Hooked? An escape room about your digital life
Create discussion groups and divide the four topics technology, the brain, social life and the money among the group members. You are now going to become experts on your separate topics. You will return to the discussion group at the end of the activity.
Individual work
Work alone. Study the provided sources in depth and answer the questions below your topic. Spend around 20 minutes.
Expert groups
Get together in expert groups. Those who have studied the same topic work together. Spend around 10 minutes.
a) Share your discoveries. Feel free to use the guide questions:
What is the topic about?
What is most important?
What do the sources say?
What have you found and reflected on as answers to the questions?
b) Also prepare for how the topic should be presented to the discussion group.
Share
Return to the discussion groups and present your discoveries to one another. Each expert gets three–four minutes for presentation.
Choose and discuss the cases
Below there are five caricatured pupil types. Choose two. Discuss:
How can the different perspectives the technology, the brain, the social and the money be used to shed light on the situation the people are in? Go around the table.
Why have they ended up in this situation?
What can they do to solve their problems?
Can anybody do something to help?
Gamer-Greg
Greg plays a lot of online games and has a lot of friends he chats with on Discord. He feels his social life is alright, but at school he has the role of an outsider no one talks to.
Greg wishes that he was more included in the class environment and that others at school could see that he actually is quite social. Additionally, gaming has started to affect both his sleep and schoolwork. But then again, he doesn’t want to risk dropping out of the gamer community.
His parents are also always nagging that he spends too much time gaming. He’s frustrated and annoyed that they don’t understand how much he actually learns from gaming, and says: "You’ve never played anything, what would you know about it?" He gets really annoyed when they interrupt him to make him stop.
Insta-Iris
Every day, Iris posts at least five photos to Instagram, two to three videos to Tik Tok and usually a few posts on other social media platforms. Iris’s favourite thing is getting hearts, thumbs ups and positive comments.
She’s gained so many followers that she’s started receiving packages by post with facial cream, foot lotion and promises of payment. Some things are cool, and some are strange. But then again, it’s easy money.
Although Iris has thousands of followers in different channels, she doesn’t really have any close friends. She’s unsure of whether her addiction to social media is the reason she struggles to make friends, or if she resorts to social media as a comfort because she’s unable to make friends.
FOMO Freya
Freya has a general fear of missing out on things. It’s rare that more than a few minutes pass between every time she checks her social media. It doesn’t help that she’s had some bad experiences of being excluded.
At school, this affects both her concentration and her marks. It has become so bad that her teacher gave her a poor mark for conduct at Christmas. She has to improve for the spring term.
Freya also suspects that her fear of missing out (FOMO) impacts her social life. Some of her friends have expressed annoyance that she’s always on her phone when she’s with them. She’s been told off by her best friend Hilde for constantly checking her phone when just the two of them are together. If Freya was to be completely honest, she knows that she often thinks to herself: "Maybe there’s something more fun going on somewhere else?" even when she’s with her best friend. And she feels slightly ashamed by it.
Conspi-Colin
Colin spends a lot of his time watching YouTube-videos and reading articles on obscure websites. There he immerses himself on everything from alternative theories concerning the COVID-19 pandemic to the introduction of the 5G network. When Colin gets started, he can spend hours on end.
He particularly likes watching videos on YouTube because it makes it easy to study different topics in depth. YouTube suggests which videos he should watch, and after watching for a good while, he feels he has a good grasp of the topic. He feels an adrenalin rush because it’s exciting, and because he feels that he has gained insight into something important.
Colin is perceived as a bit of an oddball at school, while he himself thinks the others are naïve and believe anything "mainstream media" wants them to believe. Some of his friends are worried that he’ll completely disappear down a rabbit hole and lose touch with reality. They’re also worried because he refuses to get the vaccine against the dangerous rat flu ravaging the school.
You
You love apps and gadgets and have no second thoughts about signing up on various websites or in apps to gain free access or some offer or another.
However, the problem is that the apps and your inboxes are constantly sending you notifications, and you’re swamped by ads and more "great offers." You’ve also acquired a "digital footprint" that you want to get rid of.
Summarise in plenary:
Which cases were most interesting to discuss, and why?
What were the best solutions you arrived at?
Were some of the perspectives more important than others?
Do you know people who should make a change in their digital life
How would you advise them?
Do you recognise yourself in any of the cases
Do you need to change anything in your digital life
What could you do?
Congratulations! You have now succeeded with boosting your media literacy and critical thinking!
This teaching resource has been developed in partnership with The Norwegian Media Authority.