English 808: Technology & Literacy Unit 9—Managing (and Manipulating) the Media

Unit 9 Required Materials

Due Week 11 (Nov. 4): Required Reading on Managing (and Manipulating) the Media

Ryan Holiday’s Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator
- Please note: Holiday does occasionally use some swear words/adult imagery in his book but this is not the primary focus of his work

Begin Class Part 1 @ 5:30

Unit 9 Class Activities

Class Guest
Heide Witthöft, Assistant Chair of the Language, Literature, & Writing Department

Part 1. Course Overview (15 minutes)

Course Goal: Introduce theoretical ideas about how technology is causing literacy to evolve
Course Goal: Expand doctoral students’ technological skills so they can teach their students the technological skills they will need to achieve literacy success in this Digital Age
Learning Outcome: Improve understanding of how literacy is impacted by technology
Learning Outcome: Gain insight into effective approaches for using technology to teach literacy

Managing Information Overload

Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain
- Technology Skill: Managing Projects
David Allen’s Getting Things Done & Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero
- Technology Skill: Managing Email
Articles on Developing Professional Web Presence
- Technology Skill: Creating a Professional Website

Technology’s Impact on Literacy

Walter Ong, James Gee, and Paulo Freire on Literacy (literacy as knowing the world)
Mark Prensky on Digital Natives vs. Digital Immigrants (technology changing the world)
Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus (technology lowering our ability to pay attention)
- Technology Task: Going Tech Free
Ryan Holiday’s Trust Me I’m Lying (technology changing the information we get)

Teaching with Technology

Flower Darby’s Small Teaching Online
Jose Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson’s Teaching with AI
- Technology Skill: Your Technology Project

Lesson Overview

Lesson Objective: Gain an understanding of how media manipulation is shaping 21st century literacy

Part 2. Making Us Angry

“The End of the English Major. Enrollment in the humanities is in free fall at colleges around the country. What happened?”
- Article from The New Yorker
Holiday uses the term “bloggers” to refer to any type of news publishing: even Dr. Pagnucci’s website would be considered a blog using Holiday’s broad definition
- Since news can spread via tweet, email, article, video, blog post, and website, etc., Holiday cares more about the spreading of the information and does not worry about the specific form
While there is a downward trend in majors at Arizona State University, much of the change reported is from data at a few campuses and it is often Humanities study in general, not just English
- The story makes the limited facts seem like a crisis
- The story’s headline is a Ryan Holiday style write up that is meant to get people talking and angry if they are in the humanities
- And people in the humanities did circulate the article around when it was published; several people sent it to Dr. Pagnucci in 2023 since he was Chair of English at the time (the Department was renamed in 2024 to Language, Literature, & Writing)
IUP’s own enrollment in the English major is actually up!

Part 3. Small Group Discussion: Are You Being Manipulated? (20 minutes)

What are some of the items you are being prompted to click on?
What are some of the items people are sharing with you?
What items have you been sharing with others?
What sort of manipulation are you seeing happening to you and your friends?
Remember that Hari claims they (Google) have a voodoo doll of 1 in 4 of us which looks more and more like us

Part 4. Large Group Discussion: Are We Being Manipulated? (20 minutes)

Part 5. Let’s Take a Look at the News on November 4th, 2024 (10 minutes)

News Services Stealing from Each Other

Part 6. Break (10 minutes)

Begin Class Part 2 @ 6:50 Media Manipulation

Part 7 Holiday: Feeding the Monster/Controversy Sells (10 minutes)

Tucker Max and no press is bad press
- “Students Protest Early Screening of Shock Comedian Tucker Max’s I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell”
- Max’s book I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell sold 1 million copies worldwide
Trump is good for the news
- Leslie Moonves (Executive Chairman and CEO of CBS) on Donald Trump’s Election in 2016: “It May Not Be Good for America, but It’s Damn Good for CBS”
Dr. Trisha Travers: Recognizing and Avoiding Misinformation: Evaluating Sources for a FYW Researched Writing Assignment (2024 IUP graduate!)
- Students can be trained to do lateral reading, but even knowing that this helps them identify misinformation and disinformation, students tend not to do lateral reading outside of class
Netflix Series: Inventing Anna
- From Wikipedia: “Under the assumed name Anna Delvey, Russian-born Anna Sorokin infiltrated New York’s high society by convincing them she was a German socialite and an heiress to a massive fortune, all while scheming and scamming them out of millions.”
- Inventing Anna is an extreme version of Ryan Holiday’s manipulation of the media (and people!)

Part 8. Small Group Discussion: Trump, Politics, and Manipulations (10 minutes)

Is Trump and the 2024 presidential election an outlier or the natural outgrowth of the economics of the web?
The information we read is being manipulated, how do we protect ourselves from this manipulation?
How do we teach our students to understand the way literacy is being used to manipulate them?

Part 9. Large Group Discussion: Trump, Politics, and Manipulations (10 minutes)

Part 10. Freewriting: Technology Project Headlines (10 minutes)

Come up with a good headline for your Technology Project to generate interest in it

Part 11. Small Group Discussion: Technology Project Headlines (10 minutes)

Part 12. Large Group Discussion: Technology Project Headlines (10 minutes)

Assignments

Due Week 12 (Nov. 11): Required Reading on Teaching Online