Alice’s Broken App Store
Where does digital inclusion stop and media literacy begin? Recently, I’ve been seeing fascinating edge cases that really bring that question home.
I’ve been spending a few hours a week hosting digital drop-ins at a local community hub. It’s the kind of work I love, because it’s located within a space people actively want to be in, a place of joy and solidarity where the personal and the political intertwine. I get to build up relationships with folk, while keeping in touch with the topics and issues that people are facing, in the here and now.
That said, it can be a bit piecemeal, a tad transactional, at times, through nobody’s fault. Maybe someone just has that one niggling query and once it’s sorted, they’re grand. My hope is that by being in the space over weeks and months, that becomes less of an issue.
There’s also a phrase I often hear: “Just you do it for me, son.” With one-off contact that’s hard to resist, because I don’t fully know someone’s skill set and it’s also a pretty big drain on their time if I go all ‘belt and braces’ on them. Again, I think if I’m reliably in the space, I’ll be able to round out my understanding of someone’s situation, their capacity and their appetite for new information. Patience and consistency are the key, so for me, it’s a real ‘trust the process’ situation.
But boy oh boy, I’ve had some doozies recently. Several community members have said that their phones are running slowly, so when I take a look, there are many, many apps claiming to do the same thing – mail, weather, news, calendar, all the basics – well over 300 of them in total sometimes. A strain for any device, plus a source of real confusion over which ones were current or useful.
And above all that, their entire systems can be overtaken by full-screen, unskippable pop-up ads that show every ten seconds, for half a minute each time. They often have fake ‘skip’ buttons that led to a cascade of further ads each prompting “URGENT ACTION!” to some spoof “ALERT!” In these cases, the device is a complete minefield, their owners uniformly at the end of their tether.
At first, I was stumped. I couldn’t see what app was causing these pop-ups – no doubt a deliberate obfuscation. So, rather than targeting the specific culprit, we’ll often simply have to delete, delete, delete, a process that, with the interruptions of ads, takes well over an hour.
What strikes me most is the apparently banal nature of many of the offerings. Don’t believe me? Try searching your device’s app store for something innocuous like “calendar” and see what appears.
Now, scroll down a bit through the results.
Keep scrolling….
…A bit more…
…Further? Yep, keep going…
…Further…
…and further down…
…like Alice down a rabbit hole…
…ever further…
As you descend, note the logos and names of each one as they get more bland and nondescript. Apps purposely designed to look like the stock offering built into any phone; apps which hoodwink unsuspecting users into installing them, agreeing to trade off opaque permissions (including contacts, their phone numbers, their email addresses), using them for a short while until the next one insistently barges in to take over.
What do we bump down into, when we finally land? “News” sites peddling the worst, skewed versions of truth and untruth. Nuisance phone calls and texts, some in languages you can’t even understand. Constant – and I mean CONSTANT – pop up adverts that prompt you to spend, yes, to gamble, of course, but always to get yet another bloody app. Often this is because your phone is “infected” with something horrible and only the latest killer app will sort it – a grim echo of the truth, of course! But the next app is just going to add to the churn inside your device.
You get one, and then more inevitably follow, as you’re force-fed more and more pesky prompts. And what’s eroded in the process? It’s the big stuff:
- Energy
- Connection
- Empathy
- Self-esteem
- Trust
“Who made these apps? What permissions do they need? Where is my data stored and how is it shared?” These are vital questions for digital and media literacies.
So, when does digital inclusion stop, and where does media literacy begin? They utterly overlap. The questions of trust, of critical thinking, of judiciously asking “who’s behind this? What’s their motive? What should I do now?” are locked into our digital lives from the very moment we power up a phone.
I can’t help but worry that, without a focused effort on media literacy that goes hand in hand with digital outreach, it’s going to be a long battle. We simply can’t afford to divorce the two.
But as I continue with my weekly drop-in sessions, I’m looking forward to doing my bit: building those relationships, forging individual and collective community resilience and giving folk a hand up from the depths of the warren.
Really, though, I’d prefer to be at the top, acting as a wee cautionary voice at the entrance. In practice, this means embedding criticality and media literacy from day one of a learner’s digital journey, sharing key information about useful habits and embedding savvy questions so they can become second nature. Many such voices would make light work, compared to the strain of living with, and breaking free from, a banjaxed device.
Because once you’re down in the pit of that rabbit hole, it’s a heck of a climb back to normality.
