Running head: POWERFUL DEVICES
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Powerful devices:
How teens’ smartphones disrupt power in the theatre, classroom and beyond
John M. Richardson
University of Calgary
"This is an Author's Original Manuscript of an article whose final and
definitive form, the Version of Record, has been published in Learning,
Media and Technology, December 19, 2013,
copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at:
http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17439884.2013.867867
Author Note
John M. Richardson, Faculty of Education, University of Calgary.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to John M.
Richardson, 199 Powell Avenue, Ottawa, Ontario, K1S 2A4, Canada. Contact:
[email protected], or 613.236.3340.
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Abstract
During a series of high school English and Drama class trips to the theatre, so many
students were online, the entire back row often glowed blue. Although much of the
literature suggests that information and communication technologies (ICTs) are benign
and neutral, this back row collision of digital and live culture signals to teachers that
technology is freighted with issues of power: questions of identity formation,
consumerism, autonomy and freedom. This qualitative study of high school students at
the conclusion of their four-play series suggests that cellphones shape the youth audience
experience, that etiquette regarding the use of these powerful devices remains sharply
contested, and that students apply a range of strategies to dealing with issues of power
and agency around their use.
Keywords: youth theatre audiences; cellphones; power; technology
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Powerful devices:
How teens’ smartphones disrupt power in the theatre, classroom and beyond
I teach English and drama at an independent school in Ottawa, Canada, and every
year my colleagues and I attend a series of four plays at the city’s National Arts Centre
(NAC) and Great Canadian Theatre Company (GCTC) with grade 11 Drama and grade
12 English students. A few years ago my students alerted me to the fact that so many
young people were online during our trips to the theatre, entire rows glowed blue
(Richardson, 2012, 2013). I was immediately fascinated by this mysterious and
subversive collision of digital and non-digital culture and struck by the power of the
students’ portable devices and the connections they enable. Although much of the
discourse surrounding technology in schools suggests that technology is benign and
neutral (Bonk, 2009; Prensky, 2006; Tapscott, 2008), critical scholars contend that
technology actually changes, undermines and creates power within the learning
environment (Philip & Garcia, 2013), making it crucial that “any academic account of
technology use in education needs to be framed in explicit terms of societal conflict over
the distribution of power” (Selwyn, 2012, 217). This appeared to be the case within my
particular learning environment, the theatre, and I ran a research study during our
2012/13 series to find out more. How do the smartphones tucked away in students’
pockets and backpacks affect the circulation of power within a theatre, and what do
teachers need to know about the effect of these powerful devices in order to better
prepare students for the pleasures of a 2,000 year-old tradition?
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1. Locations of struggle
There is no question that technology provides students and educators with a host
of valuable new opportunities. In theatre education, for example, sites such as Second
Life allow students to learn about theatre design in virtual environments (Kuksa &
Childs, 2010). But beyond the impressive possibilities lie deeper truths that should be
considered along with the benefits and virtues of new approaches, apps and devices:
technology is a crucial facet of the cultural struggle, formation and resistance that
characterizes education. This argument is made in forceful terms by Kincheloe (2011),
who notes that “childhood is a cultural construction shaped in the contemporary era by
the forces of this media-catalyzed techno-power” (160). This echoes the spirit of Freire,
who argued that “all data are shaped by the context and by the individuals that produced
them” (Kincheloe, McLaren, & Steinberg, 2012, 16).
Also critiquing neo-liberalism, Steinberg (2011) coins the term “kinderculture” to
encapsulate how “corporate children’s culture has replaced schooling as the producer of
the central curriculum” (13) and how “electronic kinderculture has quickly become a new
culture of childhood learning” (16). She challenges the “positivist” view of children,
which views “children as lesser than adults” and ignores “the way power operates to
oppress children around the axes of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, etc” (Steinberg,
2011, 5). The positivist epistemological position sees children as “passive entities who
must be made to submit to adult decisions about their lives” (Steinberg, 2011, 7). Instead,
she views the situation as more complex. Children can be exploited, but they also possess
agency, even as they can struggle to swim within the flood of information—much of it
designed for adults. Given that “power produces images of the world and the people who
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inhabit it that help make meaning for those who receive the images” (Steinberg, 2011,
47), it is important to understand how media experiences “filter and construct our view of
the world and ourselves and whose interests they serve” (Steinberg, 2011, 35).
