you and your teammates can easily congratulate each other on a job well done, there’s no better way to build effective teamwork. That’s why we call it “done therapy.” 🙂
5. Focus on processes, not tasks
Most project management tools rely heavily on hierarchy. The problem with that is that hierarchies are really hard to navigate, and there’s always a few different ways to construct them. When’s the last time you found a file in a folder on someone else’s computer?
It’s easier to instead think about steps and map them out in a flat and intuitive grid. When we spoke with hundreds of managers about how they define effective teamwork, we learned that almost everyone uses spreadsheets or grids to manage their work. It’s a simple way to map out a process and even better, you can replicate it for future processes.
6. Track your work visually
Unfortunately for Tolstoy, this is now the era of TL;DR. When you look at a text-based system — and they’re all text-based — you need to read to understand where things stand. That’s a problem. As humans, we take in visual information way more quickly than we do verbal information. That’s why traffic lights are colors, not words.
monday.com is completely visual. The colored statuses immediately tell you if something is “done,” “stuck,” or “in progress.” When you display a board on a screen in your office, everyone on your team knows exactly where things stand. Visuals are effective, not open to interpretation, and clear to everyone.
7. Communicate in one place Email, check-ins, chat, staff meetings, Skype calls — there are endless ways to communicate. And yet crossed wires and broken games of telephone are a continual problem for teams. The result is more meetings, more email, and more wasted time.
Here at monday.com, we’ve eliminated email almost completely and have centralized all communication inside our product. The benefit of this is that all updates are always in context, and you can drag and drop your files (images, docs, whatever) directly into the update. Voila, all the information you need is there, visible to everyone on your team.
In a nutshell: What makes teamwork effective?
In the end, effective teamwork can be summed up as simply as: it’s about people, not projects. So many project management tools treat people as a byproduct or a secondary resource amidst the hierarchy of tasks and subtasks. But that’s a mistake.
When you focus on what makes people tick — what drives them, what comes naturally to them, what they find enjoyable — you can harness their full potential to move faster and achieve incredible things together. And that’s what makes monday.com so vastly different from every other project management tool on the market: we focus on all the real factors that actually contribute to effective teamwork.
A country riven by ethnic tension. Spontaneous protests driven by viral memes. Violence and riots fueled by hateful fake-news posts, often about “terrorism” by marginalized groups.
It’s a story we’ve seen play out around the world recently, from France and Germany to Burma, Sri Lanka, and Nigeria. The particulars are different—gas prices were the trigger in France, lies about machete attacks in Nigeria—but one element has been present every time: Facebook. In each of these countries, the platform’s power to accelerate hate and disinformation has translated into real-world violence.
Americans used to watch this kind of stuff with the comforting conviction that It Can’t Happen Here. But we’ve learned that the United States is not as exceptional as we might have thought, nor are contemporary societies as protected from civil conflict as we had hoped.
Just picture a reasonably proximate scenario: It’s the winter of 2020, and Donald Trump—having lost reelection by a margin closer than expected—is in full attack mode, whipping up stories of runaway voter fraud. Local protest groups coalesce around Facebook posts assailing liberals, murderous “illegals,” feminists. (This is basically what happened in France last year with the “anger groups” that birthed the yellow vest protests.) Pizzagate-style conspiracy theories race through these groups, inflaming their more extreme members. Add a population that is, unlike those of France and Nigeria, armed to the teeth, and the picture gets pretty dark.
In other words, though it has already facilitated the election of a demagogue committed to stoking racial prejudice, enriched his family, and sold out America’s national interest, social media may not yet have shown us the worst it can do to a divided society. And if we don’t get a handle on the power of the platforms, we could see worse play out sooner than we think.
This prognosis may sound grim, but it’s not intended to get you stockpiling canned goods or researching New Zealand immigration law. It’s simply to ratchet up the urgency with which we think about this problem, to bring to it the kind of focus we brought to other times when a single corporation—Standard Oil, AT&T, Microsoft—amassed an unacceptable degree of power over the fate of our society.
In the case of social platforms, their power is over the currency of democracy: information. Nearly 70 percent of American adults say they get some of their news via social media. That’s a huge shift not just in terms of distribution, but in terms of quality control, too. In the past, virtually all the institutions distributing news had verification standards of some kind, no matter how thin or compromised, before publication. Facebook has none. Right now, we could concoct almost any random “news” item and, for as little as $3 a day to “boost” it via the platform’s advertising engine, get it seen by up to 3,400 people each day as if it were just naturally showing up in their feed.
This is no hypothetical. It’s precisely what Vladimir Putin’s minions, and the Trump campaign and its allies, did in 2016. And why not? Facebook showed them the way, dispatching staffers to campaigns to make sure they knew how to get exactly the messages they wanted in front of exactly the people most susceptible.
Facebook—and all of us—got a wake-up call when we learned how bad actors put those types of lessons into practice. But make no mistake: While Facebook and YouTube, Twitter, and the other platforms may have been genuinely shocked by what happened in 2016, disinformation and manipulation are not a bug in their businesses. It’s the very core of the model, which is why they will never fix it on their own.
Recall for a moment the commercial, ubiquitous across television last year: “We came here for the friends.” The narrator, sounding a little like a younger Mark Zuckerberg, skipped us through pictures of kids in braces, awkward bands, birthdays. Facebook was telling us its creation myth, and it almost felt true. Wasn’t it that way when we first made our accounts? Didn’t we marvel at the parade of connections that suddenly poked into our lives, reminding us of who we’d been, who we might become?
“But then something happened,” the commercial’s narrator intoned, and the screen filled up with the words “CLICKBAIT” and “FAKE NEWS.” Until finally, young Zuck put a stop to it: “That’s going to change…Because when this place does what it was built for, then we all get a little closer.”
It was a classic crisis communications campaign. Facebook was desperate to reset its brand, tarnished by Cambridge Analytica and Russian trolls. It was fashioning an alternative history of itself, one that it would relentlessly promote—via advertising and congressional testimony and carefully stage-managed interviews—throughout 2018. But very little about the actual record supports that story.
Instead, what we know now is that, for years, Facebook has been aware that user data was being shared with outside actors and that its platform was being turned into a disinformation machine. Over and over, it had the option to address the problem and inform the public. And over and over, it chose to go the other way. Think back.
