The autonomy part, has, this is the body‑mind balance. This is system thinking, and this is innovation and planning.
This is about literacy. This is about being aware of something, being aware in a sort of self‑aware sense.
Sure, yes. Autonomy on the top, interaction on the right, and then, the common good on the left. These are the three main pie charts. As you can see, none of this is about one particular skill.
The interaction part is the second strength, includes the use of symbols in communications. This is more on the...
The three literacies are the literacy of autonomy, including a balance of body and mind, the spiritual balance, system thinking and problem solving, planning, and innovation. Those are the autonomous part.
These are the three major literacies that every student need to have regardless of whatever skill or capability, because we stop playing for profits. We don’t even know what the world would be like to appear afterwards, but we know that having these literacies help people.
Back in the year 2000, we categorized the K12 system into a set of skills, capabilities, that every student needed to have by the age of 18. Now, instead of saying skills or capabilities, we’re now saying "literacies."
So this is the "foundational chart" of what we call "life‑long learning," which is the slogan of our new curriculum. What this does is that it replaces the previous curriculum which was added in the year 2000.
This might work. OK, It does work. That’s right.
Right. I was trying to look at a English slide for this, but it doesn’t really have one. So I’m sorry, but you’ll have to work with my poor translation. [laughs] I’ll try to translate it. Just a second. This may work.
Just like any other where it’s an epidemics or virology, it is just as it is. I don’t think any strains of DNAs or RNAs carry any morality. It is just a fact that we’re dealing with.
I think it is pre‑figurative in a sense that people would want more, but it is also a hindrance if it doesn’t evolve into something recursive, something that people can then say, "OK, this is the kind of social media we want," instead of blindly following what is the major ...
Of course, for governments to actually work, people need to behave as adults. We need to somehow learn from this emotional contagion ways to behave as adults, listening to each other online, and so on, which is the main technological work that I’m doing as a digital minister.
But suddenly, with social media, people become much more closer to each other. Then, they form, even subconsciously, those very contagious relationships between each other. I think this changes the imaginations of organization of democracy in a pre‑figurative way. People got a taste of the way it could be like, ...
It is still pre‑figurative because compared to many different governments, Facebook or Twitter are actually more responsive and is a way to make people feel closer. So their distance with the government may be like this in a democratic government system, which is slowly shrinking with technology.
Then, later, of course, we see the current generation of social media, Twitter, Facebook, and so on, which are not recursive in the same way. People who participate don’t actually think they do have a say on the code that makes up Facebook or that makes up Twitter. They’re more ...
This characterized, not only the free software community, but Wikipedia community, the Creative Common community, the open access, open science community, and many other communities who are vitally concerned about the rules, constitutions of how the public is formed.
This is basically a public concerned very deeply on the ways in which they communicate, they form decisions, and so on. It’s as if everyone in a public, in republic is concerned with constitutional law. It’s something like that, how the society itself is being formed is being constantly under ...
Right. Well, social media is very broad. What I care about is whether we ended up becoming what we call a recursive public, which is one of the very old way, back in the Napster days, the P2P people, my people [laughs] who coined this term, the free software community ...
There’s all sort of psychological devices that one can use to try to not get oneself contagious. That’s the personal way. The more deeper way, still, is in the media literacy, which is part of the curriculum.
If you just hover on it intentionally, then you see the color. Then, you are expecting it, so you are in a psychological state to anticipate its effect on your first system and your second system.
It prevents overflow, of course. It replaces the overflow in news feed with a quote from someone, usually about productivity. You can change the quote also. I also installed another, what we call the Quiet FB plug‑in, which turns all the social media photos into grayscale, so it doesn’t touch ...
The what?
Yeah?
The Facebook News Feed Eradicator basically just turns the newsfeed off, but you can still go to groups and follow and participate in chats and whatever. You only see the things you expect, instead of something unexpected covered in the news feed.
One of those countermeasures that I personally do is to just install what we call News Feed Eradicator, which does what it says on the tin, which is a browser plug‑in for all the major browsers. I actually put it on my Facebook profile.
What we didn’t anticipate was that if you installed more than three of those social media tools is a cocktail of effect that people don’t have the slice of time, the attention to pay full attention to anything anymore. The emotion is much more contagious in this setting. We didn’t ...
