ArgentinaThe fifth graders are still asleep. Ximena, the teacher of Social Networks and Transmedia Narratives for the Communications Bachelor's degree, talks about the transformations of networks and the differences with traditional media. It's early in the morning and they have a hard time paying attention. Then comes recess.
On the way back, the students enter the classroom with their eyes fixed on their cell phones. Ximena notices that they are excited and asks them why they are laughing. They are entertaining themselves with Tellonym, they explain, an app for carrying out anonymous challenges:
—For example, if Florencia would “give” Hernán. Then we upload the answers to the course Instagram.
Ximena takes advantage of the fervor to problematize the display of intimacy on social networks. A student, who does not usually participate in class, raises her hand and shouts:
—And what happens when a colleague posts on X that you are a whore?
On Friday, the same school celebrates its patron saint festivities. The teachers face the fifth-year students in a soccer match. The rest of the school, which has more than twenty classes, watches them. The teachers are winning the match and the kids run after the ball without much judgment while their classmates cheer them on from the sides of the field. The noise is deafening, but a conflict in the courtyard galleries steals the attention: a student, shouting, attacks a tutor. The students' reaction is immediate: they stop watching the match, run and approach the scene with their cell phones in hand. From a safe distance, they film the fight.
The debate on 21st century technologies and how to include the skills of the “digital age” in the classroom is arousing enthusiasm among specialists, but it is abstract for managers and teachers who face problematic situations due to the use of cell phones by children, adolescents and families at school. These are the practices that must be questioned in light of historical transformations that strain the authority of the school institution.
The debate on how to include 21st century technologies in the classroom is a source of excitement among specialists, but it is abstract for managers and teachers who face problematic situations every day.
Since 2018, several countries have restricted the use of cell phones in schools , whether at one or more levels: France, Greece, Italy, Finland, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, China, the United Kingdom, Ghana and Rwanda. Now, the City of Buenos Aires is moving forward with regulations governing the use of personal digital devices in educational establishments .
The challenge facing schools goes beyond devices. Platform notifications invade screens and are just the tip of a technical-economic plan that aims to capture users' lifetimes. The most important computer companies of contemporary capitalism lead this attempt at capture and have as exponents the fashionable multimillionaires: Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Larry Page or Galperín in these lands.
There can be no critical and reflective use of new technologies without first understanding the social and political effects of algorithmic functioning. School, which still has the privilege of hosting children and adolescents for seven hours from Monday to Friday, can be a space of dispute over the individualizing and commercial logics that are consolidated in the platformization of life.
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Today is a special day in the kindergarten: family visits are allowed as part of a series of activities and now it is time for body expression. The children run and dance. The kindergarten teacher takes her cell phone for a few seconds to add music to the choreography. At that moment, one of the mothers records the sequence and shares it on social media.
But this isn't just any mother. This is a dancer, the partner of a famous cumbia singer, with more than four hundred thousand followers on Instagram. The comments on the video attack the teacher for using her cell phone in the classroom: she is accused of neglecting the children. The school gets involved and asks the dancer to make a statement on social media that vindicates the teacher's work.
The challenge facing schools goes beyond devices. Platform notifications invade screens and are just the tip of a technical-economic plan that aims to capture users' lifetime.
The dancer's Instagram account can be accessed from her two daughters. At the top of the profiles, it says: "Account supervised by my mother."
The permanent publicity of life blurs the boundaries of schools. Schools have been in crisis for some time. First, it was their “interiors,” as Deleuze said for institutions of confinement in the 1990s. Now, the “exterior” travels in the pocket of each student, becomes embedded in their rituals and practices, and challenges their normative power. It is not just about social networks, but about a dispersion of practices that are intertwined with the subjectivity of children and adolescents on their smartphones : online betting, cryptocurrencies, various games, editing images and texts with artificial intelligence.
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The mass media that dominated the 20th century—newspapers, radio, television—followed the “one-to-many” model of broadcasting : a single transmitter to countless receivers, with identical content for each audience member. A mass audience sat in front of the television at the same time, watching the same newscast.
Teachers and school administrators grew up under this homogenizing experience. If you ask today's students how they get their information, the answer is not surprising: through social media. The informational function of the media has been replaced by smartphone screens.