Facebook was fully aware, back in 2015, that Cambridge Analytica and other companies had gained access to detailed, personal information about many millions of users. Facebook kept that knowledge to itself and even threatened to sue the Guardian when it finally broke the story more than two years later along with the New York Times.
Facebook’s security chief investigated, as early as the summer of 2016, how the platform was being manipulated by Putin’s minions. Yet as late as April 2017, Facebook still downplayed and scrubbed his analysis of what the Russians had done.
Two days after the 2016 election, Zuckerberg protested that it was “crazy” to think disinformation on his platform could have made a difference; “only a profound lack of empathy” with the electorate could lead one to think that way, he said. The admonition rings even more patronizing now that we know that his own employees had been concerned for months that Facebook had become the front line of information warfare.
Russian influence operations put special emphasis on African American communities, using both Facebook and (Facebook-owned) Instagram with accounts such as @blackstagram_ to discourage people from voting. And the Russians didn’t slow down after the election: They simply switched gears and began deriding the Robert Mueller investigation.
Meanwhile in Nigeria, Facebook’s push to make sure its app was the gateway to the internet for millions of new smartphone users set off a tide of fake news and hate speech that has led to multiple murders. “In a multiethnic and multireligious country like ours,” Nigeria’s minister of communications said in June 2018, “fake news is a time bomb.” (Sound familiar?) In response, Facebook launched a digital literacy program that partners with 140 secondary schools—less than 1 percent of Nigeria’s schools.
Likewise, Sri Lanka begged Facebook to help rein in anti-Muslim propaganda, with little response, until violent mobs ransacked Muslim homes and businesses and the government shut down access to Facebook entirely—whereupon the company finally reacted.
Last fall, Facebook chose the day before Thanksgiving to admit what it had thunderously denied for a week: that it had retained a conservative oppo firm (that maintains its very own fake-news site) to dig up dirt on its critics and link them to George Soros, the favorite target of anti-Semitic haters.
As late as the summer of 2018, Facebook was letting Yahoo access your friends’ posts without telling you. It allowed Spotify and Netflix to read your messages without your consent and gave Apple access to contact and calendar information even when you had specifically disabled data sharing. It was doing all this despite having been embarrassed, dragged before Congress, and excoriated by users for exactly this kind of breach of trust.
The list goes on—from Brexit to Black Lives Matter, we keep learning of episodes where social media was used to spread disinformation and hate. The transformation of Facebook into a tool for manipulation was not something that, as the commercial claims, just happened. It was facilitated and concealed at every step by Facebook itself. And the actions of Facebook’s leaders make it difficult, even for those formerly inclined to giving Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg the benefit of the doubt, to continue doing so.
A decadelong chronicle of lawsuits and leaks offers a window into the social-media giant and how its leader’s ethos to “move fast and break things” strained the public’s trust.
10/23/09
Facebook shifts user timelines away from simple chronology, introducing an algorithmic News Feed that gives the company influence over what goes viral.
2010
Facebook begins a series of data-sharing partnerships with major companies, including Microsoft and Amazon. They are only revealed eight years later.
10/17/10
The Wall Street Journal reports Facebook is allowing apps like FarmVille to collect data regardless of users’ privacy settings.
But Facebook has not just given aid and comfort to propagandists. It has hurt the antidote to fake news—real news. Review, briefly, the recent history of our industry. First, starting in the 2000s, came the giant migration of advertising dollars from publishers to Facebook and Google. Today, the two control an estimated 58 percent of the US digital ad market, with Amazon, Microsoft, and the like dividing up the rest and publishers representing barely a rounding error.
In large part as a result, there are now roughly 24,000 journalists working in America’s daily print newsrooms, down from some 56,000 in the early 2000s. And more and more of them work for hedge-fund owners who milk what remains of newspapers’ profits—mostly through layoffs—while further degrading coverage. Here in the Bay Area, all the daily papers except the San Francisco Chronicle are owned by one of these hedge funds, Alden Global Capital. There were once more than 1,000 journalists working for these papers, including 440 at the San Jose-based Mercury News, then one of the nation’s strongest regional outlets. Today there are 145 left across more than two dozen publications, covering a region of 7.6 million people.
It came, then, as an improbable bit of good news when, on November 6, 2014, Zuckerberg stepped in front of a microphone to describe how Facebook was going all in on news. The internal algorithm, which determines which of a zillion posts every day actually show up in your feed, had been reworked over the previous year and a half to deliver more content from publishers. Facebook, in Zuckerberg’s words, was aiming to be the “perfect personalized newspaper for every person in the world.”
This was a big deal. The social network seemed to recognize it was in the media business—the newspaper business!—and that had to be good news for the rest of the media, too.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveils a new look for the social network’s News Feed in 2013.
Jeff Chiu/AP
It certainly was for Mother Jones. Before that shift, up to 1.5 million users would land on one of our stories from Facebook each month. By the end of 2014 (thanks to strong reporting, a killer social team, and a lift from the algorithm) that number had jumped to 4 million, then 5 million. We were reaching people who had never gone to our website, never seen our print magazine. And while some would only glance at one article and never return, many others were reading deeply.
They were sharing, too. Lacking a huge brand or marketing budget, MoJo had never been able to get our reporting to all the people who might be interested in it. Now, readers became our marketing team, and each share was a signal to the algorithm to show our stories to even more people.
For us, this was a way to reach more people with investigative reporting. But for many newsrooms—especially those dependent primarily on advertising revenue—the urge to feed Facebook changed the way news was produced. First came clickbait and the rise of entire companies (Upworthy and the early versions of BuzzFeed and HuffPost) built entirely around getting you to click, like, and share. Millennial-focused PolicyMic dropped the “policy” and became a click machine monetizing progressive outrage with what one staff writer called “clickbait Mad Libs” stories. Super-shareable bits that pushed emotional buttons, from warm and fuzzy hope to anger and fear—the “information equivalent of salt and fat,” as Danny Rogers of the Global Disinformation Indexputs it—became the ticket to business success.
Then, as part of one of Zuck’s pet projects, Facebook pushed publishers to “pivot to video” and even paid some news organizations to make videos (for Mic, those payments are reported to have been as high as $5 million in a single year), with the predictable result that newsrooms laid off writers en masse and beefed up video teams. Never mind that Facebook, as we wouldn’t learn until much later, was dramatically overselling the number of minutes people actually spent watching videos on the platform. The site’s gravitational force had become so strong that its every move changed the orbits of those around it.
