Beyond Followers
Empowering Students as Creators with Gold Standard Academic Credentials
Industrial “Having A Job” Vs. Digital “Doing Work”
Do you want your child to attend a school for followers or one designed for creators?
Both the industrial and digital economies depend on producers and consumers. In the industrial economy, factories serve as producers. Factory workers are consumers in their free time. This creates a “jobs loop”:
Get a Job → Earn Money → Buy Stuff (→ More Jobs → …)
For decades, this cycle has been driving the macroeconomic engine of industrial growth. However, things became more complex with the rise of global consumption, such as US consumption creating jobs in countries like China. Despite this complexity, the basic human dynamic of earning money to buy things continues to drive the industrial economy.
On the other hand, digital economics are driven by producers of digital assets (influencers) and digital consumers (followers). In his book Education in the Digital Age: How We Get There, Nadav Zeimer explains how the traditional jobs loop is being replaced by what Principal Z calls the work loop, which is directly influenced by neuroscience. The work loop drives the use of human attention and it can be represented as follows:
Intoxication → Withdrawal → Preoccupation (→ Intoxication → …)
The work loop is our brain’s reward system. It is how work gets done among humans. Our brains evolved this work loop making us the only creatures addicted to learning and setting challenging goals. We derive great psychological value by being needed for our ability to do work.
Intoxication Stage: This initial stage occurs when an individual learns something new, leading to feelings of intoxication. The brain’s reward system is activated, resulting in the release of dopamine and opioid peptides in the basal ganglia. [This produces feelings of pleasure and reward 1 2].
Withdrawal Stage: After the initial thrill wears off, the individual may experience withdrawal symptoms. [During this stage, there is a decrease in dopamine function and an increase in stress neurotransmitters like corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) and dynorphin in the brain 1 2]. Glutamate, an excitatory neurotransmitter, plays a significant role during this phase. [It is associated with heightened autonomic nervous system activation and central nervous system hyperexcitability 3 4].
Preoccupation Stage: As acute withdrawal fades, cravings emerge to take on the next goal. [This stage is driven by dysregulation of key projections from the prefrontal cortex and insula, including glutamate, to the basal ganglia and extended amygdala 1 2]. [The stress systems mediated by corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) and dynorphin-κ opioid systems are also involved in this stage 1 2].
This Work Loop describes the incentives built into our brains that influence our use of conscious attention. This attention is the base layer of digital capital. Influencers use their attention for their own gain, using the work loop to generate the work ethic to become an influencer. On the other hand, this loop can be hijacked such that our attention is exploited for someone else’s gain. In such a circumstance we offer up our attention as a follower. This happens when someone else’s digital content triggers our intoxication cycle. We become followers addicted to social media.
SIDEBAR Rat Park Addiction: One might hypothesize that people turn to opioid pills because their education failed to provide them with access to the inherent pleasure of learning and goal-setting. The Rat Park Experiments of the 1970s support such conjecture. Mice were given two tubes to drink from: one dispensed water, and the other dispensed an opioid solution. Rats that had nothing else to do became addicted to the artificially-induced intoxication. However, rats that had challenges, friends, toys, sex, and a park in their backyard never touched the drugged water — they engaged in social challenges for intoxication and used plain water for hydration. When given the option, creatures tend to prefer a natural source of intoxication, but when that is not available we opt for any form of intoxication available. Teaching our youth to “get high” off of learning (often referred to as “growth mindset”) should be a fundamental purpose of public education. And yet, it’s not.
Social media apps hijack the brain’s work loop to capture and retain attention of followers whose only job is to “like” and “comment.” No productive work is done, other than to engage with influencer content (ads). If we continue in this direction we will have a creator class that owns assets and a follower class that rents.
The work loop is no better or worse than the jobs loop, by the way. One is native to industrial economics and the other is native to digital markets. One drives industrial profits and the other drives digital capital formation. We are currently in a time of transition as industrial profits decline and digital assets gain in value.
Consider that if you include not only independent gigs but part-time workers, temps, and on-call workers, the number of people working in contingent jobs already constitutes over 40 percent of American workers today and that percentage is rapidly growing. No more cubicle “jobs,” only a nascent gig economy that has no middle-class work, as of yet.
A Princeton study found that of all the jobs created between 2005 and 2015, 94 percent of them were contract or temporary. Virtually every job we created in the last decade was piecemeal and income was unreliable. It’s more than a sign of the times, it is a taste of a future that hasn’t yet arrived.
Times of transition like this are full of opportunity in proportion to devastation. Each community will either get a boost of digital cashflow by creating digital assets or they will feel the drain of a deflating centralized financial and industrial assets. Our kids will either grow up to be followers whose attention is monetized for advertising, or they will be the influencers cashing in on their creativity.
This cycle has also been described as Goal → Dopamine → Success → Opioid or even, Set → Seek → Apply → Reflect. This pattern is found all over human endeavors because it is how our brains work.
In summary, the industrial model is a pyramid with power concentrated at the top, PUSHING products down to workers and consumers alike. And the digital model is “inverted” with value being PULLED from end users organized as a web with power residing in the volume of links in the web. MACROeconomics matter most to industrial analysts, but listen for MICROeconomics to drive trends in a digital context (like memes). Industrial workers are expected to do what they are told while on the job and are compensated for their “rent-seeking,” while digital workers form communities to share content and are compensated based on the number of followers they accumulate.
So next time you find yourself pondering digital economics, just think of the Jobs Loop and the Work Loop. These really explain so much.
In the field of education, successful students will utilize this work loop to harness their attention toward learning difficult subjects just as they did as babies and toddlers who are driven by the work loop to learn language and motor skills.
We can choose to prepare K-12 students to be influencers or followers and right now the average public school is forced to choose the latter. Any time you teach to an answer key, you are training followers and shutting down the work loop. “Sit down and learn to do what you are told during ‘seat time’ to earn credit. Just like you will have to do at a job.” But some of those jobs no longer exist.
Schools that offer academic experiences where students are creators will thrive. Standardized testing stand in the way. If only educators had a way to measure academic work products instead of relying on test scores. Then they could teach students to exercise work ethic. Testing data measures who is the best follower, while performance-based assessment indicates where all the influencers are most likely to come from.
At hs.credit We offer performance-based data by evaluating youth media assets against academic rubrics. We offer 11th and 12th grade students credits not controlled by corporations or government but by veteran educators. Each credit on our platform has been validated by a teacher and three paid experts. Such credits are not easy to earn, but they leave do doubt for any college counselor as to a student’s ability to create academic content. They can click on any credit to see the proof-of-work for themselves.
#PassionForLearning
Follow hs.credit for updates on this transition from industrial native to digital native education.
