UC Berkeley

With recent advances in generative artificial intelligence, it may come as no surprise that AI influences our society in profound ways. This dissertation project examines how educational and social media platforms and their algorithms shape educational practices and the identity, digital literacies and views of middle school youth participants. Through a digital ethnography (Pink et al., 2016) rooted in sociotechnical and discursive theories of agency and power (Foucault, 1994; Latour, 2005), the study is one of few to empirically explore how participants shape and are shaped by these technologies. The study focuses on the experiences, development and views of 6th grade participants in a California Bay Area K-8 school as they 1) attended virtual schooling during the pandemic and used the educational platform Google Classroom and 2) as they participated in an online afterschool club and developed critical digital literacies (CDL) to counter algorithmic processes.

One key finding of the study is the lively presence of youth agency in the face of the seemingly overwhelming power of algorithms and platforms to shape and control our lives. Youth participants crafted and enacted identities and digital literacies in ways that disrupted algorithms through literacies that, for example, crossed platforms or hacked algorithmic processes. Teachers and students “made-do” with Google Classroom in ways that subverted, transgressed or denied the technically-embedded business model. Youth participants developed critical digital literacies rooted in a sociotechnical discourse about algorithms that enabled them to unearth patterns in social media algorithms and begin to understand how platforms tracked and profiled them. The actor-networks in which participants, platforms and algorithms were embedded provided opportunities for youth agency to manifest. At the same time, the study empirically documents how participants were reciprocally shaped by these technologies in ways that oriented teaching and learning toward narrow academic goals and that aligned participant identities with the algorithmic identity on their favorite platforms.

This study contributes to a range of scholarship critically examining the impact of technology and artificial intelligence on education and society. Specifically, it shows the importance of studying agency in relation to algorithmic and platform power and the importance of conducting empirical research to document how such technologies actually shape education and society. The study also identifies a new concept for CDL researchers and theorists: grounded critical digital literacies. A key implication of the afterschool program is that CDL programs should be rooted in youth participants’ existing algorithmic imaginaries (Bucher, 2017). A grounded CDL sharpens youths’ existing critical competencies with technology and suggests that CDL programs should fold sociotechnical orientations to technology into their budding critical digital literacy practices