(This is adapted from my 2009 book Mediactive.)

My friend and Arizona State University colleague Tim McGuire said many years ago, “The fact is one stupid mistake when you are 19 today can kill your future.”

That’s true—today, anyway, as we learn that what we do online can often be rediscovered years later. Such is the case of Alexi McCammond, who was named editor of Teen Vogue and then dethroned after anti-Asian tweets from a decade ago were uncovered.

It’s been the common wisdom for years. Back in 2009, then-President Obama told 9th graders at a Virginia school:

“I want everybody here to be careful about what you post on Facebook — because in the YouTube age, whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life. And when you’re young, you make mistakes and you do some stupid stuff.  And I’ve been hearing a lot about young people who — you know, they’re posting stuff on Facebook, and then suddenly they go apply for a job and somebody has done a search and — so that’s some practical political advice for you right there.”

Young people make mistakes and do stupid things. So do older people, of course. Luckily for me and most of my friends, my generation’s youthful stupidities are mostly lost in the mists of time, not preserved on somewhere in the digital cloud.

But the notion of punishing someone decades later for what he or she said or did as a teenager or college student isn’t just wrong. It’s dangerous.

What matters is who you are today. If some said racist things as a teenager and is still demonstrating today that he or she harbors racist beliefs or acts in racist ways, I want no part of that person.

We’re going to have to cut each other some slack. There’s no alternative.

A journalism student of mine once asked if it was advisable to have a personal blog and, if so, to be outspoken on it. He’d apparently been warned that it could put a crimp in his future journalism career plans.

I can’t say how others would react. I do know that if I were hiring someone today I’d want to know what (not if) he or she posted online, not to find disqualifying factors but to see if that person had interesting things to say. I’d take for granted that I might find some things that were risqué or inappropriate for my current world. I’d expect to find things that would be “unjournalistic” in some ways, such as outspoken or foolish (or both) views on important people and issues. But I’d also remember my own ability, if not tendency, to be an idiot when I was that age. And I’d discount appropriately.

This is all about giving people what my friend Esther Dyson, a technology investor and seer, has called a “statute of limitations on stupidity.” If our norms don’t bend so that we can all start cutting each other more slack in this increasingly transparent society, we’ll only promote drones—the least imaginative, dullest people—into positions of authority. Now that’s really scary.

I hope we’ll make more progress on this than we’re showing at the moment. In some ways we are. Recall that it was impossible for a Catholic to be president until John F. Kennedy was elected. It was impossible for a divorced person to be elected until Ronald Reagan won. It was impossible for a former pot smoker to be president until Bill Clinton got elected. (Biden is stupidly undoing this with his firing of staffers who admit they ever used weed.) George W. Bush acknowledged having been a dissolute drunk until he was 40. And so on.

Sometime in the foreseeable future, we’ll elect a president who tweeted regularly, or had a blog or a Facebook or Instagram page when she was a teenager. By the standards of today, such a person would be utterly disqualified for any serious political job. But if we adapt as I believe we’ll have to, we’ll have grown as a society; we’ll have become not just more tolerant of flaws, but more understanding that we all have feet of clay in some respect. We’ll elect her anyway, because we’ll realize that the person she has become—and how that happened—is what counts.

How will her peers know all this? They’ll have figured it out for themselves, but they’ll have had some help, too. They’ll have been taught, from an early age.

Fifteen years ago this week, I had 15 minutes of fame in Japan when my book We the Media was published in translation and the nation’s largest news magazine, Aera, put me on the cover. It was weird, but also gratifying in lots of ways.

Kaz Taira translated the book (and did the same with a follow-on book, “Mediactive” a few years later), and Katsura Hattori wrote an afterword. It was an honor to work with them, and we’ve become friends since. I look forward to the day when we can meet again in Tokyo for dinner, as we’ve done on several occasions in recent years.

乾杯!

At the top of the Washington Post’s website, a day after the second Trump-Biden presidential campaign debate, is a story entitled, “Trump seeks momentum from debate while Biden focuses on pandemic.” Read it and you’ll see a classic example of political coverage: an insider compendium that seeks to frame the debate’s impact on the race.

