My friend Mitch Joel and I talk for about an hour (sorry) about whether our hopes for the Net have proven to be forlorn. You can listen here.

The spur for this conversation was my recent article in The Atlantic, “The Net that Was (and Still Could Be).”

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I’m at workshops held by the Center for Educational Technology in Tel Aviv (I’m on its advisory board) and they’ve asked me to do a brief introduction at a session on digital literacy. I plan on saying very little, especially since Renee Hobbs is there and she actually knows this topic.

I want to make only three points, all obvious.

First, obviously digital literacy is first about values and only then about mechanics. E.g., traditionally media literacy has been about making cannier individuals, which then results in a cannier society. Digital literacy — especially if we think of it as network literacy — may decide that it would prefer to grow literate networks.

Second, I personally would want to give students a lively sense of how the Internet and the Web work. This isn’t so they can grow up to be network architects or Web designers. Rather, it explicitly aims at preserving the values implicit (yes, the meaning of “implicit” here needs a lot of explicit explication) in those technologies…values at risk as that architecture becomes increasingly paved over by commercial apps.

Third, our new media literacy is not just about making us better consumers of content but is actually about shaping the medium itself. What do we want it to be? That’s never before been so directly the case.

If I were home, I’d make these points by referring to Howard Rheingold, Dan Gillmor, Renee and others.

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The project with Doc that I mentioned is a new set of clues, following on The Cluetrain Manifesto from 16 years ago.

The clues are designed as an open source publishing project: The text is in the public domain, and we’re making the clues available at Github in various computer-friendly formats, including JSON, OPML and XML.

We launched this morning and a happy hell has broken loose. So I’m just going to posts some links for now. In fact, I’m copying and pasting from an email by Doc:

• @DaveWiner’s listicle version of New Clues (at listicle.io, one of his many creations).
• Dave’s blog post on New Clues, and working with Doc and me.
• New Clues on Medium’s Backchannel (courtesy of @StevenLevy).
• @Cluetrain on Twitter. Also @dweinberger and @dsearls
• The New Clues group page on Facebook
• Halley Suitt’s interview with Doc and me at the Globe’s BetaBoston
• Doc’s blog.

Gotta run…

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