Overexposure: the construction of identity through technology

Educational institutions are not disconnected from their context, whether that ecosystem is conceived at a local or global level. The COVID pandemic has further diluted the boundaries between formal, non-formal, and informal education, something that was already presented as desirable in the concept of Long Life Learning proposed in the European educational competence framework that governs our national and regional legal framework. The pandemic has made it clear that the school was present where a group of students had a device to connect with their teachers and learn, each from a different physical location. In fact, this blurring of borders is, according to Eurídice Cabañes (2013), a feature of postmodernity, a hybridization of the human and the technological that is introduced into every day, in our ways of relating, which forces us to constantly ask ourselves where we are going and how individual and collective identity is built. Cabañes flees from a technophobic vision and invites us to choose whether we want to be a “consuming mass or a creative group”. DolorsReig (2016) expresses herself along the same lines, with her now-classic concept of technologies such as TEP: technologies of empowerment and participation.

But the omnipresence of technology also overexposes us. Pope Francis has spoken of the "constant spectacle of our hypervigilated lives" in his last encyclical of October 3^rd, Fratelli Tutti:

Everything becomes a kind of spectacle that can be spied on, watched, and life is exposed to constant control. In digital communication (…) respect for the other is shattered and, in this way, at the same time that I displace him, I ignore him, and keep him away, without any shame I can invade his life to the extreme.

José Carlos Ruiz expresses himself in a similar way, in his 2021 book Filosofía ante el desánimo:

It is not enough to know ourselves, we also have to show it, show our world, narrate our achievements, tell our wishes, publish our feelings, show our opinions, expose our creations, upload our photographs, "share" our reflections... Everything is oriented to flee from the impersonal, which is perceived as subtraction, as negativity. The problem appears when our personality, that sum of temperament (genetic) and character (educational), feels the pressure to assume a successful identity, which is generally very far from reality (p. 16).

Bibliographic reviews and studies such as that of AAlonso-Ferreiro, Regueira, and Zapico-Barbeito (2019) have also shown that this overexposure has more harmful effects when it comes to teen girls and that the intense use of social networks is associated, on numerous occasions, with practices that violate basic pillars of digital security, such as sexting or cyberbullying, one of the most serious consequences of the overexposure that we are discussing.

The connection through technology is a new form of compromise between loneliness and the fear of failure or invasion of privacy, something that MIT Professor of Technology and Society, Sherry Turkle, calls "schizoid." It is mere illusion, and when the illusion of the Other fades, we feel more alienated than ever. The deep loneliness that emanates from the paradox of “together, but alone”, is developed in her 2012 book Alone Together- Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other and defines the new relational dimension of homo digitalis in these times in which social networks and virtual presence have largely supplanted physical encounters and "real" human contact because screens allow a security separation with which we avoid the most complicated aspects of “real” relationships and showing ourselves as we are. It is an issue on which she has delved even more in her book In Defense of the Conversation (2020).

Another of the philosophers of the post-truth era and of the techno-critics of the 21^st century who have warned that virtual connectivity is not an authentic connection is the Korean Byung-Chul Han. In his essay The expulsion of the different (2017), he alerts that digital hyper-connection does not facilitate the encounter with others, but leads us to find people who think like us and make sure that our horizon of experiences becomes increasingly narrow, making us pass by the unknown or those we consider different. The final consequence is that hyper-connection ends up locking us in an endless loop of the self and, ultimately, leads us to a self-propaganda that indoctrinates us with our own notions, while reinforcing our confirmation bias and we become more intolerant to ideas that challenge and remove us.

The students who inhabit our classrooms see quite clearly the artificiality of this virtual connection, and use the term “posture” abundantly, which is defined in the RAE as an “artificial and imposed attitude that is adopted for convenience or presumption”. The neologism entered the Academy's dictionary just five years ago, in its 23^rd edition and, at least in Spain, we all associate this word with vain and false behavior on social networks.

