Children need parents to understand TikTok, says author – 06/10/2023 – Education

There are two equally bad extremes when thinking about the relationship between children and teenagers with the internet.

In one of them, the romantic one, it is imagined that the youngest, who were born in a world dominated by technology, know everything about this universe, more than any adult. In the other, the alarmist, they are underestimated, considered completely vulnerable, easily manipulated.

Who wants to educate this generation for a healthy use of the media cannot be carried away by one or the other, but follow the middle path, defends the English researcher David Buckingham, 68, world reference in media education.

With his entire career dedicated to researching this topic, Buckingham has just launched, in Brazil, the book “Manifesto pela Educação Mediatica”. It is a translated version of the original work in English, from 2019, and added two texts by Brazilian journalists and researchers, Eugênio Bucci and Januária Cristina Alves.

The choice of the term “manifesto” to title the book addresses a central aspect: the defense that education for the media is urgent, a “basic prerequisite of contemporary citizenship”, as the author puts it. It should be a mandatory subject in schools, the object of consistent government programs, a priority for society.

But the book goes beyond raising a flag — it works as a guide for parents and educators, with simple tips on how to make children and young people capable of critically relating to the media.

And the path to this, let’s remember, is the middle one. “As an educator and as a parent, I noticed that, when we start talking to children about this topic, they often demonstrate a sophisticated capacity to understand some issues related to the use they make of the media”, says the author during the launch of the Brazilian edition. “Having said that, we have to avoid the other extreme, the risk of considering that the youngest, being digital natives, naturally know everything about the media”.

And what parents and researchers need to understand beyond this simplification “is what children and young people know and what they don’t know”. “There are elements of the larger context around technology that minors don’t necessarily understand very well,” she says.

“They may master the etiquette of online communication, social media or how to make TikTok videos. But what do they know about the companies that own those media? What sense do they have, for example, about how people’s data is being collected and how are they being used?”

This perspective helps build a dialogue between adults and younger people, he believes. “Yes, there are things that kids and teens know, and we need to give them credit for that,” he says. “But there are things they don’t know, and we adults need to identify what they are to establish dialogues and engage them in discussions.”

In the researcher’s assessment, it is not effective for parents and educators to “act like the police” in relation to the use that children and young people make of the media, pointing out what is right and wrong, just as it is simplistic to consider that media education only serves to protect from the dangers of the internet.

Educating for the media is to develop critical skills to understand the digital universe, and, for that, Buckingham argues that the theme should be in the curriculum of schools and teachers need to be trained.

It is something bigger, as he points out in an interview, than “just teaching to recognize fake news”. “And that term, fake news, by the way, I don’t even find it very useful”, she says, “because it presupposes that we can make simple distinctions between true and false, when the issue is much more complicated”.

For him, “media education covers the whole range of media that children and young people experience, and not just the news, which is often the main interest of adults”.

Another mistake, he points out, is to relate education and technology in an instrumental way, that is, to consider digital devices only as tools for learning. In simple words, media education is not putting a 3D printer in the school lab or using apps to correct essays. “It has nothing to do with educating through the media, using technology, but educating about the media”.

Of course, students can use media creatively, but in order to critically understand how they work. “My point is: if we are going to use the media as educational tools, we need to educate about how they represent the world, how they are central to politics, citizenship, economics, culture.”

The researcher defends a regulation of digital platforms, as proposed by the Fake News PL, in order to control the power of large technology companies. But he pointed out that “this task has been complicated in several countries, because technology advances quickly, and it is difficult to know when and where to intervene”. Media education is therefore as essential as regulation.

He believes that social networks are not the answer to violence in schools. “The media is not the main cause. There are many complicated causes, it is not a simple issue, and media education will not solve this problem.” Between thinking that social networks are hell or that they are totally beneficial for the youngest, Buckingham, again, opts for the middle path.

“We need to take a more balanced and nuanced view and, above all, listen to children and young people and respect their views on all this.”