Also approaching the question of young people and technology from the point of
view of critical pedagogy is Giroux (1994), who reminds us that “teachers always work
and speak within historically and socially determined relations of power” (1). To act as
though technology is nothing but a facilitator of information exchange is to acquiesce to
its hidden agenda. Not that the landscape is unchanging: as cyberspace works to
“condense time and space into what Paul Virilio calls ‘speed space,’ new desires, modes
of association, and forms of resistance inscribe themselves into diverse spheres of popular
culture” (Giroux, 1994, 10). Educators need to understand what is going on in students’
lives—including the theatre—so as to be able to “critically analyze the new electronic
technologies that are shaping everyday life” (Giroux, 2006, 4) during this “second media
age … that fuses technology, power, and human relations in new ways (Giroux, 2006, 6).
2. Technology and consumerism
One of the “fusions” evoked by the teen with the cell at the play is consumerism.
This, declares Giroux (2006), “now seems to be the only obligation of citizenship and
civic responsibility” (15). Whether at home, in the theatre, or in the classroom, “youth
now inhabit a cultural landscape in which, increasingly, they can only recognize
themselves in terms preferred by the market” (Giroux & Pollock, 2011, 2). They have
been raised to operate within a “culture of commodification” (Giroux & Pollock, 2011,
1). They may “believe themselves immune to the incessant call to ‘buy, buy, buy’ and to
think only about ‘me, me, me’, but what is actually happening is a selective elimination
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and reordering of the possible modes of political, social and ethical vocabularies made
available to youth” (Giroux & Pollock, 2011, 5).
A key work in the study of how young people operate within this highly
commercialized environment is Kenway and Bullen’s Consuming Children (2001). The
authors disagree with “developmentalism”—the view that childhood “involves a linear
progression from the simple to the complex and from the irrational to the rational”
(Kenway & Bullen, 2001, 3). Instead, they see contemporary times as characterized by a
collapse in traditional “demarcations between education, entertainment and advertising”
(Kenway & Bullen, 2001, 3) and a blurring of the lines between the generations. They
also recognize that in Fordist economies, market activity generally involved consumer
staples such as food and clothing, whereas in post-Fordist times they involve cultural
technologies and services. Teens with technology fall squarely within this contemporary
paradigm, purchasing devices and services, and downloading apps, music and movies.
The time when schools “tried to maintain a commercial-free zone or sacred space for
young people” (Kenway & Bullen, 2001, 102) has passed. The diffusion of technology
through the schools by major corporations has blurred the line between education,
corporate profit and teen consumer culture. Kids texting in the theatre—or checking
Facebook in the academic setting (Selwyn, 2009)—are the perfect embodiment of “the
current hybridization of entertainment, advertising and education” (Kenway & Bullen,
2001, 23). Technology in and out of the classroom contributes to student’s exposure to
advertising, which Christopher Lasch in his book The Culture of Narcissism (1991)
contends:
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… manufactures a product of its own: the consumer, perpetually
unsatisfied, restless, anxious, and bored. Advertising serves not so much to
advertise products as to promote consumption as a way of life. It ‘educates’ the
masses into an unappeasable appetite not only for goods but also for new
experiences and personal fulfillment. It upholds consumption as the answer to the
age-old discontents of loneliness, sickness, weariness, lack of sexual satisfaction
… it creates new forms of unhappiness—personal insecurity, status anxiety (72).
The student in the theatre continues to be exposed to commercialism through their use of
the smartphone, any attempt by teachers to shape identity through exposure to theatre
undermined through the students’ exposure to commercial web-sites. One form of
identity formation is pitted against another, since “brands are inextricably tied to young
people’s identity-building” (Kenway & Bullen, 2001, 170). All of this makes it crucial
that educators teach students “to understand the differences between data, information,
knowledge, education, entertainment and advertising. But can the marketized school tell
the difference?” (Kenway & Bullen, 2001, 188).
