I’ve been watching this debate bounce back and forth – sometimes on the side-lines, sometimes on the playing field. It’s important and it’s topical - people often have strong views about it. Like many debates you have to try to disentangle popular prejudice from clear thinking – consider this for example: you are on a long flight, and regrettably find yourself in the middle seat. The person to the left of you spends the time scrolling TikTok, the person to the right playing chess. Who spent the time better?
Chess is one of those things lionized by popular culture. Mr Spock plays a mean game of chess. But it’s not a terribly transferrable skill and so it is highly likely that – objectively speaking - the person scrolling TikTok learned a lot more, with far greater applicability, during the flight (even if all they watched were dancing and adverts).
But some of you now have an instinctive reaction. Let me guess how you will articulate it: ‘surely chess develops one’s deeper capabilities – for example our powers of concentration, or critical thinking capability?’ To which I might respond ‘is that opinion based on any evidence, or is it conjured up to justify how you feel?’. If young people live in a fast-switching digital world, isn’t that the capability they need?
We have all kinds of hidden feelings about what is ‘better’ and what is ‘worse’: for example we instinctively feel that reading a book is inherently better than watching videos of other people – even though reading and writing are profoundly unnatural practices, and watching other people is not. Equally we have tended to think that learning should involve people sitting and listening to information they aren’t much interested in, rather than moving around and trying things that they are.
For my own part, I like to learn by experimentation (as well as reading and observing). Having done a fair bit of experimentation with social media, this is what I think: social media platforms – especially platforms like TikTok – are the most powerful learning tools ever designed. They are successful precisely because they do what education fails to do: namely, they find out what people care about. The ‘addictiveness’ of learning on these platforms stems simply from their ability to figure out what matters to people, and feed them stuff that they care about.
But this is also problematic. Many people don’t think of social media as a ‘learning platform’ because they have this idea that learning should somehow be about forcing people to consume stuff they aren’t at all interested in (but which an Authority deems important). Setting this educational baggage aside, the issue is this: a teenager may be more interested in learning about celebrity gossip than budgeting, but it may well be that the latter ends up being more important in the future. Social media should solve the problem that education fails to solve: building new cares on top of existing ones. Taking people up the ladder, rather than digging them into a hole. But the commercial incentives underpinning social media tend towards feeding you more of what you like today, rather than developing your tastes for the future.
Secondly, social media relies heavily on self-moderation, otherwise you will waste a lot of time and absorb a lot of nonsense. This is also true in a library, by the way. It is perfectly possible to sit in the corner of a library reading rubbish. It’s just that social media is so much more enticing.
My own experience has been that social media has allowed me to access diverse perspectives, to have my views tested and challenged, to be informed by a huge faculty of world-class experts (all of whom seem happy to share away their expertise for free), to greatly increase serendipity in my life, and to make new friends who share my passions. All before breakfast. It has been immensely enriching.
So perhaps we should start recognising social media for what it is: the true face of learning, and help people to get the most out of it, because if they don’t take control of the algorithm, the algorithm will take control of them.