On the morning of 6 October, I spent a few hours in Lecture Room 7 at Universiti Teknologi Brunei, talking about Digital Media and Society with a cohort of Communications students from both Masters and Undergrad level. I was there as a guest, and I want to say thank you properly, because I came away having gained more than I gave. I had written down some of my thinking beforehand in The Anatomy of a (Online) Mob, but nothing prepares you for a room of people who actually answer back.
I opened by admitting something. These students probably know the platforms better than I do. What I could offer was a different seat at the table. I attended the lectures, did the coursework and wrote the papers, and then went back to working with customers, staff and deadlines that do not move because a theory is elegant. That is where the ideas became useful to me. So I did not want to stand there reciting theory. I wanted to take situations they already recognise and ask what is really going on.
We started with a simple question. What was the first app you opened this morning, and who decided what you saw next? From there we talked about why “five more minutes” turns into an hour, why a screenshot can carry a joke into a room it was never meant for, and why one tap to share is so much easier than the several steps it takes to check. We spent time on what a thousand likes actually tells you, which is less than the number suggests. I think the useful lesson is that the platforms shape what we do, but we still own our choices, and understanding the conditions gives that responsibility somewhere useful to go.
The part I enjoyed most was when they did the work themselves. I asked them to write the same short message for a close friend, a lecturer and a public post, and then to handle a hypothetical Bruneian organisation facing a customer video that was spreading fast. They had to decide what to check first, who needed help, what the first message should say and when the next update would come. Nobody had a textbook open beside them, yet they were using the same ideas we had just been discussing. In Brunei especially, the customer may also be a relative, a colleague or someone you meet tomorrow, so how we respond online follows us into the room.
I tried to leave them with questions rather than answers. Why am I seeing this? What am I missing? Who has to live with the consequences if I am wrong? Technology may be new. Human beings really aren’t, and the old questions about power, attention and who gets heard are still the ones worth asking.
To the students, thank you for your attention, your questions and your willingness to disagree with a non-academic in front of the class. To UTB, specifically Dr Ayu, thank you for the invitation and for trusting me with your students’ time. I hope some of what we covered becomes useful the first time one of them has to decide, before pressing Post, Send or Share, what they actually know.