Other scholars are also concerned with the ways in which the consumption ethos
is implicit in the use of computers in the theatre and classroom. Denzin (2010) argues that
“the information technologies of late capitalism function to create audiences who use the
income from their own labor to buy the products that their labor produces” (285). The
student in the theatre audience is at once a media audience and a technology audience,
watching a play while at some level exposed to online advertising. Sandlin and McLaren
(2010) argue that education is itself a form of consumption, with in-school ads,
consumerism-oriented courses, and of course brand name technological devices. Its most
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important contribution “is creating a peer group of teens who relate through brand names
and consumerism-oriented activities” (McLaren, 2010, xix). The scholars urge teachers to
take consumerism seriously by adopting “a critical pedagogy of consumption” that would
ask “‘What kind of consumers are being created?’ and ‘In whose interests do those
constructions work?’” (Sandlin & McLaren, 2010b). Usher (2010) refers to Baudrillard
and his “code of consumativity,” which “marks a ceaseless movement such that the
consumption image is never satisfied—there is always a lack, an endless desire to possess
the real but where there is no real, only its image or simulacra” (as cited in Usher, 2010,
39). One only has to think of the advertising that surrounds much technology—the cool
individuals, the marriage of tech to pop, the modernist designs and the bright colours—to
see the appeal of modern devices. By using the devices in the TELE, students are tacitly
encouraged to buy their own. After all, if schools have invested in the technology, isn’t
the technology by default good?
3. Technology and surveillance
The texting theatre teen is also emblematic of another form of circulating,
consumerist power. By using his or her device instead of watching a play, the watcher is
watched—in this case by the corporations that control vast swathes of the Internet. Fuchs
(2012) notes that for Marx “surveillance was a fundamental aspect of the capitalist
economy” (370) and today, “corporations conduct a systematic gathering of data about
applicants, employees, the labour process, private property, consumers and competitors”
(Fuchs, 2012, 43) in order to maximize profits. Nowhere is that more prevalent than in
the world of Web 2.0. Here, the work of Andrejevic (2009; 2012a) is key to
understanding the ways in which information secretly circulates. Every action that a
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prosumer makes on the Internet is “a reflexively redoubled one. Acts of production and
consumption both become, in this regard, productive, insofar as they generate
information commodities” (Andrejevic, 2012a, 84). In other words, every keystroke—
every Facebook post, Google search and text—is compiled in databases and becomes
another means for the corporation to make money by selling information and shaping
behaviour. This raises the prospect that “consumers will be put to work marketing to
themselves, and, through this extra work, generate a customized product for which they
are required to pay a premium” (Andrejevic, 2012a, 73). Individual control over how one
is positioned within the data mines is difficult to achieve: “the complexity of the
algorithms makes it impossible to discern why one has been turned down for a loan, or is
targeted by a particular political party” (Andrejevic, 2012a, 86). Besides, the “liquidity of
today’s surveillance” (Trottier & Lyon, 2012, 92)—seen in the constantly changing
privacy rules on Facebook, for example, the rise and fall of tech tools, or the expansion of
Google into new business areas—keep prosumers in the dark.
Going even further in his latest work, Andrejevic (2012b) writes that
consumerism has so saturated the environment that marketers are now using neuroscience
to aim their messages directly at the brain’s subconscious receptors. From this point of
view, consumers such as the kids in the back row of the theatre are now no longer seen as
people, but “bundles of nerve centres that respond to different kinds of stimuli and form
triggerable pathways as a result” (Andrejevic, 2012b, 206). The goal is to reach the
unconscious consumer, the truest self, “the part us of that yields up the truth of our
desires more accurately and objectively than consciously articulated thoughts or
psychological interpretations” (Andrejevic, 2012b, 206), and ultimately to locate the
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brain’s “buy button”—the area that, when stimulated, leads to the increased likelihood of
a consumer reaching into his or her wallet.