This story has a hollow core: empty space surrounded by the oh-so-savvy insider-isms that political journalists can’t resist. (Yes, it’s also a horse-race story, but at this point in the political cycle, that’s probably appropriate.)

The hole in this story is ignoring the central feature of the debate, which is not that the president’s overt behavior was slightly less obnoxious than during the first face-off with Biden. No, the central reality was that Trump lied incessantly and brazenly, spewing deceit about every topic that came up during the 90-minute TV event.

You won’t find the word “lie” in the piece, of course. Big Journalism does carnival-quality contortions to avoid using that clear and — in Trump’s case — plainly accurate word. Big Journalism only resorts to it when something the president’s standard-issue deceit rises to a level of brazenness that even timid news organization’s can’t justify a tamer word.

But “lie” isn’t the only missing word. So are “false” and “deceive” and “untrue” and, as far as I can tell, any other word that might even hint at the fountain of deceit that erupted — as usual — from the president of the United States.

That may account for the missing context in the Post’s story. Journalists have thoroughly normalized Trump’s lying. So perhaps it didn’t occur to the team of reporters to mention that central reality of the debate — nor, maybe worse, to their editors who put the story at the top of their home page.

Perhaps they assumed all readers already understood the context. I do note, meanwhile, that the Post featured a story — right next to this one on the home page — on one of Trump’s repeatedly told lies.

But very few people will see the Post story in that context, because most people arrive at story pages via social media and other links. And when they read this horse-race special, they won’t be reminded of the core reality of Donald Trump: his relentless, malign deceit during the event the story was covering. Journalism should be better than this.

I’m honored that Keio University’s Cyber Civilization Research Center has named me a (non-resident) Senior Fellow. The center, based in Tokyo, is the brainchild of two real (in contrast to me) luminaries: Jun Murai, widely known as the person who did most to create the Japanese Internet, and David Farber, an American who has been at the top ranks of computer networking and education for decades. Keio is generally regarded as the top private university in Japan.

Dave and I have been running a weekly online gathering, in which a special guest discusses some aspect of our rapidly changing world. Our attendees are scholars, scientists, engineers, people from business and NGOs, and more. I learn something new every time.

My work with the News Co/Lab and the Cronkite School at ASU continues. (Our new free online media literacy course launches a big session this weekend.)

Note: This is an exercise I assign to students in my Digital Media Literacy course at Arizona State University. I ask them to keep a record of how they use media in a 24-hour stretch.

How do I rate news outlets?

(Note: This is adapted from a “Tweetstorm” earlier today.)

More than a decade ago I begged journalists and sharers of breaking news to employ a “slow news” approach. The Kobe Bryant story demonstrates that need more than ever.

What’s slow news? It’s the notion that we should slow down before publishing information we can’t absolutely verify, and before believing what we’ve seen published.

I’m sorry to say that we haven’t made enough progress. Slowing down before publishing is the duty (I believe it should be viewed that way) of journalists and social media sharers. Yesterday’s barrage of misinformation, incomplete information, and guesses demonstrated that we’re not close.

Since we can’t expect journalists to do it, and social media’s vastness guarantees that incomplete or wrong information will spread fast, it’s really up to the rest of us — the “consumers” of information — to adopt a slow-news philosophy.

In our digital media literacy course at the Cronkite School, Kristy Roschke and I ask students to pause before believing or sharing pretty much anything, especially when it’s breaking news or a fast-developing story. We use examples like this to show why that’s needed.It comes down to this:

The faster the news accelerates, the slower I am inclined to believe anything I hear — and the harder I look for the coverage that pulls together the most facts with the most clarity about what’s known and what’s speculation.

Meanwhile, if journalists won’t stop spraying out the latest speculation, the least they can do is to find ways to get updates and corrections to as many of the people who’ve read the early “news” as quickly and broadly as possible.

