What I Learned When Middle Schoolers Talked About Social Media

I was holding my first system’s thinking learning session with twenty 7th and 8th graders during their lunch period, and I was definitely nervous. I came armed with a topic I knew almost everyone would have something to say about, social media, and something I knew they would like, cupcakes. I was just hoping they would participate and the whole thing wouldn’t be a bust.

I had spent weeks researching social media and developing the learning materials for the session. I also practiced how I would facilitate the conversation in a systems thinking manner. I didn't want to stand in front of a group of middle schoolers and lecture them about systems thinking. I wanted them to actually try it and see what they thought. I built the session around a series of questions. I had practiced the session, but I still had no idea how twenty middle schoolers were going to respond. Would they understand what I was trying to teach? Would they participate?  Luckily, they did.

I expected them to talk about the obvious things like TikTok, screen time, likes, and trends; and they did talk about all this. However what surprised me was how quickly they started making connections that I hadn't necessarily planned for. At one point, a student said that she would talk about something at home and then suddenly start seeing that same thing on her social media feed. She looked at me and asked, “How does it even know that?” That got everyone talking. Some students said the same thing had happened to them. Others wondered if their phones were listening to them. We started talking about what apps know about us, what they learn from what we watch and click on, and why they want to keep showing us things we will probably watch.

One question led to another question, and the students started connecting the dots themselves. What I really liked was that the conversation didn’t turn into social media being good or bad. I was honestly thrilled by how much they participated and were able to identify the systems shaping what they saw on their social media feeds. It also showed me that something I had hoped when I created these systems learning materials; middle schoolers are not too young to start looking at complicated issues this way. They experience these systems every day, even if they don’t necessarily call them systems.