All along the way, as Facebook pumped headlines into your feed, it didn’t care whether the “news” was real. It didn’t want that responsibility or expense. Instead, it honed in on engagement—did you share or comment, increasing value to advertisers? Truth was optional, if not an actual hindrance.
But as with actual salt and fat, we humans didn’t evolve as rapidly as our information diets did. We were still looking for information when the platforms were giving us engagement. People Googling “Hillary Clinton” in 2016 wanted to know about a candidate. When the top search results led them to a Breitbart piece on Benghazi, which generated a recommendation for an Infowars video, which sucked them into a wormhole of conspiracy chats, they weren’t thinking, “I’m being shown engaging content.” They were reading a perfect personalized newspaper.
This is what Zuckerberg and the other platform chiefs still haven’t grappled with: Their tools are great at helping you find content but not truth. (Even YouTube’s app for kids, as Business Insiderdiscovered, recommended conspiracy videos about our world being ruled by reptile-human hybrids.)
Facebook et al. became the primary sources of news and the primary destroyers of news. And they refused to deal with it because their business is predicated on the fallacy that technology is neutral—Silicon Valley’s version of “guns don’t kill people.”
Having denied and deflected the problem of information warfare when the wolf was at the door, by early 2017 Facebook’s leaders were finally beginning to freak out. They gave speeches about how important quality journalism was. They put money into media literacy. They hired Campbell Brown, an ex-anchor with GOP ties, to run a “news partnerships” initiative.
And then they delivered the sucker punch. In January 2018, Zuckerberg announced what amounted to the end of the “perfect personalized newspaper”: Facebook was pivoting back to friends. The algorithm would ramp up the number of posts from individuals a user was connected with and dial way back on news. Not the fake kind—the real thing.
Today, you are far less likely to see posts from Mother Jones or any other publisher than you were two years ago, even when you’ve specifically followed that page. For many serious publishers, Facebook reach has plummeted—so much so that some are even breaking their rule against disclosing internal analytics. Slate recently revealed that in May 2018, it saw 87 percent fewer Facebook referrals than it had in early 2017. Other news organizations have taken a hit in the same range.
This means that people are getting less news in their feeds, right at a time when news is more important than ever. And because, with the stroke of an algorithm, Facebook erased a huge part of publishers’ audience, it also vaporized much of what was left of the revenue base for journalism. It’s no accident that just a couple of months ago, Verizon revealed that its digital media division—which includes AOL, Yahoo, and Tumblr along with journalism shops like HuffPost and Engadget—was worth about half as muchas the nearly $9 billion it had previously been valued at. Layoffs soon followed. RIP the dream of “monetizing audiences at scale.”
Mother Jones Page Views From Facebook
For MoJo, this decline is significant but not catastrophic. Facebook never was the primary driver of what we do, and we have lots of other ways to get our stories to people, from social platforms to newsletters, podcasts, and, you know, print. Even so, the decline in Facebook audience over the past 18 months translates into a loss of at least $600,000—and for other publishers, the hemorrhaging has been far worse. The depressing tale of how Mic rode Facebook all the way up to a fantasy valuation of $100 million, and then all the way back down to a fire sale and the brutal dumping of its entire newsroom, is just one example.
It’s important to be clear that this is not about Facebook—or the other platforms—having actual malice toward news. There are many people inside these companies who recognize the problems they’re creating, and some of them chafe at not being able to talk about them more publicly. There are also many who seriously want to support sound information and have worked hard on initiatives to do that. But at least so far, those efforts haven’t matched the damage done.
Part of the reason is that Facebook has few incentives to prioritize being a responsible player in the information ecosystem. It’s a publicly traded company required to create value for shareholders, not the public. Maximizing engagement, whether it’s with baby photos or hateful memes, helps create that value.
It’s also become clear that Zuckerberg doesn’t fundamentally grasp the difference between journalism and propaganda. Last May, he explained to a roomful of journalists that “a lot of what you all do is have an opinion.” Facebook, he said, is just providing space for many opinions.
It was an almost Trumpian kind of nihilism: There is no truth. There are no facts. There is just “somebody’s version of the truth,” in Rudy Giuliani’s immortal phrasing. Everywhere you look, this truth-agnostic approach pervades the way Facebook and the other platforms have operated.
When Facebook’s vice president of global public policy, Joel Kaplan, showed up conspicuously sitting behind Brett Kavanaugh in the justice’s confirmation hearings, many Facebook staffers took it as a signal that the company was throwing its weight behind someone credibly accused of sexual assault. Facebook leadership insisted Kaplan was there simply in a personal capacity. (“Please don’t insult our intelligence,” one staffer countered.) Kaplan ended up throwing Kavanaugh, his friend from back in the Bush administration, a party upon his ascent to the court.
But aside from providing a cameo of entitlement, the moment also encapsulated how conservatives have managed to keep Facebook constantly seeking to appease them, despite (or rather because of) its perceived liberal bias. It’s a classic case of working the refs: Yell about being treated unfairly, and people will strain to prove otherwise. An executive with another social platform told us privately that his company had found an “elegant” solution to suppress the spread of disinformation via its algorithm—but that wasn’t immediately implemented, the person said, because of fear that it would become “a political issue” with censorship charges from the right. Likewise, the Wall Street Journal reported that Kaplan helped kill a project to help people communicate across political differences because it might patronize conservatives, who might not agree with Facebook’s definition of “toxic” speech. He also reportedly pushed for the Daily Caller, an unadulterated propaganda shop co-founded by Tucker Carlson, to be part of Facebook’s fact-checking program.
Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh arrives to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 27. Seated second row, second from left, is Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president for global public policy.
Win McNamee/Pool Photo/AP
As it happens, conservative entities like the Daily Caller are thriving in the everything-is-opinion world Facebook created. Not long after the midterm election, we checked in on the CrowdTangle tool, which lets you see high-performing posts on Facebook. Of the top 50 stories from US publishers, 15 were screeds from the Daily Caller, Fox News, the Daily Wire, and Breitbart. All other US newspapers, magazines, and broadcast and cable networks combined accounted for another 16. The rest were clickbait from the likes of LadBibleand TMZ.