Overidentification and FoMO: The fear of being left out

Although young people recognize the inauthenticity that we discussed in the previous section, being aware that many users of social networks abundantly “posture” and only seek to increase their number of followers or likes, the truth is that they are terrified of “being left out” of their virtual tribe, they compare each other all the time, and allow their privacy to be constantly trampled on. This psychological anxiety derived from hyper-connection in social networks was coined in 2013 with the acronym FoMO: Fear of Missing Out (Przybylski, Murayama, Dehaan, & Gladwell, 2013). It is related to the theory of self-determination, by Ryan and Deci (2000), which affirms that the feeling of kinship or connection with others is a legitimate psychological need that influences the psychological health of human beings. In this sense, FoMO is understood as a self-regulatory state that arises from the situational perception of each person. The study found that there is a significant correlation with having low self-esteem, and those who obtained a lower satisfaction of basic needs, low levels of mood and satisfaction with life, had higher levels of FoMO and presented more compulsive attitudes when it came to constantly checking social networks. The results of the 2013 research have been corroborated by other studies such as that of Torres- Serrano and M (2020), which verifies in its sample with young Spanish Instagram users aged 18 to 30, that a high score in FoMO is correlated with greater use of the social network, as well as a high score in FoMO correlates with a higher score in narcissism and, on the other hand, with low self-esteem. The study by Franchina, Vanden Abeele, Van Rooij, Lo Coco, and De Marez (2018) has also shown, this time with a sample of Flemish adolescents, that a high score on the FoMO scale is a predictor for later problematic behaviors in social networks, or relational conflicts, in what has already been coined as “phubbing”: belittling someone physically present, paying more attention to the Smartphone than to the person in front of us.

But even before the term FoMO was coined,Echeburúa and Corral (2010) warn in their work about the consequences of the use and abuse of the Internet and social networks, and how this abuse is related to psychosocial variables, such as psychological vulnerability and stress, advising preventive strategies within the family and in educational institutions. For these prevention strategies to be effective, it is evident that teachers must be previously trained in the risks involved in misuse, something that is still scarce in training plans for Digital Teaching Competence, more focused on the instrumental and on the instructional design than in "digital health"; Although, as the study by AlAlonso-Ferreiro et al. (2019) collects, the number of initiatives, programs, and plans that focus on the education of citizens in safe and healthy use of digital technologies is increasing. Some examples are Pantallas Amigas; IS4K-Internet Segura for Kids; the Plan Navega con Rumbo, and INTECO’s legal guides regarding social networks, minors, and privacy on the internet.

Misinformation: algorithms, confirmation biases, polarization, and lack of critical thinking

In 2018, the study by MIT professors Vosoughi, Roy, and Aral, published in the journal Science, raised many alarms about how impulsive the adult world is when it comes to sharing hoaxes online, with the consequent dangers that this can have for the stability of democracies. The work studied the origin and impact of the hoaxes spread through Twitter. The most striking thing about their conclusions is that it is not bots that spread fake news, but human beings. 70% of fake news, especially if it is political, goes viral much faster on Twitter than real news, which increases the danger of an increasingly polarized and manipulable society in great need of critical digital literacy. Behind the behavior of the adult who retweets without thinking, there are very human issues: we pay more and more attention to the small influencers, and our viscerality, our prejudices, and emotions are constantly manipulated. Thus, our confirmation bias is managed at the whim of the algorithms, which decide what we should read and how we (un)inform ourselves to polarize ourselves more and more, and at the same time that the infodemic bombards us, the networks generate an addiction that prevents the inhibitory control of the impulse, reflection, and a reaction time between the stimulus and the response that they do not grant us. In fact, the inventor of the “infinite scroll”, Aza Raskin, has compared addiction to social networks with dependence on cocaine (González, 2018).

The Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma” (Orlowski, 2020), starring Aza Raskin himself and other technologists who created gadgets and artificial intelligence whose main task is to capture our attention, also denounces the risks of overexposure to social networks, the infodemic, misinformation, and internet abuse, besides warning that democracy is being put at very real risk and that it can lead us to a dangerous social confrontation and the destruction of our societies, while we let the devices and the Internet apparently solve our lives and "think for us."

MarinaGarcés (2017) warns of the dangers of believing too much in technological “solutionism”. We are led to believe in the utopia that technology will lead us to a world without problems, but we can end up turned into stupid humans who have delegated and "outsourced" their intelligence and allow themselves to be managed by machines and algorithms. Garcés considers that this delegation is an unprecedented gesture of anthropological pessimism and that we are falling into the error of thinking that algorithms will make more informed decisions, in theory, more neutral and freer from human error, until we realize that the algorithm is not neutral.Harari (2018) also raises this same dilemma about the power of algorithms in his book 21 Lessons for the 21^st Century: there are post-humanists convinced that they no longer even need to think critically and understand the reality that surrounds them, because everything is data and they trust everything to a good information system (Harari gives the example of smartwatches that collect biorhythms and health status, for example) or algorithms that seem to know our tastes and needs better from the outside than we do, and that tell children and adolescents which YouTube video to consume next... From this article, we defend that this extreme “dataism”, which makes critical thinking superfluous, is an aspect on which current education must reflect at length because it can become a new gap in the structures of social manipulation and power: a thinking elite vs. a large majority of people who allow others to program the algorithms and think for them, or what Cristóbal Cobo calls “the vassals of data, who suffer from info-vulnerability” (Cobo, 2019, p.36). The author problematizes what he calls "digital hyper-positivism":

