Stop calling kids digital natives
Digital literacy is pointless without a digital upbringing to establish norms. Kids need adult guidance when learning to use technology.
Katrine Pedersen is Head of Education at Arken Museum for Modern Art. There, where she runs the Art & Tech Lab. Here, you can experiment with technology through the perspective of art as discussed in the first part of our interview.
“I never saw myself at a museum, but when I found out that they had been working with technology for many years, with the value perspectives and the relation between art and technology in general, it piqued my interest,” she says.
The interdisciplinary educational approach at Arken, based on human relations, turned out to be a perfect match for Katrine Pedersen. She had focused her career in arts and cultural communication on understanding mediated human relations ever since she was a student of rhetoric.
“I was interested in how we build relations through language and how we build relations to the time we live in. And from there it was natural for me to focus on communications technology. Especially smart technologies, smartphones and all the platforms we interact on, have in a lot of ways transformed the ways in which we build relations with each other,” she says.
Adults have failed younger generations
Her research on digital culture among children and young people has resulted in several books. The most recent is De Digitalt Udsatte, the digitally exposed. On the front page, the Danish word for native, ‘indfødte’, has been crossed out to be replaced with the word for exposed. In the book, she argues that adults have failed younger generations by exposing them to influences out of societal control.
“I was looking at the digital culture of children and youth. The reason I focus on this demographic is not because I have a professional background working with children. It’s the change that has happened in media development where all of a sudden they are direct consumers. Where before they had their parents to hold their hands, they are now in shopping mode the minute they start swiping their way through the digital universe. And from this perspective we suddenly have corporations at eye level with toddlers but no regulation from society, no addressing whether it’s a form of marketing that we think is okay,” she says.
By calling whole generations ‘digital natives’ and not holding their hands as they learn to use new technologies, argues Katrine Pedersen, we have relinquished our responsibility as adults. We need to instill norms and values for how to act and not to act and acculturating young people to a digital world.
“When you actually speak with the children, which I found in my research that unfortunately not a lot of people do, you find out that they don’t actually know what they’re doing. They don’t know how technology works and what to be on guard against. They don’t understand the phenomenon of big data and what an algorithm is. They don’t get the complexity around it, like so many adults don’t either,” she says.
Digital literacy needs a strategy
While there is a persistent call for increasing digital literacy, Katrine Pedersen says, this is not enough to solve the problems faced by young people in the digital world.
“The problem is that we, as a society, at least in Denmark, talk about digital literacy but we have skipped the important part that is digital upbringing, that is values and norms. Also as a society we haven’t talked about what we want out of this technology before we implemented it,” she says.
As an example, she mentions the policy in Denmark where daycare centers are mandated to have iPads, but where there is no strategy for how to use them pedagogically.
But not all is lost, she concedes. While interviewing young people around Denmark, she found that, at least among teenagers, they see though the social fiction of calling online platform ‘communities’ and act accordingly.
“Young people don’t see social media as communities. They see it as an audience structure, which it also is. So they’ve decoded it, but they had to go the long, hard road where they had to learn it by themselves. They have gotten that it might not be the best place to hang out with their friends, except when playing by the those rules, so they move out into smaller, closed fora or slightly bigger communities of interest,” she says.
And the difference is stark, she points out, between the commercial spaces of online platforms and the spaces that instill cultural values and social norms, such as a typical Danish elementary school where inclusion and learning to embrace diversity is a key goal.
“But if you compare to a medium like Instagram, the totally opposite is happening. Here the setting dictates an exclusion. You’re not able to use the rules and values you learned somewhere else because it’s a commercial structure that in the end is about making us stay just a little longer like in a shopping mall. And there are only certain things that fit the shelves of that mall,” says Katrine Pedersen.