Our sample happened to be from the day after a photo of a mother and her young daughters fleeing tear gas at the US-Mexico border went viral. Among the top-performing posts on Facebook was a Daily Wire piece suggesting, with zero evidence, that the photo had been staged. It had accumulated nearly 55,000 likes, comments, and shares. A BuzzFeed interview with the actual family (revealing that they were not staging their terror) had fewer than 7,000.
This pattern holds true day after day—and it’s worse when you zero in on politics. Of the top 20 political news posts on any given day, more typically come from conservative outlets than from mainstream ones, with progressive voices barely breaking through at all. (Hat tip to the New York Times’ Kevin Roose, who has been keeping tabs on this for some time.) And the algorithm tends to choose the most inflammatory and reckless outlets and posts—you’re probably not going to find a thoughtful column by George Will or trenchant analysis from the American Conservative here.
So right-wing sites and clickbait dominate the platform that dominates American news consumption. And that same platform, despite its stated commitment to supporting “quality news,” keeps making it harder for people to find genuine journalism.
It’s tough to overstate how serious this is—and how much it differs from the conventional wisdom that Americans are just becoming “polarized” into left and right. The polarization evident in social-media news consumption is not between left and right. It’s between real news and propaganda (which does come in both conservative and liberal flavors, though the likes of Occupy Democrats are bit players compared with Fox News).
Facebook’s leaders are right about one thing, a talking point they’ve used relentlessly in recent months with regard to the disinformation crisis: “These aren’t problems you fix; they are problems you manage.” There are no easy solutions, as Zuckerberg acknowledged in a recent post about Facebook’s work on artificial intelligence to suppress “harmful content” like images of unclothed breasts or terrorist messaging. The AI is getting better at ferreting out other kinds of bad stuff—like hate speech—too, he noted, but it flags this only about 52 percent of the time, compared with 96 percent for nudity. Say that number gets all the way to 60 or even 70 percent—is it enough?
Of course not. Even if Facebook becomes better at weeding out, say, voter suppression or racist hate, history does not suggest it will deploy this capability in ways that could hurt its bottom line. It won’t make itself less dominant in the way people access information about the world or more cautious about using the data it has on us. And, for that matter, we shouldn’t let it solve these problems for us. We shouldn’t expect it to be the arbiter of how much news we see in a day or how much distortion is okay.
We need to take control of our information environment before it takes control of us. That requires government to do its job—regulation, antitrust action, the full array of tools that democracies have used in the past to rein in the power of corporations. It also requires the rest of us, including those who produce news, to step up. We need to build business models strong enough to support journalism regardless of the whims of an algorithm, and to stiffen our spines when the targets of our reporting scream “bias” or “fake news.” We need the resolve to go after important stories before they go viral, and to resist he-said-she-said evasions. We need the confidence and money to fuel the work.
And you, who are reading this right now, can use the power of your dollars and time to build reporting at MoJo and elsewhere that strengthens democracy, and to withdraw support (and eyeballs) from platforms or content that don’t. These are “problems you manage.” It’s time to stop letting Facebook manage them for us.
For the past decade, on American campuses, history has been declining more rapidly than any other major, even as more and more students attend college.
Photograph by George S. Zimbel / Getty
Having ignored questions of economic inequality for decades, economists and other scholars have recently discovered a panoply of effects that go well beyond the fact that some people have too much money and many don’t have enough. Inequality affects our physical and mental health, our ability to get along with one another and to make our voices heard and our political system accountable, and, of course, the futures that we can offer our children. Lately, I’ve noticed a feature of economic inequality that has not received the attention it deserves. I call it “intellectual inequality.”
I do not refer to the obvious and ineluctable fact that some people are smarter than others but, rather, to the fact that some people have the resources to try to understand our society while most do not. Late last year, Benjamin M. Schmidt, a professor of history at Northeastern University, published a study demonstrating that, for the past decade, history has been declining more rapidly than any other major, even as more and more students attend college. With slightly more than twenty-four thousand current history majors, it accounts for between one and two per cent of bachelor’s degrees, a drop of about a third since 2011. The decline can be found in almost all ethnic and racial groups, and among both men and women. Geographically, it is most pronounced in the Midwest, but it is present virtually everywhere.
There’s a catch, however. It’s boom time for history at Yale, where it is the third most popular major, and at other élite schools, including Brown, Princeton, and Columbia, where it continues to be among the top declared majors. The Yale history department intends to hire more than a half-dozen faculty members this year alone. Meanwhile, the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, Bernie L. Patterson, recently proposed that the school’s history major be eliminated, and that at least one member of its tenured faculty be dismissed. Of course, everything gets more complicated when you look at the fine print. Lee L. Willis, the chair of the history department, told me that the chancellor’s proposal is a budget-cutting measure in response to the steadily declining number of declared majors, but it’s really about the need to reduce the faculty from fourteen to ten, and this means getting rid of at least one tenured member. To do that, it’s necessary to disband the department. (A spokesperson for the university said that “UW-Stevens Point is exploring every option to avoid laying off faculty and staff members.”) The remaining professors will be placed in new departments that combine history with other topics.
Stevens Point, in Wisconsin’s Northwoods, educates many first-generation college students, and, in the past, the history department has focussed on training teachers. Willis pointed out that, after Scott Walker, the former governor, led an assault on the state’s teachers’ unions, gutting benefits and driving around ten per cent of public-school teachers out of the profession, a teaching career understandably looks considerably less attractive to students. “I am hearing a lot, ‘What kind of a job am I going to get with this? My parents made me switch,’ ” Willis said. “There is a lot of pressure on this particular generation.” But he also noted a recent rise in declared history majors this past semester, from seventy-six to a hundred and twenty. “This perception of a one-way trend and we’ll whittle down to nothing is not what I am seeing,” he said.
