DERC seminar series: Teaching ‘Generation Like’ about digital global citizenship.

Eloísa Nos-Aldás, PhD Professor at the Department of Communication Sciences at Universitat Jaume I of Castellón, Spain, and a visiting academic at the Development Education Research Centre in London,  presents the next seminar in their ongoing series, exploring the influence of the digital on global education and on cultural and political contemporary communication scenarios.

The full title is: "The challenges and practices of teaching ‘Generation Like’ about digital global citizenship: A case study from Spain."

Event summary

The Cambridge Analytica scandal, and the sophisticated data analysis engineering of Facebook that benefited the Trump campaign, revealed to the broader public some major questions about social media that research on media literacy and political digital communication was already discussing.

It is important that we critique the business approaches of the social media platforms, as well as the chimeras our perception of them is based on, their opaque functioning, and how their programming, algorithms and relations (promoted through “liking”) result in users relating to one another, and to information, in promotional more than dialogical ways.

The individual and collective identities of “Generation Like” are being influenced by their socializing in these digital scenarios – which arguably creates a socio-political pseudo-reality flavoured with the rationality of reality shows and advertising.

Using data collected from research on these topics, and on innovative education projects to apply these challenges to higher education, this seminar will explore a specific experience at the Universitat Jaume I of Castellón (UJI), Spain - of how to develop a ‘critical digital citizen perspective’ amongst the future professionals of communication and advertising, both as global citizens and producers of the scenarios we are analysing here.