4. The study
For this year’s theatre series, my students and I first attended a filmed version of
the National Theatre’s The Last of the Haussmans, an emotionally-charged family drama
broadcast live from London. This was followed by The Number 14, GCTC’s commedia-
del-arte-inspired play set on a bus. The NAC’s Metamorphoses, a retelling of Greek myth
set in a swimming pool, followed. Our season concluded with The Edward Curtis
Project, GCTC’s multi-media enhanced play about the famous photographer of First
Nations peoples. The number of students who attended each performance ranged from
100 to 140 students. At the end of the series and with the help of research assistants, I ran
a series of eight focus groups and interviews with students that lasted between 45 minutes
and two hours. I also sent all of the students an anonymous Google Docs survey on their
responses to the plays and their thoughts about live theatre and technology. A second
survey two weeks later picked up on some of the students’ ideas in order to probe more
deeply. Seventy-five students answered the first survey and 61 answered the second, with
the written responses together yielding over 50,000 words of commentary. For the
purpose of this article, I will analyse the interview responses of Oscar, Bridget and Sean
(all pseudonyms). Oscar was an 18 year-old student about to take a gap year before
starting university. He had limited exposure to theatre prior to the series. Bridget and
Sean, who were interviewed together, were also 18 year-old, pre-university students, but
the friends both came from theatre-going families and could draw on an impressive range
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of theatre experiences. The students’ responses will be supported by written responses
from both of the surveys.
The survey data and interview transcripts were analysed according to the
qualitative research methods described by Miles, Huberman and Saldaña (2014) and
Saldaña (2013), a method that sees qualitative research as a process of data condensation,
data display, and conclusion drawing/verification (Miles et al., 2014, 12). The combined
research method of open-ended survey, focus groups and interviews was employed in
order to provide a number of affordances. The online survey reached a large number of
students, and by allowing students to write their responses anonymously, a broad range of
frank, in-depth commentary emerged (Creswell, 2008, 228). The quality of the writing
was generally high, suggesting that students valued the opportunity to reflect as they
wrote. The use of focus groups and in-depth interviews has a long and established history
in qualitative research, and in media and audience studies in particular (Creswell, 2007;
Kamberelis and Dimitriadis, 2005; Morley, 2003; Radway, 1991), allowing students to
share, articulate and build upon their ideas and experiences.
5. Results
Concerning issues of power and technology in the theatre, three of the most
compelling findings to emerge from the study are:
• Smartphones and other ICTs are a powerful force in shaping students’
experience of live theatre.
• Rules and etiquette around the use of cellphones in the theatre are sharply
contested amongst students.
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• Students tend to be aware of some of the issues of power and control
surrounding their mobile devices, but most feel that they possess the skills to
mitigate any negative consequences.
5.1 How technology shapes students’ experiences of live theatre
In person and on-line responses were unanimous in their belief that ICTs have an
effect on student experiences of live theatre – even if the student’s cellphone remains
switched off during the actual play. For Oscar, digital technology has given young people
the expectation that they will have control over whatever they watch or do during their
leisure time:
Spending a night on your laptop, you are in control of everything you’re doing …
you can pause and switch activities at any time, or you can stop whenever you like.
This control does not exist in the theatre, as once you go to a play you are there for
the duration.
Oscar likes the theatre and welcomes the opportunity to try something new, so “the
duration” for him isn’t a problem. But for other students it can be more of a challenge.
The freedom that they associate with technology makes live theatre an anomaly within
their fast-paced, digitally-focused lifestyles. Bridget compared being in the theatre to
being locked into a car on a rollercoaster:
You can pause something online, you can eat dinner, it can be an 8-hour process to
watch one movie. Whereas in a play you’re stationary, you are sitting there and you
are watching and listening and they are captivating your attention, or they’re not so
your mind is wandering. When you’re in a play you’re kind of locked in it, like
you’re on a rollercoaster.