The steep decline in history graduates is most visible beginning in 2011 and 2012. Evidently, after the 2008 financial crisis, students (and their parents) felt a need to pick a major in a field that might place them on a secure career path. Almost all of the majors that have seen growth since 2011, Schmidt noted in a previous study, are in the stem disciplines, and include nursing, engineering, computer science, and biology. (A recent Times story noted that the number of computer-science majors more than doubled between 2013 and 2017.) “M.I.T. and Stanford are making a big push in the sciences,” Alan Mikhail, the chair of the history department at Yale, told me. Other universities have tended to emulate them, no doubt because that’s what excites the big funders these days—and with their money comes the prestige that gives a university its national reputation. David Blight, a professor of history at Yale and the director of its Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, tells a similar story when it comes to funding. In a recent meeting with a school administrator, he was told that individual funders were all looking to fund stemprograms—and, Blight said, “It’s the funders that drive things.”
Nonetheless, the history major continues to thrive at Yale, in part because it’s a great department with a number of nationally known stars, all of whom are expected to teach at an undergraduate level, and in part because it is Yale, where even a liberal-arts degree opens almost all professional doors. As Mikhail said, “The very real economic pressure students feel today is lessened at Yale. Need-blind admissions make a big difference, together with the sense that a Yale degree in anything will get them the job they want, even at places like Goldman or medical school.” The school’s public-relations department recently made a promotional video about Fernando Rojas, the son of Mexican immigrants, who made national news a few years ago when he was admitted to all eight Ivy League schools. Rojas, who found an intellectual home at Yale’s Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, intends to pursue a Ph.D. in history.
The reason that students at Yale and places like it can “afford” to major in history is that they have the luxury of seeing college as a chance to learn about the world beyond the confines of their home towns, and to try to understand where they might fit in. That’s what history does best. It locates us and helps us understand how we got here and why things are the way they are. “History instills a sense of citizenship, and reminds you of questions to ask, especially about evidence,” Willis told me. In a follow-up e-mail to our conversation, Mikhail wrote, “A study of the past shows us that the only way to understand the present is to embrace the messiness of politics, culture, and economics. There are never easy answers to pressing questions about the world and public life.” Bruce Springsteen famously developed a profound political consciousness after happening upon Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager’s “A Pocket History of the United States,” first published in 1942. In his recent Broadway show, Springsteen explained, “I wanted to know the whole American story. . . . I felt like I needed to understand as much of it as I could in order to understand myself.”
Donald Trump is the king not only of lies but also of ahistorical assertions. It’s hard to pick a favorite among the thousands of falsehoods that Trump has told as President, but one recent shocker was when he insisted, ignoring everything we know about the Soviet Union’s lawless behavior, that “the reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there.” (The usually Trump-friendly Wall Street Journal editorial page claimed, “We cannot recall a more absurd misstatement of history by an American President.”) Republicans, for the past few decades, have depended on Americans’ inability to make sense of history in judging their policies. How else to explain the fact that, under Trump, they have succeeded in turning legal immigration into the excuse for all the country’s ills, when any clear historical analysis would demonstrate that it has been the fount of the lion’s share of America’s innovation, creativity, and economic production?
“Yes, we have a responsibility to train for the world of employment, but are we educating for life, and without historical knowledge you are not ready for life,” Blight told me. As our political discourse is increasingly dominated by sources who care nothing for truth or credibility, we come closer and closer to the situation that Walter Lippmann warned about a century ago, in his seminal “Liberty and the News.” “Men who have lost their grip upon the relevant facts of their environment are the inevitable victims of agitation and propaganda. The quack, the charlatan, the jingo . . . can flourish only where the audience is deprived of independent access to information,” he wrote. A nation whose citizens have no knowledge of history is asking to be led by quacks, charlatans, and jingos. As he has proved ever since he rode to political prominence on the lie of Barack Obama’s birthplace, Trump is all three. And, without more history majors, we are doomed to repeat him.
But fewer have stopped to ask whether there is a good reason for this infrastructure to exist at all. Why, exactly, is it a good thing for Facebook and Google to be selling advertising to anyone, let alone Russian agents?
The obvious answer seems to be so that legitimate advertisers, meaning the likes of Coca-Cola and General Motors, can inform consumers about the products they offer.
But herein lies the paradox of all advertising in the information age, online or otherwise. If there is one thing that the internet has made it easy for consumers to access without the help of advertising, it is information – and especially information about products.
As I argue in a recent article in the Yale Law Journal, if the only justification for advertising is that it informs, then advertising is now seriously obsolete. Not only that, it could even count as anti-competitive conduct in violation of the antitrust laws – as the Federal Trade Commission once believed.
Advertising as information
Imagine a world wiped clean of advertising of all kinds – from the sponsored links at the top of the Google search results page and the banner ads on your favorite websites or mobile apps to the sponsored posts in your Facebook feed and the TV commercials and billboards in the offline world.
Would you still be able to find all the information you could ever want about products in this alternative world?
Of course you would. Your friends, family and the host of complete strangers you follow on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and half a dozen other sites would continue to bombard you with information about their lives, including all the products they are using. And if you want to go out and learn more about a particular product, or find something new, a thousand little blue links optimized to meet your search criteria are just a Google search away.
In other words, we live in a world so immersed in easily accessible information that advertising is no longer needed to inform us about products. Advertising is obsolete.
Manipulative advertising sometimes appeals to psychological weaknesses to make consumers buy products they otherwise might not buy.Reuters/Mark Cardwell
Advertising as manipulation
But if advertising is out of date, then why is it everywhere?
The answer, I argue in my article, is that advertising has always done more than just inform. And that other function is if anything more powerful today – and more valuable to advertisers – than ever before. It is what scholars of advertising euphemistically call advertising’s power to persuade, and what the rest of us call its power to manipulate.
That – and not the ability to inform consumers about products they might not otherwise hear about – is the value of advertising for which advertisers paid US$200 billion in total in the United States last year. Advertising remains so common today not because it informs but because it persuades.
That power to sway, which has always been a part of advertising, has been magnified by Google and Facebook, which have invested billions in turning the internet into a vast infrastructure of persuasion that includes the data collection tools running behind all of our favorite free services, the algorithms that decide based on that data how best to target advertising to make us succumb to its blandishments and the screen real estate where ads are displayed.
Google and Facebook put all this in place to help corporate America, not Russian agents, reach us. If it seems credible that Russian agents could have used this infrastructure to alter the outcome of a U.S. presidential election, it is equally credible that the largest American advertisers can use it every day to their own ends, inducing consumers to buy products that they don’t want.
