--Nicholas Negroponte
Architect, MIT Media Lab founder
I can recall before the internet
era how submissions to journals used to work.
The author would submit by mail (or rarely, fax), the text was read and
evaluated, and you were either in, out, or in for a revision. Then there is the citation style – of which
there are several in academic writing: namely, APA, MLA, Chicago, and
others. Each has a hefty style guide,
and each can take years to truly learn for fluent use.
But these matters were taken care
of in-house by the editorial staff, who were clear on what they wanted to see
for the final stages. Digital intelligence
is now allowing—make that demanding—that we feed information to programs
specialized in resumes, Social Security, tax filing, remote learning, mortgages,
and publishing. In publishing, authors
are seeing a major energy transfer to these programs. The digital effect is layering on an entire
new set of skills to the heavy labor of writing and to finally getting
manuscripts accepted.
Move up to the current practice,
which is to require the author to fill in a very detailed series of files and
boxes, shifting many editorial tasks back to the hopeful submitter. I sense that this means a work transfer, or
mission creep, over to the writer, who slowly but surely is taking on this
job. After all, the author needs the
publisher much more than vice-versa--which has always been the case. Except that now there is a way to draw the
work from author time and attention, away from the desks of whatever in-house
editors remain active. It’s a process
that expects me to become, without training, part of the editorial process, all
without benefit of any consultation with the in-house team. In effect, I am preparing my own material for
review, revising from the review results, then checking dozens of boxes to even
meet the digital standard for publication.
For example, because of the
required formats on-screen, I had to stop the process many times to rewrite
several sections in order to comply with word counts, formatting, style manual,
file renaming, or other content, like the figure captions, calling for
revisions. One of these was the
abstract, the most difficult job on the list for any article, presentation, or
dissertation. While a previous instruction called for “a short abstract,” when the
time arrived to upload it, it was no longer my 250 words but a narrower 100.
This news called for a total rewrite, taking several hours. Encountering a list of similar changes in the
process consumed several more hours over more than three days. Quite a lot to ask for a “single-use” task. The style handbook compliance -- in this
case, Modern Language Association, MLA 9th
edition, a tome 367 pages long, is the documentation style – both within the
text and organized as notes at the end of the article. But MLA
is not my normal citation style, so add that learning curve (and time burn)
into the equation.
This kind of skill demand for
automation is also now why a CV must be completely dismantled and reassembled
for each customized job application, including course titles and dates, with
the exact dates (day and month as well as year) for certificates of graduation,
instructors, grades, locations, and other data that can date to many decades ago,
proving difficult and time-consuming to reconstruct or validate. Even the thought of reformulating a resume
dozens or hundreds of times must pose a major demotivator to job-hunting. This outsourcing of finding and entering
information is not optional but depends on the strong incentive to comply or
lose out.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. Digital
competence is an assumed skill—but for some, it’s not self-evident how to
acquire this toolkit in order to practice it.
And what exactly is the standard of practice? And how, when, and why does this expectation
determine what is demanded, and in which arenas? In sum, how can this skill be measured?
UNESCO defines a world-wide
standard for digital literacy as “The ability to access, manage, understand,
integrate, communicate, evaluate, and create information safely and
appropriately through digital technologies for employment, decent jobs, and
entrepreneurship.” The best way to
understand this enlarged view of literacy is to compare it to the functional
version: “The ability to read a newspaper, sign a check, and write a postcard.” This is now merely the baseline for the
digital-age literacy test. New
challenges are always emerging, in an endless learning curve. This makes literacy a constantly moving
target, even for the highest elite.
National digital illiteracy rates
persist. The US Department of Education reports that across ethnic divides,
computer literacy is another basis of unequal opportunity, with 11% White, 22%
Black, and 35% Hispanic adults less than fluent in digital media. Even 5% with Associate degrees aren’t
literate, as well as a higher 41% without high school diplomas. The digital divide still halts universal
access (Rockefeller Institute of Government, July 2022).
Moving forward, for the “blind
review” process, I had to “anonymize” most of the content, a strange ritual of
removing anything linked to my name from anything linked to my work to shield
from reviewers’ eyes. This was a skill I
didn’t have and haven’t needed—until now.
This meant I had to completely omit key content that would have given
away my identity. But there was no way of
working around these statements—they had to go.
These deletions would have explained why I was submitting to this
particular journal rather than any other, a key point of the rationale
important to selling the article: that this is a follow-up to my previous one,
now widely cited, published in the past century. *
In effect, the uploading task amounts
to learning new software – for a single operation. The same goes for thesis and dissertation
projects. They impose a high demand for
mastery over a documentation system that too often gets applied just once – and
at the same time must be skilled enough to pass and graduate with the
degree. Just the uploading operation itself
is a self-taught process without any real way of knowing what will be asked
for—or why. All this effort is applied
atop the already “sunk cost” (term from economics) of months or even years of
writing and research. It’s distressing to think about whether this submission
process reduces the chances of the less-digitally literate of being
published. From my own experience, there
is no question that this dynamic is actively operating to favor the tech literate.
And as a colleague in the data world
puts it, what’s being tested for is compliance over competence.
Seeking out an equalizer, I was
able to recruit a long-time colleague, an excellent “explainer” and recently
retired software engineer. “I’m sure if
you had cast your annoyance aside momentarily you could have easily done the
same [anonymizing a document],” he noted.
In fact, there is a relatively simple set of steps to remove “Author” from
the Track Changes program. You just need
to know where to look.
Like productivity expert David Allen, who has admitted to being “semi-literate” in his classic Getting Things Done, I must concede this status is just not enough anymore. David Herlich, my coach that night, agrees, up to a point. He created TheSportsTutor.com, a personal consultation service which aims to explain the complexities of sports to brand-new participants. He told me I was just like many of the people he has met and hopes to serve. “I didn’t really do anything,” he says, “except to help you see what you could already do.” It is the frame of mind, not knowledge, that blocks performance. This insight certainly fuels learning as discovery of one’s own powers.
And yes, the Internet
helps. But what I’ve noticed is that
there is always more than one answer to any question, raising the problem of distinguishing
between answers to pick the one to go with.
You really never know if you got
that right—without an explainer with an expert perspective.
_____
*“Disneyland and Walt Disney World: Traditional Values in Futuristic Form,” Journal of Popular Culture, Summer 1981: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0022-3840.1981.00116.x