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The contrast students feel between the fluidity of their digital lives and the static nature of
spending a few hours sitting in the theatre is often seen to affect negatively their powers
of concentration. Bridget saw theatre as serving a useful purpose in the hyper-speed
world of instant connectivity, a way to “forget about the outside world”, although she felt
that “it’s harder to focus on one thing now because you could be doing so many things at
the same time”. Online respondents overwhelming agreed that the contrast between
online activities and live theatre is highly problematic:
With our busy, fast-paced, electronically driven lives it becomes excessively
difficult to sit through a live performance. Constantly being “plugged in”, the
disconnect can be dull and slow. This is something our minds aren’t used to, putting
us in a state of mind that is not calm enough to give live theatre our full attention.
Others are even more direct. “I think my daily and digital lifestyle has shortened my
attention space quite a bit, and made attending live theatre seem much longer and less
interesting than it really is”, wrote one. “I am used to begin able to pause what I am
watching, get a snack, go on Facebook, and then return when I feel like it.” “I was
waiting for the play to end so I could use my phone or get home and use my laptop”,
wrote another. But other students are unable or unwilling to wait, which has made the
theatre a site of debate around cellphone etiquette. “When you know the play's not going
to get better, that’s when you give up and you check your phone”, responded one student.
“I fought for ages, and I couldn’t do it.”
5.2 Cellphone etiquette in the theatre
Amongst the online student respondents, two evenly sized camps emerged: those
who believed that the temptation to check a smartphone during a play is too great to be
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resisted, and those who believed that to do so is the height of bad manners. Oscar took a
strong position on the anti-cellphone side, reflecting very clearly the schism within his
generation of digital natives:
Whenever I am at a theater performance … and I see another audience member pull
out a phone, it is very annoying for me. I think it's completely disrespectful … You
are there to witness the live theatre performance. You are not there to find out what
is happening online. If you want to do that, stay home. Don't come to the theatre
and distract other audience members with your annoying little glow from your
screen.
On-line respondents can be equally impassioned over the breach in etiquette a
smartphone in the theatre represents, concerned that the blue glow will draw attention
away from the stage, distract viewers, and show disrespect toward the actors:
I did not activate my phone during any of the performances. I believe that would
be disrespectful and unbelievably irritating for the performers and the people
surrounding you.
I do not use my cellphone in plays because I do not think it is fair for the actors or
the other people watching because it is distracting and disrespectful.
No that would be disrespectful and if you can’t focus for two hours on one thing
you should go get hit by a bus right now.
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Bridget is also adamant in her rejection of in-theatre cellphone use, even though she
multi-tasks online when watching TV or accomplishing other tasks:
Bridget: Nine times out of ten I’m playing “Bejeweled Blitz” or I’m playing
“Ruzzle”, which is kind of like “Boggle”, I’m playing that on my phone all the time
when I’m watching Criminal Minds. I don’t see half the things because I’m not
paying attention which is a habit I can’t seem to break.
Speaker 1: But the theater’s different?
Tori: Yes, I’m not going to pull out my phone in a theater and ruin the
experience for someone else. That’s just rude.
Speaker 1: Looking around do you see other people checking …?
Tori: Yes. I mean you’re kind of committed to being there with everyone else.
You’re not in your room. It’s such a pet peeve of mine. It’s so rude. That one bright
screen in the whole theater; everyone sees it. I hate it. It’s so annoying.
Her interview partner, Sean, agreed, with the caveat that “If it’s a good play, you don’t
want to check it. You don’t really care. But if it’s a bad play …” The play has to be good,
the friends agree, or else the attitude quickly becomes, “it’s there, so why don’t I check
it?” Continuing, Bridget added:
If it’s a really great musical, I don’t want to miss a second whereas the second it
gets slow you know people are thinking, ‘Hey, I wonder if my friend texted me or I
wonder if I got an email from my boss’ … I think that is the criteria these days.
The “criteria” – whether a play is good enough to keep people off their devices – is an
important new element to the theatre experience. The performers on stage are working
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against the audience members’ temptation to check their devices at all times, their power
diminished. When the play is going well, the theatre remains in the dark. If it isn’t so
successful, the darkness can be shot through with glowing blue screens.