Coca-Cola has long used Santa to sell its products.Amankris/Shutterstock.com
The antitrust case against advertising
And just as Russia’s political advertising may have put one candidate in the election at a disadvantage, commercial advertising can put companies selling products that consumers might actually prefer, but are less well advertised, at a competitive disadvantage.
That gives the Federal Trade Commission, which is charged with enforcing the nation’s antitrust laws, a legal basis for going beyond current limits on advertising that is falseor aimed at children, to sue to put an end to all advertising.
The courts have long held that Section 2 of the Sherman Act prohibits conduct that harms both competition and consumers, which is just what persuasive advertising does when it cajoles a consumer into buying the advertised product, rather than the substitute the consumer would have purchased without advertising.
That substitute is presumably preferred by the consumer, precisely because the consumer would have purchased it without corporate persuasion. It follows that competition is harmed, because the company that made the product that the consumer actually prefers cannot make the sale. And the consumer is harmed by buying a product that the consumer does not really prefer.
The FTC and the courts understood all this in the 1950s, when advertising was taking another new medium – television – by storm. The FTC launched a series of lawsuits against some of the nation’s largest television advertisers, including Procter & Gamble and General Foods. In the FTC’s greatest success of the era, the commission managed to convince the Supreme Court that the advertising of Clorox bleach illegally put rivals at a disadvantage. According to the court, the profusion of Clorox advertising “imprint[s] the value of its bleach in the mind of the consumer,” allowing Clorox to charge a premium over store brands, even though all bleach is chemically identical.
But now that the information function of advertising is obsolete, as I’ve shown, the FTC should pick up where it left off and once again challenge the business of advertising.
Advertising has always been as manipulative as informational.Reuters/Peter Morgan
Freedom and consequences
A renewed FTC campaign would force the reorganization of some important industries.
Google and Facebook would of course have to find new ways to generate revenue, such as by charging users for their services, and newspapers would probably have to embrace a public funding model to survive without the advertising that has long been their lifeblood.
But, arguably, since consumers already pay for Google and Facebook with their personal data, it may not be too much to ask that they pay with their money instead. And given journalism’s well-documented woes, public funding is probably its future anyway.
The only things to fear from a renewed FTC campaign against advertising are freedom and peace of mind; the freedom to decide what to buy on your own, and the peace of mind that would come from the demise of an advertising infrastructure that foreign agents are already trying to exploit again.
Assistant Professor of Law, University of Kentucky
Disclosure statement
Ramsi Woodcock does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
As of July 2018, 4.1 billion people were active internet users and 3.3 billion were social media users
In 2018 more people have access to the internet than safe drinking water
Every minute, 38 million messages are passed between various individuals on WhatsApp
There are 3.7 million search queries on Google per minute
Every minute, $862, 823 are spent online
Internet giants Facebook, Amazon and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, have published their quarterly earnings reports this week.
Alphabet earned $32.7bn in revenue in the past three months, with Google churning out extraordinary amounts of profit. Alphabet reported net income of $3.2bn. Without the antitrust battle with EU regulators over Google’s Android mobile software, which led to a five billion dollar fine for the quarter, it would have been $8.3bn, the company said.
Facebook profits were up 31 percent over last year, but they shocked investors, forecasting slowing revenues. As a result, Facebook saw about $119bn wiped off its stock market value – which is the largest one-day loss for any company in US stock market history.
E-commerce giant Amazon topped $2bn in quarterly profit for the first time in its history.
Part of the reason these companies are so profitable is because the world’s digital population keeps growing. Because the internet has gone mobile, more people in 2018 have access to the internet than safe drinking water.
Anyone born after 1985 is considered a “digital native” and can’t imagine a time before the internet. As of July this year, 4.1 billion people were active internet users and 3.3 billion were social media users.
Every minute, 38 million messages are passed between various individuals on WhatsApp. There are 3.7 million search queries on Google. And every minute, $862,823 is spent online.
According to the World Bank, developed economies still dominate the spread of knowledge and information. And there’s concern that the world is not reaping the so-called “digital dividends” of this transformation.
“Given their power in the digital sector … these companies have a special responsibility to act fairly and not to infringe competition,” says Alasdair Reid, principal researcher and Policy Director at the European Future Innovation System Centre.
Asked whether 2018 could be a decisive year for Facebook, Reid explains that “Facebook has been particularly hard hit by some of the concerns that have arisen over the different scandals … the access of data and the use of that data related to elections.
“The younger generations are also looking for other tools and moving to other apps and platforms. So there is a natural trend linked to the hit that they have taken from the privacy abuses that have taken place … Is it the peak of Facebook? Well, I am not sure that’s the case, I think they’re in a very strong position. But it’s a very good example for where there is a need for clear regulation and checks on the use of the data that’s collected by such a company.”
But Reid believes that overall there are “huge benefits for us. I think the internet … the future applications of artificial intelligence, these are all things that should be enablers for a better society and not only about making profit. We have to get that balance right in the future.”
Ocean diamonds: Africa’s ‘blue economy’
Africa’s “blue world” is made up of vast lakes, oceans and rivers. The African Union(AU) calls the “blue economy” the “New Frontier of African Renaissance” and there’s been a lot of talk and forums focusing on it over the past year.
We really need to transform the way sectors and countries plan among each other, and also appreciation by the economic and corporate powers that the value is generated from ecosystems or assets that can be damaged. You need to manage them sustainably, just like you manage a hedge fund … so you don’t destroy it while you are exploiting it.
David Obura, CORDIO
Thirty-eight of Africa’s 54 states are coastal. The island nation of Mauritius, for example, is one of the smallest countries in the world. But it has territorial waters the size of South Africa, and lying on the ocean bed are potential sources of metals, minerals, and oil and gas.
While the blue economy has the capacity to provide desperately needed jobs, the challenge is all about how to exploit water resources in a sustainable way. As efforts get under way to exploit the continent’s ocean ecosystem, environmentalists are warning more research is required to shape policies.
So what’s behind the “blue economy” concept? Is it more than just the rebranding of marine exploitation?
“The blue economy is about using and utilising ocean resources sustainably, without damaging it … It’s problematic but it’s still a long time into the future,” says Dr David Obura, the director of Coastal Oceans Research and Development in the Indian Ocean (CORDIO), East Africa.
