The Social Dilemma, Algorithm, & Teenagers

Has School Changed?

I have been teaching middle school science for almost 2 decades. This means almost half of my life has been dedicated to educating teenagers in the areas of science and well, life perspectives in general. As teachers, we end up spending more time with our students than many of them spend with their parents. As teachers, we have an obligation to try and guide our students on paths we believe will lead them to successful and fulfilled lives. Much of what we do involves getting students the skills to be able to analyze different perspectives and to then choose the one they believe will lead to their own success.

In my time as a teacher I’ve had to change some of my discussions with students. For example, one of the debates used to be whether or not marijuana should be legalized. Now the discussion is whether or not all states should legalize or what the data is showing for states that have legalized.

Social Media is something that wasn’t even a topic when I first started teaching. It has now become something that consumes much of my students’ lives. The Netflix film titled ‘The Social Dilemma’ couldn’t be more relevant to the lives of most adults and even more so, my students.

#mrmckinney_says

There are some things that have held constant in teenagers throughout my 20 years of teaching. Middle School students don’t like to talk in front of people. As a matter of fact the #1 fear of teenagers and adults alike is public speaking. People have rated public speaking as a fear higher than death. Yes, Death! In my experience, social media has not made students any less willing to speak in public. Now with the Google explosion I would have to say that students have become less willing to analyze problems for as long a time because they are so used to ‘Googling’ everything. We are in an information rich time, almost too rich. As a science teacher I almost turn my students into skeptics, so as to analyze and to not believe everything they see on the internet. Another thing that hasn’t changed about middle school students is that they are easily influenced and honestly quite gullible.

This brings me to the Social Dilemma-Dilemma.

It’s not quite as complicated as one might think. People spend a lot of time on social media. The pros and cons about the amount of time will have to be saved for another time. Ironically, I polled almost 150 of my students and not one of them had seen the ‘Social Dilemma’ film. In short, social media companies are tracking everywhere we go and everything we watch on a digital platform. They then collect all that data and use it to create algorithms. These algorithms help predict the best products and videos that users will most likely click on and thus spend more time on the social media platform. The idea behind it is pretty simple.

So what’s the big deal?

I for one appreciate that if watch and like a certain type of video, social media platforms will find other similar videos and suggest that I watch them. If I am in the market for a certain product and the ‘internet’ suggests more similar products that I may like, why is that a bad thing? In my opinion, it isn’t.

Again, so what’s the big deal?

Okay, here it is. The only ‘big deal’ I see is that people, in particular my student’s, don’t know about it. Like I mentioned, not one of them had seen the film or had their parents spoken to them about how social media is working. This means that students are finding themselves going down the ‘rabbit hole’ of social media for hours upon hours without realizing how and why. They need to be educated on how money is being made from their viewing time. Does this mean they are going to stop, honestly, probably not. However, it does give them a new perspective to consider and the power of choice. Teachers and adults have a responsibility to educate young adults on the algorithm of social media.