Week Two: Jesse Miller and the Call to Dialogue

“Space [is not] the final frontier.” The internet is. 

I’m not one to mangle Star Trek’s iconic line lightly. Yet as an English and Social Studies teacher, Jesse Miller’s presentation on instilling digital citizenship in youth made me reassess my assumptions of technology and the internet in my future classroom. 

Thinking back to elementary school, the internet looked something like this.

My news largely came from cable TV news channels, and the closest thing I had to ‘meme’ accounts was America’s Funniest Home Videos. I did not grow up in the hyper-connected world many students are familiar with.

While Miller raised numerous fantastic points, I focus on the importance of teaching digital literacy in the classroom. 

Miller stressed that it’s important not to demonise social media. Instead, he recommended teaching students ways to interact with it in a healthier way. One of these, he said, was managing the constant stream of information that youths are bombarded by through the internet. This isn’t just the 24/7 newsfeed (often pared down into ‘Tik Tok-sized’ clips), but also advertising, streamer opinions, and posts from their extended peer network. What he (and others) maintain, is that- unsupported- this unceasing barrage of information buckles the emotional backs of students. Students are given so much to care about, but not always given the space to deal with the resultant emotions. 

Luckily, this isn’t a new conversation. In our socials methods course, we discussed the importance of integrating what students bring in from outside the class (in breaking news for example) into class discussions and lessons. The importance of this being to support students in contextualising and digging deeper into the critical issues thrust into their hands, day in, day out. 

Miller’s interaction with his daughter and social media really spoke to me as a potential way forward. Helping to scaffold her use of social media and the internet, Miller asks his child about the content they access online, and how she reacts to it. Whenever they encounter content that troubles them, or they otherwise want to share, the child has a discussion with Miller to unpack the material. 

Dialogue is at the heart of what Miller recommends. But I struggled to find something tangible with which to bridge the gap between concept and application. I needed a tool.

Watching The Social Dilemma, I was struck by how useful it may be as a teaching resource.

The Social Dilemma is a 2020 documentary-drama that discusses some of the tactics used by social media corporations to capture peoples interest, market products to users, and grow their product base. While The Social Dilemma is about an hour and a half long, it is structured into ‘chapters’ on specific aspects of social media corporations. These include: selling user data, curation of feeds, and the mental health impacts of social media. Moreover, the ‘drama’ portion of this documentary illustrates a teenager’s journey down a content rabbit hole, his life taking a turn influenced by social media. Student’s may be more likely to connect with this story, as opposed to a slide deck of charts and figures.  

Using sections of the documentary, teachers can prioritise topics to focus on in limited class time. Returning to Miller’s importance on discussion, these sections can be used to spark in-class dialogue and provide a common context for all students. 

Very little is new in this documentary. Students have likely heard these points many times before at the dinner table, school assemblies, or in ‘Tik Toks’. Yet The Social Dilemma may help ‘break the ice’ of student indifference resulting from previous exposure. Part of the documentary dramatizes the separate algorithms that sell user data, recommend contacts, and suggest content. By having these otherwise abstract concepts characterised, it may help broach the topic with younger high school students who would otherwise struggle with deeper engagement. 

This is just one piece of content, one tool.

As teachers, it looks like now is the time to “boldly go where no [curriculum] has gone before.”