WSHU’s Jeniece Roman speaks with Connecticut State Librarian Deborah Schander about the core principles of digital citizenship and what it means to responsibly participate in online spaces.
The conversation explores the rights, responsibilities and opportunities that come with being active in the digital world. Schander discusses the importance of digital civic engagement, including how algorithms shape what users see online and how misinformation spreads.
She also offers practical tips for navigating digital spaces more intentionally, including ways to reduce time on social media and focus on more meaningful online interactions.
Schander has served as Connecticut’s state librarian since 2021. She is a member of several state boards and commissions, including the Commission on Educational Technology, the Semiquincentennial Commission, the Data Analysis and Technology Advisory Board, and the CT Humanities Board of Directors.
Before her appointment, Schander worked as a library administrator at Seton Hall University and Vanderbilt University, and held positions in law libraries in Georgia and California. She holds a Juris Doctor and a master’s degree in library and information science from Florida State University. Read her full bio here.
Resources:
- The Connecticut State Library website lists physical and digital resources.
- Connecticut State Digital Navigators: The program offers free technology and help with learning how to use technology, finding information online, signing up for affordable internet and more. Located in person at seven libraries across Connecticut.
- Combat Misinformation: Snopes.com is a fact-checking and original investigative reporting publication. It’s a member of and in compliance with the International Fact-Checking Network's standards for combating misinformation online.
Interview:
WSHU: What is digital citizenship, and how can we participate in civic engagement online?
DS: Digital Citizenship encompasses the relationship that we have to the online environment. It's about how we behave online. It's about how we protect and take care of our personal information and what we share, and it's also about understanding the legal framework that may underpin some of those activities as well. We can engage in, civic engagement online can take a lot of different forms, so that might be participating in an online conversation with people, or a zoom conversation, town hall, any of those things in which we are learning and understanding about the world, communicating with other people about topics that we care about in the same way that we can talk about cooking, or we could talk about our hobbies, or we can talk about other things that we care about in our lives. We can engage in the political world, and our engagement with the activities in our towns and states in our country’s online as well.
WSHU: So, speaking about that engagement online, having access to the world digitally. What kind of responsibility does that bring?
DS: That is a really great question, because I think one we should also remember is that it is a privilege. Not everybody has access to the online environment in the way that so many of us think about. For me, it's perfectly normal to have a cell phone and a computer and all of these different ways that I engage with the world online, to not even think about that as an extension of the regular world, but there are many people, including many people in Connecticut, who don't have that privilege. Who doesn't have the technology or the reliable internet access or the affordable internet access that we think about and we take for granted in our lives? And so it is very much a privilege that we have in order to do that. And I think with all privileges comes responsibilities and a need to understand what we are doing as well. So in the same way that you would engage with someone else in a face-to-face conversation in a respectful way, you will hopefully do that in your online environment as well. I think there is, there's very much a sense that people's online environment, or their online activities, are very different than their in-person ones. And I think part of that is because with an anonymous way to engage, it changes how we think about it. We forget that there are people behind the conversations, behind the posts that we are responding to. And I think a lot of that responsibility is understanding that we are still dealing with people on the other side of whatever we are engaging with. And that is definitely one of those responsibilities that we would have to take into account with the privilege that we have.
WSHU: I like that phrase that you mentioned about, being online, that online world, it's still an extension of the real world, and it's not uncommon to see discord online, but sometimes, as you mentioned, that transfers over to personal relationships as well. Friends and family might have a different opinion. So how can we sort of navigate these conversations, first of all, with the people in our lives? And then secondly, how can we connect online in a more positive and respectful way?
DS: I kind of think about it like the Thanksgiving dinner scenario. When you're with family. In the real world, there may be things that you've learned over time that are not how you would talk to someone else, or how you would choose to phrase something, because you're there looking them in the eye when you're having those conversations, and maybe you choose to refrain or rephrase some of what you want to convey. And I think the online environment has really, it didn't necessarily lift those restrictions, but it helped us forget that some of those things exist in our on in our interactions with people in the real world. And so keeping that in mind, keeping the example of ‘this is a real person that I am talking to’, is just as important when you're online.
WSHU: What should we be mindful of when scrolling online, and how can we be a critical consumer of media?
DS: There are several things that I would, I think, we need to be very careful about. One is just the endless scrolling that is now possible. You can sit and open an app, and you can just continue to flick your thumb and flick your thumb for hours, and the content never ends. And the longer that you do that, the less the algorithm is showing you the content that you came there for, and the more it is showing you just information that is pulling in order to give you something to see. And I think that you often see that there is a significant drift from where you started and where you wound up. And if you're not mindful of that, if you're not understanding the activity that is happening, the psychology of what is happening in order to show you that content and keep you there for their own purposes, whether that's ad revenue or sharing particular viewpoint with you that they want you to see, if you're not conscious of that, it can be very easy to not realize how much your your thinking is shifting, your understanding and willingness to access information is shifting. And so we need to be aware of the behaviors and the reasons why these companies, or these organizations, or these people are presenting the information in a way that they are. So there is, in many cases, deliberate efforts to provide certain types of information, and in some cases, there is nothing, no thinking behind it. There is an artificial intelligence that is an algorithm that is giving you information and not thinking about it all, other than just saying, I need to continue feeding you content.
