Social Media Versus Critical Thinking

It’s August, and I’m sitting on the beach in a sand chair. Thirty feet in front of me is a young woman, about fifteen. She’s wearing a bikini, sunglasses, and an August tan. And she’s taking multiple pictures of herself with her iphone. Holding it up, smiling, not smiling, coyly looking over her Ray Bans, trying to get herself in profile, maybe get a glimpse of the water or blue sky behind her. After each pose for the phone, her expression flattens and she examines the picture. She does it again and again from different angles or in different positions. Sometimes she takes five or six pictures in the same pose. I’ve read twenty pages, and she’s still at it.

I know what she’s doing, and it makes me sad. For her sake, I wish she got a shot she liked and could spend the energy doing something else: swimming in the actually warm New England water or playing Kadima with her younger brother. But instead it’s picture after picture after picture.

I guess her photography is about getting a perfect image she can post on Snapchat or Instagram. Or maybe she’s trying to create a new profile pic for her Facebook page. I appreciate her persistence and can even appreciate the craft of a selfie. She’s trying to get the light, her expression, the right angle of her body. She’s trying to make it look natural and show herself having fun at the beach. None of these goals feels wrong. Except it bothers me that she’s not happy with any of those pictures, and she has to take them again and again. How they come out and how she looks are more important than anything else.

What I am witnessing in this young woman’s efforts is a regular element of interaction for teenagers. In her mind, she is creating an image that will allow her to interact better with others. She’ll get more likes, create more interest, generate more hits, and she’ll be interacting with her peers in a meaningful way.  And if we asked her, she’d tell us that what she is doing is social. I imagine that for many young people today, this kind of online communicating dominates their experience of interaction. But ironically, I see her taking these pictures by herself. The primary emotion I experience as I watch her is sadness and pity, and she is missing the chance to have meaningful interactions with her family. If this photo posting is a form of interaction, to me it looks controlled, solitary, and overly self-aware. Her standards are impossibly high. There is no spontaneity, no attention to the present moment, no space for something unexpected.

I think about this young woman in her English class when school starts in a couple of weeks. Maybe twenty five students sitting in a circle, a teacher--maybe someone like me--trying to lead them in a shared inquiry discussion or a lesson using essential questions. Maybe she’ll go to math class where a teacher will give her a challenge problem, and she’ll have to work right there in the moment and collaborate with her peers to figure it out. And there isn’t one answer. Multiple viewpoints or solutions are possible. The students will have to talk to learn. They will have to put their ideas out there, not be afraid of being wrong, and use each other’s ideas to energize new thinking. I might call this learning in the moment. It’s an essential quality of critical thinking.

For critical thinking to happen in our classrooms, certain behaviors are required. Students must be able to negotiate, encounter and solve problems as they come up, and learn by listening and thinking in the moment. They have to be comfortable being wrong, having their interpretations challenged, and disagreeing with each other. They’re going to be asked to justify their choices, take risks, and be creative. They are going to have to be confident, sincere, and vocal. But if their experience of interacting with each other is filtered and controlled through a device--and they consider that exchange the normal experience--a classroom where critical thinking is a mode of learning is going to feel scary and even hostile. This student might shut down. She will feel like she can’t control how her contribution is experienced by her peers, and because that expectation--and its impossibly high standards-- has become a reality for her, her ability to learn from her own process of critical thinking will be crippled.

So, what can I do about it? Just the act of noticing what kind of interactions students have and create online is a start. That and helping students see a distinction between what kind of interactions they have online and live interactions in the world. They aren’t the same thing. I have to show students what I mean. I feel like we could talk about this phenomenon more constructively as a faculty and share observations and strategies. We need to scaffolded activities that reorient them with spontaneous interaction. Maybe it’s a little strong to say we need to teach them socialization behaviors? I’m curious to know what you think.

Thanks, Catie, for getting the conversation started.