I’ve been going through my NextDoor community because — well, I have to keep on top of new problems in social media and information. On good days that means I scroll through TikTok, on bad ones, NextDoor.

One thing people occasionally do on NextDoor is share Ring videos. Some are of legit crimes; the ones I’ve seen are mostly car prowls, where thieves go door to door looking for unlocked cars to steal stuff from. Others are not — e.g., sharing videos of garbage pickers (and yes, the irony of someone hooking up a home camera to Amazon and then worrying about someone picking through their garbage is not lost on me).

It’s really early days and there are not that many Ring videos shared on NextDoor. But still, what I sense — particularly through one video that I watched where a man hassled a homeless man going through his garbage with what I think was a sense of performing for a future NextDoor audience — is that people see a local Ring video with either criminals or conflict in it as a hot commodity. If you have a video that shows suspicious activity — or even better, shows you “standing up” to criminals or people you *think* are criminals, you’re the belle of the ball for the night. You post, and everyone gathers around for a couple rounds of “ain’t it awful” and “good for you”. And the conversation ends, of course, with a bunch of people saying “I really have to get a Ring.”

Get a Ring for protection? Maybe. But that’s not all. People have to get a Ring partially because that’s the only way to get in on the game of video sharing. Which leads to the weirdest dynamic of all — you not only need a Ring to share videos like these — most importantly, and bizarrely, you need crime to happen.

So what happens in communities where the demand for sharable crime exceeds the available crime in the community?

We’ve been through this social story before — Facebook and others created a popular demand for a certain type of story traditional media (and reality) wasn’t providing. So people warped reality to meet the need.

In the case of Ring + sharing, there will be pressures for individuals to take the most minor incidents and frame them sensationally, to create incidents with drama, to edit clips deceptively, to build (or tap into) deep narratives with imbue the mundane with tension, and maybe even to fake content (it seems risky to me for a small community where you know people, but the P. T. Barnum quote applies here). When crime content is scarce, people will expand their definition of crime. When suspicious activity is scarce people will expand the definition of suspicious. When those expansions still fail to serve up enough content, people will engage in even more disturbing stuff. The local dimension may also bleed into more engaging nationally viral Ring videos that serve to structure local narratives. Suddenly your hassling the homeless man video looks braver when shared against the background of a violent conflict over garbage picking the next state over.

Maybe at some point the novelty wears off, and people get off these platforms or find something else to share. I actually think there is a good chance the whole culture implodes out of awfulness. But given the commercials for the product model the sort of content you want to be producing and consuming, and that customers find that attractive, maybe not.

In any case, I’ve generally seen my misinformation/disinformation work as separate from the excellent work Chris Gilliard has been doing around Ring. But what we see here is a very disturbing parallel between the supply gap that fueled our current disinformation crisis and a coming supply gap in sharable Ring videos. History and theory shows when supply and demand fight it out demand wins — we should think very carefully about how that might play out in this case.

A question we get asked a lot about our four moves curriculum is whether it sticks. Can a two or three week intervention really change people’s approach online to information permanently?

Remember, we don’t do traditional news literacy. We don’t do traditional media literacy. We don’t teach people about newspapers, communications theory, or any of that. We just do one thing — give them a set of things to do in their first 60 seconds after encountering a piece of media. We do that for two to three weeks of class time, and talk a bit about practical issues around online information, algorithms, trolling, and the like.

We do take some efforts to check persistence. We do the post-assessment several weeks after the last class session, to see what happens after skills decay. We test with authentic prompts, to try and mimic the context students will exercise the skills as precisely as possible. But still the question comes up — are students going to keep doing this? Like, really really? A formal assessment of this would involve some seriously creepy surveillance of students. But we got a powerful anecdotal piece of evidence a bit ago.

The background: CUNY Staten Island implemented our two-week curriculum in their Core 100 class for freshman last fall. A few weeks ago the coordinator of the Core program got this letter from one of the school’s scholarship advisors about some spring scholarship applications. The advisor writing it had no idea of the changes in the Core program and had never heard of the four moves. I am reproducing it in its entirety here, partly because I want you to know I am not cherry-picking here, and partly because the advisor writes with a beautiful clarity that I’m not sure I could match (I love a beautiful email!):

Dear Donna,

I’ve been meaning to tell you for a few months now that the Core program deserves a HUGE kudos, and that I am very impressed with the training students are receiving through Core 100.

Each year, I run our campus competition for the Jeannette K. Watson Fellowship, which is a prestigious opportunity that gives students generous stipends, internship experience, mentoring and professional development training. As part of our campus competition, my committee and I interview candidates as the final stage in the nomination process, as all candidates must then attend an extensive day-long interview session at the Watson Foundation.

One of the questions our committee asks applicants is, “Where do you get your news?” The fellowship seeks students who are knowledgeable of domestic and global issues, as well as students who are motivated to affect positive social change. This question is often asked of nominees who go forward into the official competition, therefore, we make it a point to ask this question for our internal campus competition.

In years past, we received answers such as social media, or perhaps one or two popular news stations, etc. Occasionally a student would cite the NY Times as a primary source for news. This year, we were astounded at the answers we received to this question. Nearly every applicant told us how they compare different news stations for different perspectives, and how they seek to verify the news they are reading. Most applicants further cited international sources of news for an even wider perspective. We couldn’t believe the change this year – how intelligent and worldly and diligent they all sounded! (More so than most older adults!) One of the applicants told us that she learned to do this in Core 100.

Whatever you’re doing, it’s working. I’m very impressed and quite moved.

Sincerely,

Michele

Last night I mentioned this letter to Paul Cook, who has taught using these methods at Indiana University Kokomo. I expected him to say something along the lines of “Wow, that’s incredible!”. But he didn’t. He said “Honestly, Mike, that doesn’t surprise me at all.” And he was right. It’s moving to see here, but it’s also completely consistent with our experience of teaching the course. It’s moving to me because it’s what we see too.

You see the moves in Michele’s description, of course — find other coverage, investigate the source. The habits we push. But you see something that I often have trouble explaining to others — with the right habits you find students start sounding like entirely different people. They start being, in some ways, very different people. Less reactive, more reflective, more curious. If the habits stick, rather than decay, that effect can cumulative, because the students have done that most powerful of things — they have learned how to learn. And the impact of that can change a person’s life.