The technology has advanced to a point where it is its focus is on continually providing you with more information, whether that is information that is being decided on by a person or a particular group of people, or by an algorithm that is just intent on feeding you more information so that you continue to stay on their website, stay on their app and scroll. That has changed the way that we interact with information. It used to be that the news was a discreet thing. There was only so much that you could watch, and now most of the information that we interact with online, you could just keep reading and just keep scrolling for as long as you want to. And that has changed our behaviors and our psychology, or the psychology behind what we are doing, in a way that I think many people don't even realize.
WSHU: How can we build habits that avoid getting drawn into that?
DS: I think first of all, it's if you can simply be aware of the fact that it is happening at all. I think many people don't quite realize how much time they are spending online at all, and so once you become aware, there are, ironically, technological ways that you can handle some of these situations. There are apps that let you say, "I am limiting the amount of time I am spending on this particular app." And so if you spend more than five minutes, a notice will pop up and say, Do you want to stay here and you have to be more conscious in the way that you engage with it? Or there are ways that you can set up your phone so that the screen is grayed out. So it's not even just the fact that something might not be bright and colorful that might change the way that you interact with what you're doing. So there are, first, of course, just knowing what is happening. And then there are tools, whether they are digital tools or others, that you can use. So, for example, there's also the Pomodoro method that people use for their work. And that is, you set something, you set a timer, and you do it for 25 minutes, and then you stop, and you go on to another task. So if you don't want to use an app to control your scrolling, for example, you could set a timer on your oven. Or however it is that you do that, and you can say, you know, once this alarm goes off after 10 minutes, after 25 minutes, I'm no longer going to do that and change to it. Or you could have a buddy.
That's another really good way to do it, is to have a family member or a friend who says, I've noticed you've just been sitting there scrolling for a really long time. Do you want to take a break? And so helping us be more conscious of it and then take affirmative steps to change our behavior, really can change the way that we interact online. I'm actually doing that right now. I have removed a couple of apps from my phone that I found I was just scrolling endlessly, and I was seeing a lot of in particular, political content, and I was being more thoughtful and careful about how I was engaging with that type of content, and so I just deleted the app, and I haven't missed it, and, but I've also noticed that there are a couple of other apps that I've started using, kind of as a replacement and, and now I'm saying, “Okay, it's time to delete those too.” If I need that information, I can access it, but it's not as easy, and that, I hope, will make a difference too.
WSHU: Those are all really great tips. I'm excited to use that myself. I am familiar with Pomodoro for work, but I never thought to apply it to social media. So that's an excellent tip. Going back to what you mentioned, we want to be informed about the world. So, how can we go about navigating that and specifically, how do we spot misinformation?
DS: That is a really important question, because, as you were saying, the more information there is online, the more likely it is that it is inaccurate or it is being fed to you by a particular person or a particular viewpoint. So there are a couple of things that we can do to start spotting misinformation, such as looking at the source of the website.
I was a teacher for many years, and one of the things that I would tell students is, look at the URL. Is it coming from.gov a.org What is the source of the information, who has access to those websites, who can create the information? There are places online that you can go to that will tell you, at least from the standpoint of like government information, who controls that media, and that might tell you the perspective that that organization or that government has, so you can look into information like that. You can also just start looking at a variety of different sources that are talking about that same topic and thinking about whether they are presenting the information in the same way. Are there facts that are being shared in one environment that are not being shared in another? What is significant about those facts, and does it change your perspective if you don't know some of that information, or you know there's also the question of, like, how do you know that that information is true? There are websites like Snopes and other places that you can go to to confirm information as well. Accuracy, you can go and continue to look online. Unfortunately, there's no one place that tells you all of this information. Even places that have very good reputations, they always have some degree of, everybody has a perspective, everybody has a bias, and so you always have to be mindful of that. But there are some that are more reputable, that have been around longer, or have developed a reputation for being truthful and accurate. But I think it's always, unfortunately, these days, it's probably good to always question at least a little bit the source of the information.
WSHU: For the final piece of advice for those who are listening about navigating the digital world, what is one thing that they can do right now to be a better digital citizen?
DS: I would say just start tracking how much time you're spending online every day. Where is your time going when you're doing that? Are you there to learn a particular thing? Are they there to accomplish something, or are you just kind of there to spend some time and waste some time? Not necessarily a bad thing. We all need to waste time, but being simply conscious about how much time you're spending online and then asking yourself, Is that how I want to be spending my time? I think that's a really good place to start.
Music for Digital Citizen is ‘Newer Wave’ by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License. Digital Citizen is reported and produced by Jeniece Roman, with editing by Davis Dunavin.
