Surprise surprise, the grump is here to complain about things again. This week, it’s the concept that seems benign at first glance, but scratching the surface reveals the icky hypercapitalist police state lying underneath; teaching youth about how to manage their online presence, and to take personal responsibility for the content they make available on the internet.
To start off, I should say that I don’t disagree in principle with teaching youth how to manage an online profile responsibly, given the realities of data collection and the impact that personal information can have on their futures. No kid, you shouldn’t thoughtlessly put the photos of you doing coke in a bar bathroom on your Facegram or your Instabook. A reasonable amount of technology usage in the classroom done within collectively and horizontally determined guidelines can be very empowering for our students. Handheld devices and internet communications will dominate their lives and as such we need to show that we trust them to use them respectfully in social settings. I think we can do this by working with our students to express needs that they have regarding technology, and needs that we as teachers have. Indeed, parents may very well hold the expectation that they can reach their kids and we need to mindful of that too. Together, balancing the use and non-use of social media platforms, digital devices, and other technological tools within a social classroom can cultivate a culture of technological usufruct without creating a feeling of dependency. But this take on online privacy, data protection, and image is quite small next to the real questions we should be guiding youth to engage with.
Something I felt was dearly lacking from our guest speaker’s presentation and initial TED Talk was a critical engagement with the ethical and political implications of our technologically mediated social world. We need to be engaging our youth not only in how to manage an online presence, but in questions of why this has become essentially necessary and if it is a good thing? Additionally, we need to be exploring questions of if it is just for future employers to be able to judge hires on their social media postings or for our information to be used to generate algorithms for anything from advertisements to determining where heavy policing happens. Particularly concerning was the presence of a police officer in BC’s digital safety video. Anyone can speak to the impacts of having your information online forever, but the purpose of having a cop tell youth this is to implicitly warn them that if he finds anything he doesn’t like, he’ll keep it and use it against them in the future if the ‘need’ arrises. Far fetched as it may sound, Victoria PD has history of trouncing privacy rules.
The most important part of so-called digital citizenship is not learning how to cultivate an impressive professional online profile and footprint. It is recognizing the ways in which big data tech firms have privatized access to personal information and use it to do everything from sell concert tickets to attempting to buy elections. We need to be empowering students to the belief that their data should not be a profit tool in the hands of private companies, or a tool for oppression in the hands of the forces of state violence (these two actors are more and more blurred)
Empowered technological engagement means knowing that technological relationships are only veneers over actually existing social relationships with material consequences. It means knowing you can fight for a technological future that cares for people and protects their rights, privacy, and livelihoods online.