Your wish list for 2025? What Meta doesn't want. Two video editors I recommend.
Plus new damning evidence how TikTok affects kids' analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety.
We got off to a rough start in January, didn’t we? Threats to ‘merge’ Canada with the US, and to annex Greenland didn't go well. But there were some interesting tech trends worth noting. More later.
But first my wish list for 2025:
Engage humans. This ‘touchless’ experiment, post Covid, has gone too far. I saw a writer in the Atlantic magazine weigh in on how that choreography in restaurants between the kitchen and the customer is been killed by Uber Eats and its ilk. Did the phone get invented to make us stop talking now? Think about that should you get into driverless car to get to the restaurant where no one sits down and chats. When we visit our favorite restaurant in Chandler, the owner comes by and we talk so much I feel guilty he’s neglecting the other diners.
Stop going going ga ga over everything with an AI feature. That’s getting old. Everyone and their brother-in-law is launching (or fawning over) some AI feature that could do X, Y, Z. It’s as if we are back in the early days of the Internet, when everyone was blathering about those things called ‘websites’ of ‘electronic mail.’ Please stop!
Start producing something. We consume way too much. How many videos have you watched in 2024? (I bet it is in the hundreds.) How many have you ‘filmed’ or edited? How many memes have you shared? Created any? I like to build things out of wood. It’s great fun to nail together some pieces of wood without any handbook, and see what ensues.
Plant something. A shout out to my wife who grows about 25 new varieties of houseplants or veggies every year. Also my friend Jude, who’s currently in Sri Lanka spends his ‘vacation’ teaching people how to compost, grow crops, and head off food scarcity. Most people just talk of these things. Jude puts his money where his mouth is. He sent me this from a National collective of community-based savings and credit service providers event in Hingurakgoda.
Jude Fernando in Hingurakoda; display at Peasant Women’s Convention Read something different. I am reading this quaint book, “The Guernsey Literary and Potato-Peel Society” that was turned into a movie. Set after WW2, it’s a series of letters.
WHEN TO BREAK THE RULES.
I ran a photography competition at the end of 2025 in my school. I announced the winner of the High School entry last week at the school assembly. I told them how in most competitions there are ‘rules’ or what we call guidelines. What this student did was what to exploit what was not said. The theme was ‘Tracks’ and as you can see here, it was a wonderful interpretation. But it was possible by exploiting what the guidelines did not say—about the type of camera or perspective.
He shot this in a field next to where he lives, using a drone!
IS AI JUST ‘ COLLECTIVE WISDOM’?
I read a commentary on something Sam Altman wrote in September last year. Altman, CEO of Open AI (from which begat Chat GPT) has always been controversial. He said that:
“society itself is a form of advanced intelligence. Our grandparents – and the generations that came before them – built and achieved great things. They contributed to the scaffolding of human progress that we all benefit from. AI will give people tools to solve hard problems and help us add new struts to that scaffolding that we couldn’t have figured out on our own. The story of progress will continue, and our children will be able to do things we can’t.”
Isn’t it odd how he posited AI akin to ‘grandparents,’ as if to say…. who needs grandparents’ wisdom? We have synthetic intelligence!
I had a Socratic discussion around this in class this week, on what the pros and cons of AI may be to them. Yes there were a lot of positives. But even these students, just dipping their toes into the pond of AI, were concerned. One mentioned the horror of implanting a chip in human brains. This is Elon Musk’ other bizarre project, Neuralink.
CANADA DOESN’T THINK IT’S FUNNY
“The joke is over,” said Dominic LeBlanc, the country’s point person for U.S-Canada relations, referring to Trump’s joke about making it the 51st state. There is a historical precedent for this annoyance. Bad fences make bad neighbors. Here’s some history from an article in the USS Constitution Museum.
American armies invaded Canada in 1812 at three points, but all three campaigns ended in failure. One army surrendered at Detroit at the western end of Lake Erie, a second army surrendered at Queenston Heights at the other end of the lake, and a third army withdrew after little more than a skirmish north of New York.
It didn’t go well.
WHY ARE THESE (STILL) FREE?
If you’re looking for some software tips, here are my top two. They are (still) free.
(A) CAPCUT AND ADOBE EXPRESS
I never thought I would be comparing Canva to anything. Then I discovered Adobe Express which practically let me create and edit graphics and video so easily I wondered why the free option exists!
Last year a s student introduced me to Capcut, a powerful, intuitive video editor. It has now become my go-to app. Both web-based and also a phone app, it’s the best software I discovered in 2024.
META REALLY DOESN’T GIVE A @*%!* ABOUT FACTS, DOES IT?
On January 7th, Factcheck.org that bastion of accuracy said that Meta has cut its ties with them. Their partnership began in 2016. This is connected to the other Zuckerberg announcement that it is moving to a ‘community notes’ model. Meaning you as a Facebook or Instagram user, will have to rely on someone calling out misinformation. And in the absence of which how would you know?
This is not a one-off decision. It was coming ever since X decided that fact checking was not its responsibility. Last August Meta discontinued a tool called CrowdTangle, that many researchers said was vital to “parse through” harmful content and threats.
CHILDREN AND TIKTOK
A month doesn’t pass when we don’t see evidence of how social media is attacking children. (Adults too: New evidence here if you care to read this. Don’t let cognitive dissonance make you avert your eyes if you are a Facebook fan.)
Tiktok, under intense scrutiny has been found to harm children at an ‘industrial scale.’
I will leave you with a synopsis by two researchers I follow. They pull from 14 attorneys general reports that conclude that the hard is on an industrial scale. This includes:
Addictive, compulsive, and problematic use
Depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia, self-harm, and suicide
Porn, violence, and drugs
Sextortion, CSAM, and sexual exploitation
TikTok knows about underage use and takes little action
“The product in itself has baked into it compulsive use.” - Tiktok Executives
CAREERS CHANGE - JUST ASK WALTER CRONKITE
Walter Cronkite, that iconic TV newsman tried many things before he became journalism’s hero. He published a school newspaper, worked for a bookie, and once helped a radio station work with Western Union to turn football scores into an almost-live sports commentary!
I bring this up because we often ask students to decide on their future career way too early in life. Just as the news world rapidly changed, so too are many other fields today. ‘Supply Chain’ became Logistics. Cybersecurity is creating jobs in ‘Red Teaming’ and ‘Digital Forensic Analysis.’ We can barely keep pace with these career paths, which begs the question: what should schools teach? It’s a pedagogical topic for some of the discussions we have at our school, and certainly in my computer class.
I’ll leave you with an interesting tidbit: The word pedagogy derives form the Greek word paidagōgos. It refers to the slave who brought children (of his master) to school.
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