“You need to manage them sustainably, just like you manage a hedge fund … so you don’t destroy it while you are exploiting it.”
Also on this episode of Counting the Cost:
Industrial whaling: The commercial hunting of fin whales is in the spotlight in Iceland after the death of a rare mixed breed. Nick Clark reports.
Cementing the BRICS: The Chinese president says there will be no winners in a global trade war. He is urging unity among BRICS nations – pushing emerging economies for closer ties to offset Trump’s protectionism. Haru Mutasa reports from Johannesburg.
Brazil innovation and technology: As the world becomes less homogeneous and less Western, Brazilian innovators and engineers are hoping that advances in their country’s technology industry can help solve many of the development problems encountered by emerging nations. Daniel Schweimler reports.
Jakke Tamminen has plenty of students who do that very studenty thing of staying up all night right before an exam, in the hope of stuffing in as much knowledge as they can. But “that’s the worst thing you can do”, the psychology lecturer at the UK’s Royal Holloway University warns them.
He should know. Tamminen is an expert on how sleep affects memory, specifically the recall needed for language. Sleep learning – another idea beloved of students, in the hope that, say, playing a language-learning recording during sleep would imprint itself into the brain subliminally and they’d wake up speaking Latin – is a myth.
But sleep itself is essential for embedding knowledge in the brain, and the research of Tamminen and others shows us why that is.
In Tamminen’s ongoing research project, participants learn new vocabulary, then stay awake all night. Tamminen compares their memory of those words after a few nights, and then after a week.
Even after several nights of recovery sleep, there is a substantial difference in how quickly they recall those words compared to the control group of participants who didn’t face sleep deprivation.
Students who do not get enough sleep may have a harder time recalling information (Credit: Getty Images)
“Sleep is really a central part of learning,” he says. “Even though you’re not studying when you sleep, your brain is still studying. It’s almost like it’s working on your behalf. You can’t really get the full impact of the time you put into your studies unless you sleep.”
Inside the sleeper’s brain
We’re standing in Lab Room 1 of Tamminen’s sleep lab, a sparsely decorated room with a bed, a colourful rug, and framed paper butterflies. Above the bed is a small electroencephalography (EEG) machine and monitor to detect activity in each research participant’s brain, via electrodes placed on the head. These measure not only activity in different regions of the brain (frontal, temporal, and parietal), depending on their placement on the head, but also muscle tone (through an electrode on the chin) and eye movement (through an electrode next to each eye).
While a participant is sleeping, researchers can see activity in different regions of the brain (Credit: Christine Ro)
Down the hallway is the control room, where researchers can see in real time which parts of each volunteer’s brain are being activated, for how long, and to what extent. It’s easy to tell when a volunteer is in the rapid eye movement (REM) phase, based on the activity in the E1 and E2 (eye 1 and eye 2) graphs.
But more critical to Tamminen’s current research – and to sleep’s role in language development more generally – is a non-REM phase of deep sleep known as slow-wave sleep(SWS). SWS is important for forming and retaining memories, whether of vocabulary, grammar, or other knowledge. The interaction of different parts of the brain is key here. During SWS, the hippocampus, which is good at quick learning, is in constant communication with the neocortex, to consolidate it for long term recall. So the hippocampus might initially encode a new word learned earlier that day, but to truly consolidate that knowledge – spotting patterns and finding connections with other ideas that allow for creative problem-solving – the neocortical system needs to get involved.
During slow-wave sleep, the hippocampus and neocortex communicate to encode information for longer-term recall (Credit: Getty Images)
“Sleep spindles are somehow associated with linking new information with existing information,” Tamminen says. And the data from his research participants suggests that people with more sleep spindles have more consolidation of the words they have learned. (Read more about how you can learn in your sleep).
Dreaming has been shown to help students make new connections to a language they’re learning (Credit: Getty Images)
Students intensively studying their second language had more REM sleep, giving them more time to integrate what they were learning while they slept
Dreams, after all, are more than simply a replay of what happens during the day. Research has suggested that the regions of the brain that manage logic (the frontal lobe) and emotion (the amygdala) interact differently during dreams, allowing for these imaginative new connections in the language learner. And students intensively studying the second language had more REM sleep. This gave them more time to integrate what they were learning while they slept – and better results during the day.
Nightly rhythms
There’s a genetic component to how many sleep spindles we have. There’s also a genetic basis to our internal clocks, which tell us when it’s time to go to sleep and wake up. And adhering to these hard-wired cycles is necessary to reaching our peak cognitive performance. (Read more about why night owls shouldn’t try to be morning people – and vice versa).
Few people know more about this subject than Michael W Young, who in 2017 was awarded a joint Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine for his work on clock genes with two co-researchers. Young explains that for optimal functioning – whether at school, work, or other areas of life – “what you want to do is to try to recreate a rhythmic environment”.
For a person whose lifestyle, environment, or inherited sleep disorder leads to distorted sleep patterns, “a cheap first-line response” could be using blackout curtains at night or bright lights during the day to mimic natural light/dark cycles as much as possible.
Blocking out light can help you sleep – and function – better (Credit: Getty Images)
Power naps
The circadian rhythm’s role in adult learning is unquestionable, but its importance may be particularly pronounced in childhood.
Children have more slow-wave sleep than adults – which may be one factor explaining how quickly kids learn, in both language and other areas. The child sleep lab at Germany’s University of Tuebingen investigates the role of sleep in consolidating children’s memory. Monitoring what happens in children’s brains during sleep, and how much information they retain before and after sleep, shows that sleep helps with accessing implicit knowledge (procedural memory) and making it explicit (declarative memory).
Children’s ability to learn so rapidly may stem from the fact that they have more slow-wave sleep (Credit: Getty Images)
Adults can also call upon this kind of information learned during the day. But as researcher Katharina Zinke explains, “sleep is doing that in a more efficient way in children”.
Children need to sleep during the day to remember everything that they have to learn
“The effects are stronger in early childhood because the brain is developing,” says Dominique Petit, the coordinator of the Canadian Sleep and Circadian Network, who has also explored the circadian rhythm in children. In practical terms, this means that “children need to sleep during the day to remember everything that they have to learn”.
“Daytime naps in young children have been shown to be really important for vocabulary growth, generalisation of the meaning of words and abstraction in language learning,” she says. “Sleep continues to be important for memory and learning throughout the lifetime, though.”
