Last year I held a seminar for trainee careers advisers on how the internet works – starting from the hardware and networking processes, running through to things like advertising and analytics. But as I got more into prepping for the session, I realised just how much of it I had to look up myself, and how little I knew about the internet. I’ve never studied computers beyond school age, but my father is a programmer, and I’ve hung out with enough programmer friends that I could blag my way through a little bit of most things tech related. So I found it extremely disturbing that I didn’t know how most of the systems I use EVERY DAY function beneath the surface. I started thinking about how knowing how online systems work should be at the heart of education; what is education if not to prepare us for life, and for work? And the digital “world” is so omnipresent that it’s hard even to conceptualise what it is. It has become a structure around which society is based, not just a tool.

One of the complaints I’ve heard from many teachers is that the DfES revises the curriculum too infrequently to keep up to date with the changes that the internet and digital tools are undergoing (here’s a link to the briefing paper from the House of Commons Library on the school curriculum, 2018. TL:DR: it can take a year and a half even just for the changes to be implemented – and that’s after discussions and consultations have happened and decisions have been made. It needs to be MUCH quicker if we’re ever going to keep up with changing technology.) Worse, teachers are also suggesting that the changes made to change ICT to Computing actually do this less, not more, focusing on hard skills like coding. (And by the way, while I think it’s great to teach kids to code, there’s no guarantee that those jobs won’t be automated in twenty years.).

But even if it were being taught, the internet isn’t one thing that one organisation designed. It’s something that grew out of lots of little and big things that many people designed, and everything is connected up – not just visibly through links between sites (as the name “internet” suggests) but also disturbingly invisibly through the ways that third parties are connecting to sites we visit via ads and cookies.

(A single site you visit could have connections with several other sites embedded into the page, and each one can put a cookie on your computer, by which they can gather various kinds of information about what you do. This in turn gets sold to a multitude of other companies to help them personalise advertising and sell you more products, so you have no idea where your information will actually end up.. This is why the crackdown on third-party cookies matters quite a lot, though some sites are terrible at allowing you to opt-out effectively. It won’t stop you from having a digital footprint, though, and it’s probably a bit late for those of us who have been using the internet for decades; I think Google probably knows when I’m likely to visit the bathroom by now.)

So the whole thing is ridiculously complex, probably in ways that will never be entirely knowable by an average user. We’ve only skimmed the top-level of complexity with the recent press coverage of social media and election outcomes. And how would anyone begin to document the little ways in which people and companies have worked out how to exploit the quirks and features of the web, or predict how things built for one purpose will be co-opted for something else? Organisations have got around gambling laws, for example, by allowing users to gamble with “skins” (in-game upgrades and bonuses) in CS:GO (Counter Strike: Global Offensive), which can be translated into real money because people are willing to pay for them. Couchsurfing.com was started to be a hookup site and then became one of the most popular sites for crashing in people’s spare rooms (who knew people would take it so literally??), leading to Airbnb’s monetisation of the same activity.

In spite of the magnitude of the task, my point is that I think that young people ought to be taught about how the internet works in more detail than simply telling them about digital safety and their digital footprint. Often this is what it boils down to: don’t embarrass yourself because it’s there forever and an employer might see it, don’t sext, and don’t talk to strangers. But there’s so much more to the internet, not just in terms of knowing that sites are funded by advertising revenue, but that information sites can be slanted; that social media information can be leveraged to influence political outcomes; that social media shows you what you want to see; that large organisations can collect an enormous amount of data about every one of us even when you change your settings. This applies equally to opportunities; people aren’t necessarily aware of how to present themselves positively online in ways that can benefit their careers.

The International Centre for Guidance Studies at Derby University (iCeGS) has been working on the 7 Cs of Digital Career Literacy, which describes the processes of Changing, Communicating, Connecting, Creating, Curating, Collecting, and Critiquing to be necessary parts of successful career management online. I would add to this that one of the crucial skills of online careers activity is to join up one’s digital presence to form a complete narrative that is consistent with your career goals. Unfortunately JUOPTFACN is not a helpful acronym. Linkedin profiles can lead to blogs which can lead to facebook professional pages which can lead to work samples which can lead back to all of the above. Anything not fitting into your career goals can certainly go there – but perhaps framed as “what else I’m doing”. (Maybe it’s a bit cynical to tailor everything about you online towards your career, I don’t know. Maybe it’s also a bit sad that it’s probably better not to write Star Wars fan fiction under your own name, or whatever. At least for now.)

It would be foolish to imagine that school aged young people are entirely unaware of this. One of them recently said, quite rightly, “If someone really wants to find you online, they will.” Smart cookie. Their overall comfort with technology use is undoubtedly greater than previous generations, but I don’t buy this “millennials are digital natives just because they have grown up in a world that has always had digital technology” rhetoric. Here’s an article by Paul Kirschner and Pecro de Bruyckere that talks about why that’s not true (sorry about the paywall). They may be learning how to use the hardware easily, but the technical skill to use a laptop or a tablet is very different from having the critical skills to know when the text they are reading is tailored to manipulate. Most of us don’t have much awareness about what’s happening underneath the systems that we use every day; why should we expect young people to?

In a way this is also a case for integrating different subjects in the curriculum. Media studies (as far as I can tell) does encourage critical readings of news and media, which is a step in the right direction. But what if a core subject like English were to include critical readings of internet material? Some of my greatest feelings of unease with how young people are educated in this country stem from the abstract quality of a lot of their acquired knowledge. Their constant connectivity and the systems that they are using every day are not just tools. To the everyday user, apps and websites are interfaces, yes, but they are also one-way mirrors with vast subterranean depths. They reflect us on their surfaces, but a whole host of beings stare back without revealing themselves. The least we could do is to acknowledge how complex things are online.