Students who chose to use their devices during the play ranged from furtive time
checkers, to message-viewers, to Facebook-updaters, to music-listeners, and to full-on
Internet-surfers. “I was texting and on Facebook at some point during all of the plays,”
wrote one. “As the plays weren't of my choosing, the themes didn't always engage me
and pull me in … those two activities have become a kind of reflex when I’m a little bit
bored.” Other students were more pithy in their responses. Did they check their
smartphones during the show?
Not for long, but probably a dozen times depending on if the play was boring or
not.
For a good part of all the plays.
Yes i did. i was texting the entire time
YES! frequently during the plays and replying to all of my messages.
Three times every hour.
For the users, the customs of theatre-going appear to be a quaint anachronism. If the play
seems uninteresting, the need for distraction and stimulation reigns paramount, and the
cellphone imperative seems natural. “I did check my phone”, one student admitted
casually, “if only to play Sudoku.”
5.3 Awareness of issues of power and control
The draw of technology, even during a live play, is only one of the manifestations
of the power of tech, although it is one that students are aware of and engaged with. Some
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students focused entirely on the practical benefits of social media sites, unaware or
nonplussed by any of the possible negative consequences concerning power. One student,
for example, wrote simply “I use social media because it is an easy way to keep in touch
with people and not pay any extra fees you would on a phone bill.” Here, cost benefits are
touted, and the view of social media lies uncomplicated by larger and more troubling
issues. Others are similarly unperturbed by any downside to their digital lives:
I do not like controlling or being controlled so I do not let that happen.
The sites are just a part of my life that help me connect to other people.
I feel that I have full control over what I do online on social media.
In many other cases, however, a range of concerns emerged. Oscar reflected on his final
year of high school with candor. Recalling his struggles with low motivation, he said:
I waste a lot of time on the computer. I do things such as play games, listen to
music, check what other people are doing on Facebook. Pretty much anything
imaginable to waste time, so much so that some nights I'm not even sure what else I
could do on my computer. All I know is that I am not going to get off.
Here, I was struck by Oscar’s tone of regret, even helplessness. Other students echoed the
concern that technology can become like an addiction. Social media, one student wrote:
has the power to make you become addicted to these activities, you tend to check
your social media sites a few times a day then many more times until it becomes an
addiction.
This constant need to check status updates permeates the live theatre experience and
students suggest it is one of the reasons for the blue glow from the back row.
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Other student expressed concerns regarding the lack of control around personal
information and offered a range of responses to dealing with the hazards. One, for
example, showed a broad understanding of risk, not to do with loss of privacy, but of
social exclusion:
I know that I have control over what I show the world about myself and I can use
that control to my advantage. However … now that social media has become so
embedded into almost everyone's daily routine I feel as though if I did for some
reason want to disengage from that virtual world I would be judged and get left
behind.
In this teen’s view, social media use has become such an essential part of social life, kids
have no choice but to participate. The “advantage” mentioned by the student, however,
shows that the student feels as though he/she has confidence in their ability to play the
social media game successfully. In other cases, a tone of alarm creeps into the writing:
Facebook scares me a little because it holds all of this information on me that could
be used anywhere at anytime. All of my photos and what not are out there and
could be seen by anyone! However, I do not put anything inappropriate that I would
not want anyone to see.
The student felt that people are able to maintain some control over the risks involved, in
this case by monitoring and censoring what they post, even if the risks posed by what
other people might post is overlooked. The fact that corporations often change their
privacy policies was also a concern, as keeping on top of one’s consumer rights is seen to
be very difficult:
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I definitely feel controlled by Facebook, I feel like it is no longer a place to connect
with friends and family but rather a data base of personal information, and it is
constantly being updated and changed which shows that the only thing the company
is interested in is profit and improvements.
Other students felt even more strongly about the risks of the social media endeavours:
Anything you say can be used against you and can be used to ruin your life in the
future. This is especially true in the accessibility of photography on the internet and
that if a photo is taken of you it will never truly come down from the internet. It can
always be found in some random place and if it is inappropriate it can be used to
ruin your future or your present life.
Many feel that they can mitigate risk by keeping their audience in mind at all times:
More and more adults, including parents, teachers, and employers, are
beginning to use social media sites, and many have access to the accounts of
younger people. Your audience is no longer just your friends.
