The Piano Lab

I’ve been on twitter for about 6 months now (I created my account in 2013 I think, but never used it – at the time I thought it was for raising complaints; My opinion has since changed. It is a great way to find people’s thoughts, interesting people, especially those who’re geographically not in your vicinity or you don’t have easy access to.) I might do a post on why there’s so much first order thinking type posts on Twitter (the medium is the massage).

Anyway, twitter is a great place to learn but also a weird place filled with all sorts of rabbit holes, algorithm echo-chambers and in general social media related signaling and modeling.

Considering the benefits and therefore inevitability of people getting on twitter, I think people like me, and younger people (and their parents) would benefit from kiddie wheels in the beginning.

Why?

1. Twitter is basically very rapid information thrown at you. So rapid that instead of analyzing, you’re essentially doing pattern recognition and matching after a certain point. Which makes it easy to have emotional reactions to people, keywords, topics, organizations, etc based on what you already believe. Especially when you just have one second to process a tweet before moving to the next one. Which keeps us in the limbic part of our brain. Susceptible to being in an echo chamber because,
2. Most people, including me, have very poor hygiene when it comes to information; I’m swayed and impressioned by modestly persuasive writing and have a hard time asking basic questions like : What is the missing viewpoint here? How reliable is this information? What is the motive of this account? What type of qualities are they modelling or are known to model? I just kinda believe people, which brings me to,
3. Public places like twitter can easily ‘put’ you (or you internally do it) into roles and hierarchies in twitter-verse and I suspect, real life. Younger me was pretty much in awe of a lot of people I ended up meeting in life later, that I wish I hadn’t put on a pedestal. It subconsciously makes the world feel very rigid and paternalistic. You should be consciously deciding your own place in the world.

Therefore, I’m starting a video series on YouTube (lol) where I’d invite different people to spend 2 minutes thinking out loud as they scroll twitter. This, I hope, will be a tool for parents to sit with kids and young adults and help learn how to learn on twitter. This will hopefully bring out 2 types of models for kids to learn from:

1. How do people think? How does this VC, economist, writer, scientist think or feel while reading tweets (ie what kind of models and filters they use). And so how could you ‘think’ while using twitter.
2. What’re some of the basic mechanics of analyzing anything new you learn; We often take things at face value, or we trust things other people trust (so we don’t have to apply our brains/spend time and find out if something is true). So the next time you learn something anywhere, books or the increasingly non-traditional learning media (videos, shorts, twitter, instagram, WhatsApp forwards), you can think for yourself.

We’re constantly learning from our increasingly content-heavy surroundings. It is important I help my nieces and nephews to learn how to learn from these new ways of learnings. Besides, as bunny Colvin says, kids (and adults) learn for their worlds, not ours. Their world shouldn’t be small because of how they consume information.

If you’re interested in coming on the show or know someone who should, please reach out!