Jesse Miller’s presentation on social media and mobile technology articulated a good many points and positions regarding the role that technology is playing in our lives and the lives of students. It is easy to view technology both with rose tinted glasses for all of the convenience it affords us, as well as with great apprehension for the waves that it makes in day-to-day life. The collective cries in opposition of AI echo those against the early internet, and the proliferation of newspapers before it. Jesse maintains a sense of stalwart optimism for technology and its integration into ever more aspects of our lives; which is a productive outlook for how to “go with the tide” rather than attempting to “stop the tide with a broom”. 

Photo by Creathrive

Kids will use social media. Its allure is carefully and meticulously cultivated, through algorithms and targeted advertisement, to grab and maintain attention. Educating students on how best to navigate social media and the internet more broadly (with its own artful and evil algorithms) is a pragmatic outlook that recognizes the challenges with trying to deny kids access to anything that is so easily within reach. The problem arises however, in trying to determine and articulate “appropriateness” by degree. If kids are permitted (and in Jesse’s perspective) encouraged to engage with the internet and social media, how are we as educators and as parents going to be able to determine for our kids in advance what is appropriate, and how can we articulate that to our kids without exposing them to material that breaches that boundary? 

While there are measures in place in many parts of the internet to prevent children from accessing age-inappropriate content, it is most often a pop-up window that asks “are you eighteen?”. I need not articulate the frailty of methods like these in keeping the internet child-friendly. Whether its age-restricted video games on a platform like Steam requiring you to input your birthdate before browsing, or Adult Films, all that stands between kids and material that has been deemed inappropriate for them is a few keystrokes and mouse clicks. And social media is no better.

Following Jesse’s challenge to the class of “if instagram cost $1/day to use, who would use it?”, I deleted the platform. At the time of writing this entry, I have been “off the sauce” for three weeks. My previous efforts to make social media a more productive space were hindered by SM’s “recommended accounts”, or suggested reels. While my culling of accounts I was following was productive in thinning the herd of crap content in favor of the feeds of my friends and those I wanted to keep up with, the “crap content” was replaced with similarly banal and vapid content – a good deal of which was promotional accounts for OnlyFans accounts. I had gone from being unable to see the posts of my social media friends through all of the “meme” accounts, to being inundated with “thirst traps”. My cultivated social media presence was no healthier than my uncultivated presence.

While Jesse’s cautioning of what is appropriate and sensible to post online is cogent, I myself have fallen prey to vicious cyberbullying my social media. While the content that I allowed to be immortalized online was unfavourable and inadvisable, it would have been prevented entirely if I hadn’t had a presence on social media. The main argument in defense of children having a social media presence is for them to participate “in the real world”, a world that has social media, and for them to be able to socialize with their peers and with folks they otherwise would not be able to engage with. My experience that I articulated above illustrates the problem with this position; that even a carefully cultivated social media presence is subject to the whims of its platform – and the people that become accessible are not always themselves. There is a degree of unkindness and disingenuousness that can come with the degree of  separation offered by a keyboard and screen. If the value of social media and an online presence is the socialization that it can offer, then I would argue that the same socialization can be found in other sources of community, like music or sports; or even in individually created text chains, group-chats, and invite-only forums.

Photo by MYKOLA OSMACHKO

The internet is not evil, in the same way that a knife is not evil; both are tools that seek to improve the quality of life of the user. The problem with social media however, is that you are so seldom the one holding the hilt.