At the ASU News Co/Lab, which I co-founded a couple of years ago, we’re working on ways to help journalists and prominent sharers do just that. A tool, now under development, can partially automate the process of sending corrections down the same social pathways that the original errors traveled.

We’re in “pre-alpha” testing of the tool, which Ted Han is developing, and it looks promising. More on this work here.

(If you’re in a newsroom and want to get a look at this, let us know!

While the tool is aimed first at corrections of major errors, we see updates in these kinds of situations as an important use case. Sometimes the original information isn’t “wrong” in a traditional journalistic sense — example: the police give out an incorrect death toll.

But the public doesn’t care where the misinformation came from, and a journalistic duty is to get the correct information out there, pronto. So when the news is “developing” — if you see that word on a story, it’s probably changing fast — we may be able to help.

I’m under no illusions that slow news will become the norm for creators of information, certainly not for newsrooms or people who use social media as an attention-getter. But I hope we can make progress and reduce at least some of the rumor-mongering.

As creators and consumers, we all need to reflect on what we’re doing. Please consider adopting a slow news approach.

It boils down to this: Take a breath, and think.

(Note: This is adapted from a Thanksgiving Day editorial I wrote many years ago at the Detroit Free Press and later updated in my San Jose Mercury News column.)

Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday, invites us to pause and remember our blessings. It’s also an annual reminder that, as a friend once reminded me, the world needs more pilgrims and fewer turkeys.

The pilgrims I admire take risks. They embark on journeys to new, unfamiliar, and often unfriendly places, with vision transcending fear. But that isn’t all. Their staying power and moral convictions take them far beyond the self-obsessed hunger for wealth and power–and willingness to poison our public discourse–that infects our nation at the highest levels and threatens to bring down the republic.

Because people are complicated, we can be turkeys one moment and pilgrims the next. History tells us that America’s colonial pilgrims weren’t uniformly admirable (to put it mildly) in their deeds or motives. And human nature hasn’t changed.

So as the more fortunate among us give thanks for our bounty this week — as Thanksgiving Day’s culinary surplus gives way to the holiday season’s commercial excess — let’s honor our own good fortune by reminding ourselves of the best in others.

I revere my small town’s teachers and librarians, who spread knowledge through the community. They believe in the power of words, of learning, of discovery. They are pilgrims.

I am humbled by the people who work for relatively low pay, and sometimes at great personal risk, to bring the truth to their communities via a craft–journalism–that we have never needed more. They, too, are pilgrims.

I admire the activists who see a better America, and work every day to create it, than the cruel nation so many of our leaders have fostered over the years. They are guiding us on a national pilgrimage toward real justice.

A friend who died several decades ago built a successful business and then went into public service. Early in his political career he pretty much insisted that if you were poor it was your own fault, period. Holding power helped him understand otherwise. A conservative Republican–back before “conservative” had been twisted into its current status of right-wing extremist–he never stopped trusting that the free market would erase poverty in the long term. But he realized that the rest of us, as volunteers and through our government, had to help in the meantime. He was a pilgrim.

In the Bay Area, where I live, the behavior of some famous technology people might lead you to believe that the tech world has vastly more turkeys than pilgrims. No question, the field has attracted more than its share of both — reflecting its intense, creative style. Silicon Valley does everything in excess, so why not this? But our tech companies’ worst behavior is now intertwined with our national turmoil, and their leaders have barely begun to recognize their culpability. Some of them are in desperate need of pilgrimages of their own.

At times I fear that America, awash in anger, pettiness, greed, smugness, and deceit, has all but lost its sense of exploration, wonder, and justice. But I always come back to the pilgrims who refuse to accept the way things are, who reject pure grasping and complacence, and who are leading us to better places.

My table will overflow with bounty this Thursday. I’m grateful beyond words for my life of relative comfort, for my opportunity to constantly explore and learn.

I hope to sustain this pilgrimage for life, for justice. And as America celebrates Thanksgiving Day, 2018, I wish the same for you.

The ASU News Co/Lab is gathering momentum, I’m glad to say. If you have a minute (and are interested), take a look around our website…