Today, I am returning to one of my perennial topics — literacy (and also my newfangled term: publicacy — see also “What is Publicacy + Why does it Matter?“).
I was reminded of these issues yet again (and indeed, several times) this week. The most prominent reminder was undoubtedly this quote (by Joe Rogan):
As a drunk waitress, you’re one of us — you’re a human, and humans, there’s are a lot of people that have opinions or ideas on things, they’re just not good at articulating it (or they never learned how to articulate it). But everyone does what we do (or everybody can do what we do) — they do it with their friends, they talk with their friends, they bullshit about stuff … and, you know, it’s just a process of putting it out there.
https://fuckwith.news.blog/2025/02/14/they-do-it-with-their-friends
I thought this was excellent. I also thought it was excellent several decades ago, when I first thought of it. I used to refer to it as a “literacy” issue, but in the meantime I have come to the conclusion that people so commonly associate literacy with reading, that I decided to create the new term “publicacy” for writing, publication, publishing, etc. I realize that the term “publicity” (and the associated academic field of public relations) are similar, but they actually focus on the activity much more than the required skills and capabilities (see e.g. “Our goal is to attract readers” [ https://publicity.school.blog/2021/11/19/our-goal-is-to-attract-readers ] and / or almost any other post @ “Marketing + Public Relations” [ https://publicity.school.blog ] )
Yet I do not wish to merely rehash old topics. No, this week I also discovered (or maybe re–recognized) something. Whether this insight is new + improved or merely an old-fashioned piece of anecdotal evidence — who cares? Let me just tell you what happened. I was sitting in the town center and using the public wifi with my laptop. A bunch of teenagers also showed up to use the wifi with their smartphones. I tend to look down upon smartphone usage, because of its limited technical capabilities (especially for publishing information) and poor privacy control (it is basically portable personal spyware — another recurring topic on many of my blogs).
This time I noticed the kids all sitting next to each other, doing nothing more than scrolling and occasionally clicking on something that would launch a music or video app (or whatever). They didn’t talk. Instead, their smartphones took turns blurting out whatever crap they clicked on. I realized that one significant reason that smartphone users lack publicacy skills, is that they simply have no need to express anything. The expressions coming from their smartphones are entirely focused on their consumer behavior.
While pondering this psychological insight, something else also occurred to me. The way many people use their smartphones to answer whatever question happens to occur to them at any moment. In part this is related to “Learning to Understand Irrational Information Retrieval” — the “security blanket” behavior, People seem to feel validated when they find an answer that suits their needs. Beyond that it is also somewhat narcissistic insofar as they see such answers as they receive as indisputable truths (see also “If Google is the Pope of the Internet, Then Who Are You & I?“)
In this vein, it also occurred to me how quickly and easily people forget the talk about “Weapons of Math Destruction” that were doing the rounds less than 10 years ago. If some super-geniuses use such methods to discover examples of government inefficiency, what is the risk of perhaps pressing a button and all of a sudden something catastrophic happens?
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