For me, I don’t look at Facebook posts and get angry or whatever. For me it’s just the output of a algorithm that I also contributed to design. What we didn’t think of, back in 2008, was that we all designed to make people become aware of the ambient knowledge, ...
I’m optimistic in the humanity’s potential to deal with any outbreaks, virtual or real, of virus. I also trust the people researching this kind of thing because before joining the cabinet, I was also working with Silicon Valley companies, developing social media for the enterprise setting for eight years.
One of the very effective ways in practice is just by listening to each other, especially to opposing views deeply. Afterwards, for that particular topic, one becomes immune to any propaganda or whatever. It is scientifically proven.
It doesn’t help to anthropomorphize this kind of effect. What does help is to quantify, to learn about it, to see those virus of the mind as a kind of virus and then try to develop inoculation.
Just as if it’s an actual flu, whether it’s avian flu or some other epidemic, you don’t actually negotiate with the virus because it doesn’t talk back. It’s not a same category of things.
Like any other virus strains, it mutates. There’s different populations developing different immunities to it. The whole point is that it is not about optimism or about negotiating with technology.
Of course, it is, like any other outbreak, people develop antibodies to it. People get used to the need to fact‑check before believing anything online.
Mobilize one of these emotions, so people would share before they even consider its content. Because of this, people have become much closer, much more connected on a subconscious emotional level, instead of on a conscious, more deliberative level. It makes it very easy for epidemics of emotions, of ideologies ...
Before social media, we used to read an article, to listen to something, and then recommend it to people. Nowadays, with social media, there’s things that just mobilize our center for emotions, for anger, for outrage, for sadness, or whatever.
Sure. Technology is a really broad term. Mostly people blame social media, which is a very narrow slice of technology. Social media makes, for the first time in human history, sharing easier and faster than actually reading something, which is very weird.
This is very useful in a demonstration kind of way, regardless of where on earth that you are. Whether it takes a minister without portfolio or some advisory council or a digital service unit, I think that’s up to each country to decide.
I think having someone who demonstrate in a demo sense that digital tools does improve the quality of life, and in the future not just with VR or AR, but also with the basis of machine learning and so on as part of the public service infrastructure in a safe, ...
As a anarchist, of course, I don’t give commands, but I just show those examples and people take whatever they like. They seem to like it because by showing it works, it’s probably certainly they’re all smart people. They try to pick the things that they need, that they want, ...
Soo we turn the unknown into something that you can see on a smaller scale. It’s up to each level of government, to each ministry to see whether they want to implement these procedures and introduce those digital tools. How much to introduce is all up to them.
By showing people that it actually reduces costs, both in time and also in people involved, also, it’s fun, right, you make this much participatory. Also that is effective. It removes the fear of the public servants of the unknown.
I run my meetings like this. I run my websites like this. I do radical transparency knowing that, of course, it’s impossible to ask every ministry, every level in Taiwan to do this in five months. It’s just not possible.
Whether it’s useful or not, I think it is kind of useful as what we call pre‑figurative politics way. The whole idea pre‑figurative politics is to be the change we want to see in the world, but in a smaller scale.
Before me here was a minister without portfolio, so‑called cyberspace minister, in charge of cyber law and stuff. This is, whatever it’s called, there’s one role in the minister without portfolio level in charge of digital or cyber space or Internet‑related affairs.
So it is transitional. This is a part of digital transformation. We did have this position, a minister without portfolio in charge for digital affairs for many, many years. It was the Science and Technology minister without portfolio, who are in charge of open data and so on.
I think this is also kind of an ephemeral position because maybe 20 years from now, all the ministers will be digital. Maybe we’ll reserve a analog minister for the people who are not digital yet.
Right. It is a great question. I’m a minister without portfolio, meaning that I’m a minister without ministry. Digital is by definition a very cross‑ministry business.
We’re now explicitly saying, as much as possible, we’re now using multi‑stakeholder approach for the innovation with private sector and for inclusion with the civil society. That is the main direction. Of course, if you go into the details, there’s many other details as well, but that’s the main idea.
Basically, what’s that DIGI+ plan? The government has shrunk its size to just maintain the infrastructure and opening of the government, which is one half of our previous duties, if you look at the NICI plan that was before the DIGI+ plan.
