Educating children in the age of social media seems like uncharted territory – but is it?
The specific challenges of social media are unique: a problematic video can ricochet around the school (or halfway around the world) almost instantly. But technological advances bringing new social problems is a tale as old as time, according to Joanna Literat, a professor of communication media design and instructional technology at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Literat is also associate director of the Media and Social Change Lab at Columbia, where, she said, she spends a lot of time thinking about the social and educational implications of media for young people.
Education Week asked Literat about these implications and what educators might be wrong in their assumptions. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What nuance do you think is missing from the current debate about social media and youth mental health?
I think an important part of the nuance of this discussion, the current debate, is also by historicizing it. We like to think that everything with social media is unprecedented. Even in the name of technology itself — new media, right?
There’s a myth that it’s new, but we’re actually seeing these [kinds] of moral panic around social media, exemplified in earlier communication technologies.
One of the classes I teach at the Teachers College is the history of communication. And that’s exactly how I start: I pick these quotes that are about moral panic about social media, or [my students] I think they’re for social media, but then I discover they’re for the telegraph, and the telephone, and the post office, and the newspapers. So it’s not really that new.
Whenever there is a communication technology that has such a huge social impact, there is a tendency to panic and there is a tendency to go between utopia and dystopia with no middle ground. Often when we see these moral panics, the target of the panic is young people and women.
Yes, as a society we’ve gone crazy, but we’ve gone crazy before with every major technology cycle and almost every time it involves young people and women – especially young girls.
Is there any basis for this moral panic? I think of multiple investigations into how men use social media to contact young girls.
I don’t mean to say, “Oh, it’s all exactly the same,” just that historical perspective definitely matters. And because the scope and scale of social media is so great, we need to pay close attention to the harmful effects, whether those effects are intentional or not, whether they are direct or less direct.
On the one hand, [there are] the safety issues you mentioned. There are challenges with misinformation, cyberbullying, the negative impact on young people’s self-esteem, which we see far more with young girls and female-identifying youth than male-identifying youth.
But I will also say that, in general, my research perspective is one of … belief in the agency of young people. I think the question is often: What is technology doing to young people? And I like to ask: What are young people doing with technology?
Much of my own work is in this area: how participating in causes online, or even just following them, can really broaden young people’s understanding of social political issues, foster empathy, and civically refine their voice. Because it’s not like just knowing how to be a citizen or a participant in public life. You need to actively work on this skill, and to work on this skill you need a safe space. And often for young people, for better or for worse, social media is that space.
What skills should schools be teaching to promote healthy use of social media?
When it comes to media literacy, for example, much of it still centers around consumption: how to be good users of social media or online content.
It definitely needs more focus on production. Nowadays, everyone is a content creator, and for young people, this is so important.
