How to offer young people a fair digital education, and prevent them from being manipulated by the giants of the net?

A carte blanche from Marthe Mahieu, former director of a secondary school.

The subject is on the agenda: the schools want to make a success of the “digital turn”, the Walloons want to make up for their delay by “digital training” (see our edition of September 18). Developing the “skills” of the population to master these machines and these procedures essential to life in society is essential.

But what does it mean to be “competent” in a digital civilization? The cited article targets technical (handling of tools) and economic (access to employment) skills. Where do we find the concern for citizen vigilance, ecological priorities, ethical challenges, which are not lacking in digital matters?

While there is a strong emphasis on philosophy and citizenship education, and awareness of the climate emergency, many do not seem to see how closely the way digital invades our daily lives are linked to these ecological, ethical and political questions.

A necessary sobriety

The energy consumption of computers, tablets and smartphones is gigantic. Ten percent of the world’s electricity, without counting enormous volumes of cooling water, is spent by Gafam servers, including those of Facebook installed, or rather hidden in particular in… Lapland. Shouldn’t we explain to young people that participating in the safeguard of our “common home” also implies showing sobriety in terms of digital consumption? For example: extend the lifespan of equipment, repair it, buy it second-hand, refuse “gadget” connected objects (such as the fridge which sends you an e-mail when you run out of tofu), turn off the devices. devices when not in use, protest against advertising video screens (350 kg of CO₂ per year) (1)?

Neither can we silence the conditions close to slavery which govern the extraction of rare minerals necessary for the manufacture of certain brands of devices, nor the large-scale tax evasion instituted for their benefit, nor the dehumanizing organization of underpaid work in use in large distance selling platforms such as Amazon or Zalando, also harmful by the multiple CO2-generating transports that they entail, further multiplied by the frequency of “free” returns (2 ).

A new model of civilization

But the worst is undoubtedly elsewhere, and few of us are aware of it: it is not the technique itself, nor its conditions of manufacture and use, but the logic of “surveillance capitalism” which models slyly, for twenty years, the outlines of a new model of civilization on a planetary scale.

The main wealth is migrating in information, including in the possession of personal data on the experience of people. Whenever we send e-mails, click on Facebook, or use “free” applications, we deliver to the private owners of the networks our information which is processed, stored and used, without any control, primarily to sell us. more and more things but also to influence political decisions, or to record our movements. All this without our knowledge and without our consent, with the sole aim of maximum profit. “You think you read your tablet, but it’s the one who reads you” …

We can no longer do without these tools, and if we must recognize the multiple social, didactic and cultural possibilities that they bring, we must know how certain suppliers are enriched, and fight to gradually regulate this operation by democratic laws. savage capitalist. We managed to do this in the twentieth century in large manufacturing industries thanks to social protection, and the European Court of Justice started to do it in 2014, banning the indefinite retention of private data and guaranteeing citizens the “right to information”. ‘oversight”.

What we’ll never read

But there is another more worrying aspect. Facebook changed its algorithm for sorting data on Facebook in 2018. Because if everyone can express themselves on the network, not everyone can read everything: the platform selects what it makes you read, in order to make you stay as long as possible online, which increases the advertising auctions! It is a personalized guidance of attention, and therefore of thought. The new algorithm favors information that matches your areas of interest, and especially information that is sensational, emotional, outrageous – girl killed by a dog, bridge collapsing, stabbing in the street, etc. – because that’s what keeps users online, more than the IPCC report or the advances in social justice. It is also what brings about feelings such as anger, hatred… We thus formatting people who are more and more moved, more and more indignant, and less and less capable of understanding and analyzing.

The responsibility of schools is crucial to prevent the population from submitting more and more, through social networks, to these injunctions which submerge reasoning, science and discernment under the most negative emotions. (3)

Isn’t this incompatible with the mission of the school, which goes against the grain to teach how to problematize things, take a step back, seek the truth and, more than ever, live in happy, dignified and intelligent sobriety? disdaining false needs?

If mastery of computer tools and preparation for the many professions that digital technology will develop in the years to come are highly desirable, is it not essential, in places of learning, to make students understand how the system works? unbridled salesperson who manipulates them without scruple? Should we not include in all training a reflection on the moderate use of tools, attention to their ecological footprint? And above all, information that allows them to remain free, to choose their future, without being unwittingly recruited into a society dominated by algorithms?

(1) “What is digital pollution?” Greenpeace. https://www.greenpeace.fr/la-

(2) “Digital Hell”, Guillaume Pitron, Les liens qui libéré, 2021.

(3) “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”, Shoshana Zuboff, Zulma, 2020.

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