While the Internet has become their media of choice, young people do not know how to interpret digital content. The training of e-citizens is only beginning.
At the Taninges school in Haute-Savoie, CM2 students take an oath on the head of their mouse before opening an Internet page. They swear to put on their “hoaxbuster” costume, intoxicating hunter, to equip themselves with their sharp minds during this navigation. On each digital content, they will investigate: source, date, origin, intention… One thing is certain, to these ten-year-old students, we do not do it backwards.
E-citizens
It was a primary school teacher, Rose-Marie Farinella, who had the idea for these digital criticism workshops. She herself received “an increasing number of hoaxes” and she asked herself: how are very young people doing in the face of this flow of false information? It was not just a question of truthfulness or manipulation of the facts. In the anarchic world of the Internet, young people are quite helpless in the face of the violence of certain ideas, images and words. “The parents of students expressed to me their dismay at the aggressive exchanges on social networks”, explains the one who wants to create an awareness of “e-citizen” as soon as possible.
“They are already both consumers and producers of information; I teach them that they are responsible for what they share, ”she continues. Launched in 2014, its eight-session method is now well established: first, recognize real information, identify reliable sources and testimonies, legal sites. Then, dissect the mechanics of “hoax”, the manipulation of images and captions. Use its range of tools: Google Map, Google Image, TinEye, StreetView … Finally, understand: why did you sow the seeds on the Web? By negligence, by malice? But, then how to react?
“I taught them a strategy, which they can apply whenever they are faced with digital content.” A strategy which, in fact, is lacking by many, and even more so among pre-adolescents. During their journey, the apprentice “Web detectives” produced a fake hoax-laden with “Les infaux du Haut Griffe”, which they presented to students in other classes. Almost all of them have fallen for the trap. For Rose-Marie Farinella, “young people must be trained before they enter adolescence, before they allow themselves to be tempted by seductive speeches”.
Conspiracy
A few hundred kilometers away, at the Picasso college in Montesson (Yvelines), we are working on these “seductive speeches”. Students of 3e have an original educational sequence: conspiracy theory. Together, they unravel the rhetoric and the scenography of these speeches which abound on the Internet and cause excesses. “It’s a way like any other to inspire a critical mind and to be wary of bad information, in their most caricatured form when it comes to conspiracies”, explains Lionel Vighier.
This literary teacher chose to reveal to his students the workings of these theories instead of dismantling them together – he would have been unable to do so. How to prove that Mickael Jackson is not dead, that the American government did not sponsor September 11, nor the French authorities did not order Charlie Hebdo?
So Lionel Vighier makes the occult visible. The keys to conspiratorial, sluggish and Manichean reasoning, its recurring vocabulary (“As if by chance …”), the deliberately aggressive tone, controversy, the detective writing and the dramatic setting. “We are discussing the use of these plots in the service of multiple ideologies – jihadists, nationalists, politicians, Scientologists, religious…”, says Lionel Vighier. The students have produced their own plots: teachers are in fact vampires, cats are the real masters of the world …
The module has good press in the establishment, but for Lionel Vighier, it must be part of a more global and regular program aimed at increasing the critical thinking of young people on the Internet. “We should insist for a few weeks on one point, the conspiracy for example, then repeat the sessions on other subjects.”
Since 2013, media and information education is compulsory in school curricula. On the Internet, teachers exchange educational resources that they have just produced and that they must already develop, as digital content changes. The objective is now accepted: no longer leaving young people to educate themselves on the Internet.
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