Reading about Skylar Hughes is like reading about the early days of a superstar. A ballerina, a young academic powerhouse, and a community and psychological researcher for years already, Skylar went from high school in Georgia to attending Duke University, her dream at the time.

She worked as a fact-checker at CNN, and caught our eye with her TEDxDuke talk about social norms around truth.

Since then, she has graduated from Duke and is now pursuing a Master’s in the Social Science of the Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute.

In this interview, we discuss distinctions between norms, normal, and normalized, dis- and misinformation, believing lies vs. condoning lies, “weird checking,” the Fairness Doctrine, and much more.

We also have our “Discoveries of the Week.”

• The paper Skylar mentions

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Music provided by Provoke the Truth — https://provokethetruth.net/

“Disintermediation” was a hot buzzword during the early days of disruption thinking, but it never really occurred. Instead, the platform era ushered in new forms of intermediation based on advertising incentives and deregulation, making the current environment far less accountable and far more about exploitation.

Markets depend on middlemen, as do information economies. The health of markets and information spaces often depends on how well those middlemen function, the rules that define their scope of action, and the incentives that guide their choices. As Jonathan Rauch wrote in The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of the Truth (Brookings Institution Press, 2021):

Compared to the intermediation of yore, with editors, editorial boards, and publishing staff listed on mastheads, platforms have no such obvious pathways to accountability. Section 230 has been used to provide them with the kind of legal cover that allows them to make their own rules and behave with near impunity. Attention is the new commodity, and stealing yours is the goal. The new middleman is a thief, not an ally.

We discuss these issues, the black boxes of platforms, the role of LLMs as new black box intermediaries, the long-forgotten Fairness Doctrine and its relevance, and more.

We also touch on recent news (the new STM report, PISS, and more).

Joy’s post about velvet ropes: https://www.the-geyser.com/bring-back-the-velvet-ropes/

This podcast gets a nod:

Also, this draft paper (labeled as such, thank you authors) is a critically important read because of the ideas: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5870623

• Some background on how it came about: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/how-generative-ai-is-destroying-society

We finish with our “Discoveries of the Week.”

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Music provided by Provoke the Truth — https://provokethetruth.net/

Rick Anderson, the University Librarian at Brigham Young University (BYU), joins us today. Rick serves on numerous editorial and advisory boards and is a regular contributor to the Scholarly Kitchen. He has served as president of NASIG and SSP, groups that span from libraries to publishers

• Also, he and Kent are not related, even if people often misattribute things between them.

Late last year, Rick wrote a two-part contemplation (Part 1 and Part 2) of what the OA movement might have achieved and where things might reasonably go from here, emphasizing that a range of approaches might have to be embraced so we can focus on more central issues.

Rick has also written three books, including Scholarly Communication: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2018).

Our wide-ranging discussion touches on how libraries first inspired Rick, his career journey from BYU and back, and his role in shaping discussions around OA through analysis.

We finish with “Discoveries of the Week.”

• Joy’s Discovery of the Week: https://youtu.be/zOd01sLlDj4?si=L6cCE09o-K7c-g1A

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Music provided by Provoke the Truth — https://provokethetruth.net/