Daytime naps in children are key for their ability to learn new words, among other language skills (Credit: Getty Images)
Not only does sleep help with accessing this information, it also changes the way this information is accessed. This makes brains more flexible at retrieving information (or able to access it in more ways). But it also makes them better at extracting the most significant parts of it.
“It’s actually an active process of strengthening and changing the memory trace,” Zinke says. “Memory gets transferred in a way that the most important information (the gist) is remembered.”
Clearly, for children as well as adults, prolonged sleep isn’t a sign of laziness in a language learner. It’s critical for our brains’ connections and our bodies’ rhythms.
So, following your next intense Duolingo session, it’s a good idea to sleep on it. You may be surprised the next morning by how much you’ve absorbed.
In this 10 minute lecture, Dr. Tony Kashani delineates the fundamental elements of critical thinking. This is the first installment of the short lecture series on critical thinking featuring Dr. Kashani who is an expert in interdisciplinary studies.
Those of us in the so-called mainstream media work in a tricky environment, one in which superficiality has gained an importance approaching that of substance.
We must be conscious of and engaged in, but not driven by, clicks; consumed by, but not obsessed with, metrics; and, at the same time, try to fit in journalism on substantive issues.
The ongoing scuffle between President Donald Trump and LeBron James is a prime example of how we balance the interest generated by the superficial AND deal with the critically important substance of the issues.
In their war of words, the superficiality is a public exchange on social media. The substance is the audacity of a black athlete to challenge a president he believes traffics in the politics of hate.
Last year, James reacted to the White House’s withdrawal of an invitation to the Golden State Warriors by calling the president a bum. Last week during an interview with popular CNN anchor Don Lemon, James spoke proudly of a school for at-risk children that he opened in his hometown of Akron, Ohio.
In their war of words, the superficiality is the public exchange on social media. The substance is the audacity of a black athlete to challenge a president he believes traffics in the politics of hate.
During the course of the conversation, James lamented that the president of the United States seemed to be using sports as a wedge to drive people apart. James said, “What I’ve noticed over the last few months is that he’s kind of used sports to kind of divide us.”
Shortly after the interview, the president tweeted: “LeBron James was just interviewed by the dumbest man on television, Don Lemon.” He added a backhanded compliment: “He made LeBron look smart, which isn’t easy to do. I like Mike!”
Classic. Not only did POTUS 45 insult a prominent African-American newscaster and the NBA’s most popular player, he dragged the famously neutral Michael Jordan into the fight. One of the worst things for any African-American is to be used publicly to denigrate another African-American by a white person perceived to be anti-black.
The president forced Jordan to respond, which Jordan did through a representative who said: “I support L.J. He’s doing an amazing job for his community.”
In February, one of the president’s surrogates, talk show host Laura Ingraham, criticized James for discussing politics and said that James should “shut up and dribble.”
James responded that he didn’t know who Ingraham was and went on to discuss his thoughts on activism. Ingraham’s condescension revealed a deeply held belief by many about athletes in general, black athletes in particular: You’re OK as long as you remain faceless, thoughtless entertainers. James’ response was evidence that more African-American athletes are feeling empowered to speak up.
The exchange ignited a week of ratings-boosting content for Ingraham. In a universe where clicks and eyeballs are king, that was a win.
James is the latest in a line of black athletes who have used their visibility to fight racism.
1960: After starring for the United States at the 1960 Rome Games, Wilma Rudolph, winner of three gold medals, refused to participate in a parade in her honor in Clarksville, Tennessee, unless the parade and the banquet were integrated. The city relented.
1963: Bill Russell, weeks after leading the Boston Celtics to a fifth consecutive NBA championship, ignored death threats and traveled to Jackson, Mississippi, to hold the first integrated basketball camp in that city. Russell was moved to act by the murder of activist Medgar Evers.
1967: Muhammad Ali famously refused to be inducted into the U.S. Army on religious grounds that he was a conscientious objector. The same year, Jim Brown summoned well-known black athletes to Cleveland to support Ali.
1968: Sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos used their Olympic victory to stand at the Mexico City Games to protest injustice in the United States.
1969: Curt Flood pushed for a different type of freedom when he filed a lawsuit to force Major League Baseball to remove the reserve clause that bound players to their respective teams for life.
1996: Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf was suspended by the NBA for refusing to stand during the playing of the national anthem. He called the U.S. flag a symbol of oppression.
2016: Colin Kaepernick, explaining that he could no longer stand and put his hand over his heart during the playing of the national anthem, chose instead to kneel. His protest and subsequent blackballing by the NFL set off a wave of discontent that likely will continue into the upcoming season — a season of discontent.
Is James’ dust-up with the president activism, social activism or simply social media activism? This isn’t exactly Rudolph, Ali, Smith and Carlos, Flood, Abdul-Rauf or Kaepernick.
James is not kneeling, not raising his fist, not exhorting fellow NBA players to ignore the collective bargaining agreement that compels them to stand for the anthem. He is fighting a war of words through social media with the president of the United States.
The public brawl has increased James’ following and standing in the black community while solidifying the president’s base by showing that he’ll stand his ground against an “uppity” high-profile African-American.
How will James respond to the president’s “dumb” tweet? Will he let it go?
James is not kneeling, not raising his fist, not exhorting fellow NBA players to ignore the collective bargaining agreement that compels them to stand for the anthem. He is fighting a war of words through social media with the president of the United States.
Back in the day, our people used to say: Sticks and stones may break your bones but words will never hurt you.
That may have been true before the explosion of social media, but it’s not true now. Words can hurt. In an environment in which the accusation becomes truth before discussion and confirmation, words matter.
The best way to defuse arguments is to simply not throw logs on the fire. The worst thing that can happen to anyone who uses social media is to have no one respond, with no likes, no retweets, no clicks.
James might choose to concentrate on the school he just built or on his business ventures, his family’s full-time transition to Los Angeles and the upcoming NBA season.
On second thought, James should fire back.
Challenging those in power is more important than ever.
Defiance in any form is an acceptable form of protest.
William C. Rhoden, the former award-winning sports columnist for The New York Times and author of “Forty Million Dollar Slaves,” is a writer-at-large for The Undefeated. Contact him at william.rhoden@espn.com.