In schools where students learn by doing authentic work, there’s an understandable desire to have them use “real world” tools. To build houses and stairways to nowhere, they’ll wield circular saws, hammers, and socket wrenches. To create robots, they’ll use soldering irons, wrestle with Arduinos, and code with Javascript. And to build brands, they’ll capture and design with digital cameras and Photoshop, and they’ll want to spread the word via social media platforms.

It’s certainly true that just as a hammer can extend the power and precision of your arm, social media has the capacity to amplify your voice–making it, in theory at least, a potentially useful tool. 

What ought the parameters be on social media use for purposes of school projects and clubs?

What follows is an exploration of the related opportunities and dangers, followed by a suggested process for developing those parameters to fit the specific needs of a group of students.

Tools Use as End and Means

Fundamentally, the skillful wielding of a tool imbues its user with a certain status and power. Hephaestus’s mythical blacksmith shop occupied a special designated area on Olympus. As both the user and creator of tools, and despite his physical deformity, Hephaestus was revered for his ability to forge objects that transcended the constraints of lived experience: thrones, weapons, and “life-like” tombs and statues.

For the Greeks, tools and weapons, being concrete, physical, and contextual, were precisely what enabled humans to accomplish things on earth and also steal glimpses into the ethereal and abstract world of the gods.

Isn’t it easy to see that something glorious and even transcendent inheres in the tableaux where a 5-year-old’s screws his face into pinched concentration while cutting construction paper with snub-nosed scissors? Or where a torch-bearing, gloved-and-masked sophomore girl fillet welds a joint under a shower of orange sparks?

But tools aren’t simply glorious in the moment of use. They enable the creation of beautiful, useful, and lasting artifacts such as paintings, robots, films, houses, podcasts, pacemakers, songs, chairs, and sculptures.

Tools allow humans to bend time and space to their will; they grant power to the disenfranchised; they connect us to the past and to the dreams for our future. The use of tools isn’t part of education, it’s education itself, and schools must organize themselves with this in mind, right?

Because what could possibly go wrong?

Our Tools Can Destroy Us

Lest we get too carried away with our images of tools-as-empowering, let’s remember that a circular saw can lob off several fingers or even a full hand. 

And as with so many dimensions of our western life nowadays, the dangers of our newest tools are less obvious and more abstract than self-amputation.

Let’s review a non-comprehensive list of the dangers of social media (sm, hereafter, with smp=social media platform), after first remarking that most teenagers believe these reasons to be ridiculous, incomprehensible, and anachronistic. Hearing these reasons, teens react the way birds^ would react if you tried to convince them not to fly. 

One can easily find plenty of critiques of sm, often right there in your Twitter or Facebook or Instagram feed*.

For teenagers, who are biologically wired to test boundaries and rebel, one of the most salient dangers for them is impulsively posting a photo or comment that surfaces later to do lasting damage to their reputation–the virtual equivalent to cutting off their fingers.

Kids who ask to use sm have a ready answer: “Thanks for the warning. I’ll be careful not to do that!”

But the thing is, a series of interconnected dangers of sm conspire to encourage everyone, especially the young and relatively voiceless, to be more provocative and mean, as Jaron Lanier’s been saying for at least the last ten years.

How exactly?

The brief gloss of anti-sm arguments below aren’t completely unique to Lanier, but he’s less shrill than most, and is also a reasonable, intelligent, dreadlocked, generous, whistle-blowing Silicon Valley insider. He wrote an unambiguously titled book on the subject: Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Now. Here are some highlights:

• smp’s privilege ephemera; due to volume and velocity, sm content disappears and is forgotten at the speed of scrolling
• smps capture information about you and use it in ways you wouldn’t approve of
• one of the ways smp’s use information is to feed you personalized content and ads designed to increase your engagement with the smp
• smps use punishments and rewards (likes, re-tweets, followers) as a way to situate all participants within a hierarchical structure and emotionally manipulate them:
• smps thereby coerce you into acting like a jerk or a Pollyanna–either way someone less authentic and free and more similar to the bots that populate smps
• as a consequence of certain facts about habit formation, this behavior seeps into your “regular” life and you risk becoming more of a jerk or overly nice person, again less authentic and free
• And, most discouragingly, smps encourage you to “share” all your ideas and photos for free, with the vast majority of the financial rewards accruing as economic rent to the owners of the smps 

In sum, Lanier argues that smps meta-physically reduce all users and he coins an inelegant acronym to describe how the smps combine emotional manipulation with grand-scale theft: BUMMER (“Behaviours of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent”)

It’s important to note that Lanier himself’s no Luddite, and his book includes some intriguing ideas about how to create social networks that will better serve participants and allow them to enjoy the benefits without the manipulation and soul-crushing economic rent extraction.

Whether or not you sympathize with this argument, again, know that most teenagers don’t. 

Many sound-thinking adults don’t believe Lanier’s correct about all this, but many do worry that he might be.

Norms for Engagement

Ultimately, young people will decide for themselves whether to delete their accounts or, if not, determine how to best navigate the sm landscape.

High school is the perfect place to allow students to try on hats and thereby emerge as adults who can think critically to make informed choices for themselves–according to their own lights and desires and personalities–in all sorts of domains.

So how might we mitigate the dangers and embrace some of the possibilities expressed in the vision of skillful-tool-use-as-mankind’s-apotheosis?  

Engage students interested in using smps to promote clubs and projects in dialogue around the following questions, ideally by asking them to present their responses to you, a fellow colleague, and an smp marketing professional:

• Audience: Who is the audience you are trying to reach? Be as specific as possible.
• Content: What content will you be sharing? How will you ensure the content is valuable to your audience and of high quality? (include examples if possible)
• Exemplars: What smp accounts provide a sense of the sort of online presence you intend to have? What is important to notice about how the accounts handle their digital presence?
• Interactions: What will be your guidelines for engaging with other users on smp’s? How will you respond to any negative comments? (include example responses if appropriate)
• Expertise: Who will do the posting and responding? What are their credentials? (for example: digital citizenship course during 20-21 school year)
• Reflection Checkpoints: When will you gather data to reflect on the efficacy of smp use, as well as the return on effort?

Essentially, these questions ask students to have a differentiated plan according to their circumstances and hopes, and be willing to “re-see” their own behavior. 

The re-seeing includes the aesthetic dimension: how do I look when I use my phone to scroll and share and revenge-post? And what have I created that will last? What have I forgone creating?

Even at the risk of bourgeois-Romanticization of the proletariat, isn’t it true that no amount of colorful and noisy marketing can make the act of tapping out a Facebook message as aesthetically powerful, grand, and human as the throwing of a pot or the able driving home of a nail?

At the very least, the deliberation and reflection on how to use smps, and why, may help sustain the idea that screen-free creation remains possible and maybe even desirable.

_______________________________________

^pace penguins and ostriches, and a few others

*it’s worth thinking about the word ”feed” for a minute.