Others understand that an audience cannot be so neatly controlled, and so use chat
features to circumvent the risk of being seen by everyone:
When everyone can see what I'm posting, I take more care so as to make sure that it
is appropriate. However, there is also a 'chat' part of Facebook where you can talk
to one person individually. When using this function, I just say whatever I want
knowing that my audience is the one friend on the other side of the chat.
The attempt to maintain control of the social media setting can sometimes lead to extreme
measures. Some discussed how they would frequently quit Facebook in disgust at the
goings-on and the lack of control, only to keep coming back because they could not live
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without the social updates, or else they conclude that pictures of themselves are being
posted anyway so they had better join to keep up with how they are being presented by
others:
I don't like Facebook. I've tried to delete it about six times … Also the privacy aspect of
Facebook is so shocking that I don't want to put any of my personal material on it at all.
That's why I deleted my Instagram as well.
One student offered a strategy less extreme than quitting, but dramatic in its own way:
I plan on deleting most people once I am in university. “Friend cleanses” are very
popular, where high-school graduates delete those that they are positive they will
never see in their life again.
6. Discussion and conclusion
Although it is tempting to view technology as a neutral means to an end, scholars
in the field of critical pedagogy see schools as sites of conflict between competing
expressions and discourses of power, and the role of the teacher as key in helping to
educate students on how they can navigate a complex and potentially dehumanizing
environment. This environment can include consumerism, the tracking and manipulation
of online behaviour, and even the attempt to control and exploit psychological processes
and through that, the identity formation of young people. All of this suggests that “crucial
questions need to be asked (and hopefully answered) of how digital technologies
(re)produce social relations and in whose interests they serve” (Selwyn, 2012, 219).
Although these complex issues can often be hidden, one place that they can be discerned
is in the theatre during a school trip to see a live play. In the blue glow from the back row
is a manifestation of the conflicts swirling around teens and their portable devices. Here,
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power shifts from the performer to the viewer and the student’s focus moves from the
physical space of the theatre to cyberspace, from the drama on-stage to the drama on-line.
One kind of consumerism associated with high culture is replaced by another, associated
with devices, data, and commercialism. The ability of high culture to command attention,
and by the theatre to command respect, is challenged by the multifarious aspects of life
online: the gossip, the news, the friends, the shopping, the ongoing self-presentation, the
sex.
The student comments in this study confirm that cellphones are a powerful force
in shaping students’ experience of live theatre, either constantly tempting them to check
out of the theatre space to go online, or shaping their overall expectation around speed
and control. As in other aspects of life, etiquette around the use of these powerful devices
continues to evolve, with a roughly equal number of students either adamantly opposed to
cellphone use in the theatre out of respect for the other audience members and the actors,
or happy to give in to the temptation to text, update, surf and chat. Student awareness of
issues of privacy and control are similarly mixed, ranging from a total lack of awareness,
to hubristic denial, to smart self-editing, although many of the larger and most troubling
issues, such as those discussed by Andrejevic, are not on students’ radars. Whatever
qualms a student may feel about their lack of privacy online, it is often outweighed by the
imperative to be on-line: to find out what’s happening, to present an image, to know how
one is being viewed by others. This imperative eclipses other concerns, even during a live
play.
It is into these gaps of understanding that the teacher can step; there is no shortage
of issues to discuss, explore and navigate with students. How important is the liveness of
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theatre? How do our digital lives affect our experience of being human? What role can
live theatre have in allowing us to assert our fragile humanity? Why do we check our
smartphones during a trip the theatre—what is the source of their power, and what does it
say about our own power as individuals? What does it mean to pay attention? In the era
of constant connectivity and neuro-marketing, the need for sophisticated and well-
informed guidance by teachers is pressing. Within the Internet era they emerge as cultural
workers, or perhaps warriors, at the forefront of attempts to confront and mitigate the
powerful forces embodied within ICTs, powers that aim to reduce, narrow and refine the
terms of teenage life according to the needs of neo-liberalism.
(Word count: 5, 700)
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