Does the age of big data bring us closer to the truth or is it just a technophilic mirage? (…) It is essential to develop future-proof skills, not limited to certain tools, instruments, or methodologies (…) In short, to favor the development of new capacities that are not limited to the technical aspect of certain technological tools but rather that favor learning to think differently and allow us to face new problems from a perspective that goes beyond the instrumental. (p. 29-30)

Moral and ethical blindness

Carrie James, a member of Harvard's Project Zero, published her book Disconnected: Youth, new media, and the ethics gap in 2014. In its pages, James warned that despite living in the most informed era of humanity -something that should, in theory, favor a greater open-mindedness, more global competition, and a greater spirit of tolerance to other ways of understanding the world and reality- today's young people are inclined to think very narrowly, to focus on themselves and on very close people they know in real life. The book is supported by extensive interviews with children and young people ranging in age from 10 to 25, and through these interviews, James describes her thoughts on issues such as privacy, intellectual property, and virtual participation. Three ways in which young people approach their online activity are described: practicing self-centered thinking, in which they are mainly concerned about the consequences for themselves; moral thinking, when they worry about the consequences that their virtual praxis will have for the people they know; or ethical thinking, if they care about strangers and larger communities. James concludes that adolescents, for the most part, are blind to moral or ethical concerns. For example, hostile speech or insults, if they occur in online content, are usually justified with the comment “it's just a joke”. Regarding intellectual property, they seem to feel that “if it is online, it belongs to everyone”; They show a relaxed attitude towards piracy, downloading other people's files, or the use of copy/paste of materials without worrying about referencing the sources.

Permanent training: the INTEF’s digital health and safety offer

Given that the safety of schoolchildren in the use of technology is one of the issues that most concern educators and families, from the Ministry of Education and Professional Training, through the National Institute of Educational Technologies and Teacher Training (INTEF), initiatives have been launched for the training of practicing teachers that seek to respond to several of the challenges that we have pointed out in this work. As of the date we write this article, INTEF offers the first edition of a NOOC (Nano Open Online Course) on Technoethics, which will begin in November 2021, and during 2019 it has offered NOOCs on digital identity care (Sexting and other risky practices), Cyberbullying, Digital respect, and protection of personal data, basic measures of digital protection or privacy on the internet.

European Framework for Educators' Digital Competence: DigComEdu

Beyond the circumstantial problems described in previous sections, when discussing what happened during the COVID 19 crisis and “emergency remote teaching” (some of them, in fact, can already be considered conjunctural problems in vulnerable environments), digital teaching competence transcends the individual and instrumental training of teachers in educational technology, as highlighted by Colás, Conde, and Reyes (2019). In their work, they analyze the INTEF’s Digital Teaching Framework of 2017, which they consider reductionist in their approach to digital teaching competence, since it focuses fundamentally on technical and formal skills of the teacher, and they compare it with the European DigCompEdu Framework (Redecker, 2020). The authors opt for the latter framework since it progresses from the individual empowerment of the teacher in a technological world towards proposals for the transfer of the development of competence to students. The latest NOOCs offered by the INTEF since 2019, and which we have mentioned above, seem to want to correct these training deficiencies highlighted in the study by Colás et al. (2019). However, it would be necessary to quantify the real scope in the percentage of practicing teachers who have enrolled in these courses to understand if this type of initiative can effectively contribute to minimizing the dangers that we have raised in the article.

We agree with Colás, Conde, and Reyes that DigComEdu implies a conception of digital skills as transformative and empowering skills, especially in areas 5 (Empowerment of students) and 6 (Development of digital competence in students), and it aligns much better with the global frameworks for education that we mentioned in the introduction. DigComEdu emphasizes that teachers have to train students in the application of digital technologies critically and responsibly in terms of information, communication, content generation, wellbeing, and problem-solving, and in that sense invites them to give students tools to fight against the problems that we have discussed throughout section 3 of this study.

