Social Media and Education: Should We Choose to “See Results Anyway”?
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By Jacob Pleasants and Marie Heath
Marie, Dan, and their colleague Ben Gleason recently published an article, “See Results Anyway”: Auditing Social media as Educational Technology, in which they used the method of technology audit to technoskeptically inquire into social media and consider its role in education. The title of the article refers to a warning on Instagram when a person uses search terms which may reveal explicit or even illegal content. Instagram offers the following statement, “These results may contain images of child sexual abuse” and notes that consuming such images may lead to extreme harm to children. Then Instagram offers a choice, “Get Resources” or “See Results Anyway.”
You can read Marie, Dan, and Ben’s full article at the Information and Learning Sciences journal page (If you can’t access it, please use the contact us form, and we’ll send you a pdf). Jacob Pleasants recently read the article and offered this commentary and review of the piece, which we have included below.
Discussion of “See Results Anyway”
What I most appreciated about this article is how Heath, Krutka, and Gleason deeply grapple with a core question regarding education and new media. As educators, there is a natural impulse to educate students to use new media for good, especially when we perceive that the dominant uses are less-than-desirable. Should we not, then, teach with social media in ways that are constructive and pro-social? Teachers, after all, are in ideal positions to help students harness social media toward productive ends, in the controlled (and mostly safe) environment of school.
The in-depth audits that Heath et al. carry out for Twitter and Instagram reveal the flawed logic of this impulse. In short: the negative patterns of interaction that exist on these platforms is not an accident or the result of inadequate education (i.e., a lack of social media literacy). Those patterns are products of how the technologies are designed (and continuously updated) and the cultural environments in which they are used. Those sociotechnical systems do not necessarily determine what people do on the platforms. It is certainly possible to use Twitter for democratic engagement or other educative endeavors. But any educator who wants to teach with social media needs to be keenly aware that to do so means to actively resist the dominant scripts of the platforms. To put it in tech-culture terms, while teaching with social media in productive ways is possible, there’s just a lot more friction in that use case.
But isn’t this all the more reason to incorporate social media into our teaching? Should we, as educators, not repurpose these technologies for more noble ends, thus showing our students how to do so as well? It’s a tempting vision, and there is some merit to the idea, but as Heath et al. argue, teaching with social media is not the best way to achieve it. Instead, what we need to do is teach students about social media. Teachers and students need to be able to step back from the platform and take the medium as an object of examination and reflection. An important benefit of this approach is that it prioritizes a practice of critical reflection that can be applied not only to the social media of today but of the future as well. Indeed, Twitter provides a clear example of just how rapidly a platform can both wax and wane. Figuring out how to teach with Twitter is useful only as long as Twitter exists. Figuring out how to teach about Twitter, though, offers ways of thinking that can much more easily be carried into the future.
We educators need some humility. It’s easy to envision the wonderful ways that we might harness social media - or any technology - for noble and lofty purposes. But we cannot ignore the power of the sociotechnical systems. Even if our intentions are good, bringing students into social media environments exposes them to all of the logics, manipulations, biases, and harms that are embedded in those systems. Which is why serious EdTech audits are so crucial.
Sharing and Discussing Critical Tech Scholarship
Hi, Marie again! I appreciated that Jacob took the time to digest and discuss the article which Dan, Ben, and I wrote. In particular, viewing the paper through Jacob’s eyes and thoughtful synthesis allowed me to see the work in a new light, with different and deeper implications. We’d like to offer more discussions of relevant research, so if you have a recently published article related to critical technology or more just technological futures, please share it with us! We’d like to publish a blog which discusses your work and promotes it to our Civics of Tech community.