Newspapers, radio and TV are still supposed to be decisive in shaping “public opinion.” But screens are restless and fickle. Notifications attract attention and content on platforms is personalized. The common experience of a mass audience consuming similar news is blurred by the algorithmic recommendations of social networks.
The “outside” travels in the pocket of every student and challenges the normative power of the school.
At the school gate, a fourth-grade student interrupts a conversation between a literature teacher and a history teacher. He greets them and makes a joke that questions the economic policy of the then Minister of Economy, Sergio Massa. The teachers, in confidence, invite him to argue. The teenager takes out his cell phone, extends his arm and responds with a journalist's Instagram reel . There is silence.
—And? —asks the literature teacher.
The student brings the cell phone even closer to the teachers' faces. He insists, with his gesture, that the truth is contained in that reel . Short videos with fast shots: in their reception, a certain vision of the world and the society in which one lives is consolidated.
It is necessary to ask whether there is such a thing as “public opinion” for a teenager today. The question also applies to adults who get their information from social networks. But today’s teenagers are born into social life as consumers of platforms. Their relationship with information is already personalized by algorithmic intervention. Platforms shape an individualized relationship with social and political events: how can we work in classrooms on the democratic values of plurality and diversity in the face of these singularizing modalities?
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The platformization of everyday life is an ongoing, expanding process that includes practices that go beyond social media: Google Maps reviews, MercadoLibre purchases, audiovisual and musical consumption on streaming platforms, traveling in Uber, requesting delivery through Rappi, sending a message on WhatsApp, completing tasks in Classroom, investing in MercadoPago.
At a round table in the library, six second-year students are looking closely at the statistics on their cellphone usage. This is an activity that interrupts the school routine: a workshop that the fifth-year students prepared for their second-year peers, organized by the Communication, Technology and Society Seminar course.
A fifth-grader takes the initiative and helps the younger students analyze the statistics. The goal is to transfer the information to a group poster that shows the sum of the weekly time spent on the most popular platforms. The smartphone of one member of the table replicates the usual in all groups: 17 hours and 16 minutes spent on Instagram in a week. If we add the 9 hours and 48 minutes of TikTok, we have more than a whole day of the week spent on social networks.
Teenagers are born into social life as consumers of platforms. Their relationship with information is already personalized by algorithmic intervention.
The workshop confirms what was expected: a significant portion of adolescent life is spent on platforms that create algorithmic mirrors of each of their users, whether they are students, family members or education workers. This mirror is fed back by interactions with the content shown: liking , commenting, sharing, chatting, but also rejecting, scrolling (going to other content) and viewing time. Every action on platforms is quantified, parameterized, recorded and transformed into data for the construction of profiles that fit the interests, tastes and opinions of users. Algorithmic predictions and recommendations are adjusted to these profiles so that the user remains on the platform for the longest time.
The equation is simple: more time, more data with which the algorithm refines its automated analysis to offer more effective content to capture the gaze. If the gaze is sustained, more advertisements are shown and the circuit of data production and analysis deepens. Children and adolescents have before them a mirror that reflects them in their individuality, spread across multiple areas of life: consumption, cultural tastes, fashions, emotional ties, political opinions. Platforms are not a neutral territory, much less the space in which “digital citizenship” is exercised. For students to better understand the world in which they live, it is necessary, on the contrary, to dismantle the mechanisms by which “the digital” operates.
This logic, when applied to consumption in general, implies a refinement of advertising and marketing techniques that are already a century old. But the algorithmic personalisation of information and political content makes it difficult to access world views that confront one's own inclinations. These preferences, furthermore, constitute platforms that reward explosive content, in virulent forms, due to its potential to incite reactions. Journalists, political and business leaders increasingly speak in X-like modalities: aggression, insults and mockery of those who do not think the same. This language, which has its maximum expression in trolling , is introduced into school links: WhatsApp stickers become a routine way of ridiculing those who are considered different.
In the classroom, the cell phone is a temptation: checking that new post from a friend on Instagram, the latest short from a favorite artist on YouTube, the trending video from X, the TikTok of the moment. In high school, the teacher competes, with his presence and his teaching methods, against the platformized distraction that flows through the classroom. He is in front of the students for a few hours a week. Algorithmic mirrors, on the other hand, know no time or institutional limits. They tend to blend in with life.