Teaching digital identity

However, before being able to accompany the students' skills development, we, teachers, must reflect on our teaching digital identity, since we are role models for children and young people. It is vital to become aware of our new role in a postmodern digital society, characterized by the hybridization, omnipresence, and embodiment of the technology of which Cabañes (2013) spoke and in which we become active agents that enable meaningful learning experiences, connecting and involving students and improving their development as learners.

The teaching digital identity, (…) is a dynamic and permanent process that implies giving meaning and reinterpreting one's own beliefs, values, and experiences in light of the new contexts and frameworks of relationships in contemporary society; a process of negotiation, representation, and constitution of the experience lived inside and outside the school by teachers and their visions, beliefs, and expectations about what it means to be a teacher and the type of teacher one wants to become in a society characterized by the digitization of the human experience, which compared to other previous historical moments, offers new ways of accessing knowledge and new forms of representation, collaboration, communication, and learning. (Correa et al., 2015. p. 47)

Learning and teaching in modern classrooms require pedagogical approaches to inform the design of digital environments that facilitate conceptual learning and the development of students' understanding of how to carry out learning and thus help them develop the competence of learning to learn and the rest of “21^st-century skills” (Engeness, 2021). AsColás et al. (2019) emphasize, the digitally competent teacher is no longer the one who best knows how to use technologies or the one who has the greatest knowledge of them, but the one who can take advantage of that background for the development of the digital competence of their own students.

CCastañeda et al. (2018) emphasize that the institutional models of digital teaching competence that had been used before have several important shortcomings: they consider technology as a tool neutral in values ​​(when, as we have discussed, its use can hardly be considered as such) and also reduce the teaching action to work in the classroom, thus avoiding dimensions such as social and political commitment or the possible impact of educational institutions in their communities. We agree with Castañeda, Esteve, and Adell that it is necessary a reconceptualization of the teacher's digital identity that directs both, educator and student, to critical empowerment and the possibility of developing their agency, understood as technical capacity guided by good judgment, in a world increasingly mediated by technology. We believe that we can support ourselves in area 5, and especially in area 6, of DigComEdu, to carry out this critical empowerment, and that the latest actions of the INTEF in terms of training offers are a good sign that we are on the correct path, although there is still a long way to go, as shown by the scarce offer in initial teacher training that we have indicated in section 5.1.

Self-perception of future teachers about their digital competence and initial training

In the present work, we have not been able to review the self-perception that active Spanish teachers have of their own digital competence, but we have located three studies that we consider significant to name on education students who will be teachers and professors tomorrow. The first, by Esteve-Mon, Gisbert-Cervera, and Lázaro- Cantabrana (2016), carries out a self-perception questionnaire in education students, which shows encouraging results: the vast majority of the participants in the study considered themselves quite or very capable for the performance of digital competence. The study showed that the youngest students (20-24) showed a higher perceived self-efficacy than the older group, and the most significant differences were precisely those related to digital citizenry and responsibility, which seems to indicate that the new generations are increasingly aware of the risks involved in the use and abuse of the internet, which we commented at the beginning of this work. However, the work of M Moreno-Guerrero, Miaja-Chippirraz, Bueno-Pedrero, and Borrego-Otero (2020), carried out within the framework of INTEF 2107 with students of the Master's Degree in Compulsory Secondary Education, High School, Vocational Training, and Language Teaching at the Ceuta Campus of the Universidad de Granada, does not give such optimistic results. The groups of future teachers have an average level in the area of ​​information competence and information literacy, they present higher values ​​in the storage and retrieval of information, data, and digital content; medium levels in the storage and retrieval of information, data, and digital content; but they have lower results in the evaluation of information, data, and digital content, precisely one of the aspects that concerned us in the analysis of this article.

The third work (Ferreiro & A, 2018) describes a PBL experience for the development of digital teaching competence in the initial training of teachers of the Infant Education Degree of the Universidad de Santiago de Compostela. During the proposed PBL, university students had to collaboratively develop a didactic project that integrated tasks with digital technologies. The high satisfaction expressed by the students with the proposal, especially regarding the possibility of implementing the PBL in their visits to the practical schools, highlights the importance of active methodologies in the initial training of teachers concerning the development of digital teaching competence and transferability capacity.