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A quick scan of the results offered by Google for the terms “social media” and “school” reveals: children escape from a school in Mar del Plata to complete a TikTok challenge: disappear from their homes for 48 hours; a school in North Carolina, United States, removes mirrors from bathrooms due to the time students spend filming themselves in front of them for that same platform; a second-year student in La Plata edits images of his classmates with artificial intelligence, so that they look naked, and spreads them on WhatsApp; rules so that teachers do not suffer reprisals for their use of social media. Disparate news that confirm a symptom of the times: the growing conflict between the exhibition of life on digital platforms and the school institution.
In secondary school, the teacher competes, with his presence and his teaching methods, against the platformized distraction that flows through the classroom.
In the 20th century, the boundaries between the public and the private governed everyday practices. Not everyone could enter a house, much less certain domestic environments, which were protected from the gaze of visitors. Today, these spaces are offered to the platformized gaze of others: bedrooms, bathrooms and living rooms parade in publications and stories on social networks. The intimate, the private and the public flow intertwined on platforms: where do each of these areas begin and end?
Fifth-grade students show pictures and videos of their high school graduation celebrations. A drunk classmate in a corner can't stand up on his last first day. Another shirtless classmate holds a smoke flare and sings wildly in a square. Videos of the party bus before the graduation trip. Unforgettable moments that are recorded and shown not only to friends but also to adults at school.
The Argentine communicator Paula Sibilia calls this phenomenon extimacy: an intimacy that is realized through its exhibition. The daily lives of “ordinary people” become a spectacle that is published and consumed on platforms. On social networks, novel rituals are formed that allow adolescents to give themselves a certain image of themselves and build their identity, subject to the confirmation of others through the reactions that the platforms offer for interaction. The presence of others on the screens pushes the desire to record one’s own life and spread it. Extimacy moves children and adolescents to perform acts that find their value in the likes and follows that they arouse on the platforms. The permanent evaluation that these relational modalities imply puts pressure on the subjectivity of students, who have at their disposal a mechanism of instant and spectacularized gratification – or punishment.
The dissolution of borders also affects education workers. It is not the same for teachers to have their social media profile closed or open to the public.
The dissolution of borders also affects education workers. It is not the same for teachers to have their social media profile closed or open to the public. The pandemic was a shock for teachers. Many had to show their own homes to students and it strained a generation that grew up under social parameters very different from those of their students. The lives of adults – their work, their love situation, their political thinking – are within reach of a search on Instagram or Google. But the damage is also within reach of a smartphone . A screenshot of a photo on Instagram is shared in the class WhatsApp group and is exposed to the comments and opinions of teenagers. If these comments are aggressive and come to the knowledge of the teacher, his integrity and authority in the class are damaged.
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The future has long since arrived at schools: technology is already incorporated into education at its various levels thanks to the platformized practices that children, adolescents, families and workers naturalize in their digital socialization.
Restricting cell phone use at all levels serves as a warning and contributes to improving teaching and learning conditions, but implementation cannot be left solely to schools. Every school context is part of the broader picture of an era that has the platformization of life as one of its salient features.
The annex accompanying the resolution of the City of Buenos Aires mentions risks and inappropriate uses of the devices. But the problem lies in the common and current use of the platforms that fill cell phones, both in families and students. In the face of these practices, “self-regulation” is promoted. Students are held responsible and the political-economic dimension that explains the dispersion of problems and individual sufferings linked to the platforms is forgotten.
The school, during the time it retains its students, has the opportunity to confront the individualized relationship with the world that platformization promotes. Restrictions on the use of cell phones for non-pedagogical purposes must be accompanied by training instances that put in the foreground what remains forbidden in the naturalized use – not deviant, nor risky, nor pathological – of platforms: the operation of capturing life time and its economic exploitation.
In the face of algorithmic logic, the school is a space open to interventions, proposals and the presence of others who recover the heterogeneity that constitutes every society, with its diverse and contradictory ways of experiencing the same historical time. This historical time.
It is the day of the Veteran and of the Fallen in the Malvinas War. All the fifth-year divisions, more than one hundred students, meet in the school theatre. A former combatant, dressed in fatigues, tells of his experiences. He is a tall, robust man with a dark complexion. He recalls his combat experience and talks about the dilemma of killing or dying in a war. He implies that he made a decision in the face of this dilemma.
In the room, only his voice can be heard. No teenager, at that moment, has the reflex to take out his cell phone.