Connected generation: Youth facing the ethical dilemmas of the digital age

[00:00:09] Martine Turenne: Welcome to Congress in Conversation, a special podcast series brought to you by the Big Thinking Podcast and the Conversation Canada. We invite researchers who participated in Congress 2025 to share their research on this year's theme: Reframing togetherness.

[00:00:27] My name is Martine Turenne, I am the editor-in-chief of La Conversation Canada, and I will be your host for this episode of Congress in Conversation. In a world where digital technologies are increasingly shaping our interactions and civic engagement, it is crucial to understand how young people are positioning themselves in this ever-changing space.

[00:00:49] In this episode, I talk with Professor Megan Cotnam-Kappel. We'll discuss her VRAenligne project, an initiative that explores ethical citizenship in the digital age, particularly among young Francophones living in minority communities in Ontario and Alberta.

[00:01:09] At the heart of the discussion, we will examine the role of young people in the digital space and ask the question: how do they perceive their citizenship in a digital world?

[00:01:22] Martine Turenne:  So Megan, maybe you could tell us a little bit about your background as both a researcher and a teacher. You studied and did your PhD at the University of Ottawa and also in Corsica, which is quite fascinating. Tell us a little bit about your career path.

[00:01:38] Megan Cotnam-Kappel: Yes, well, I'm a proud Franco-Ontarian. I was educated in Ontario and moved from my hometown of Orillia, which is in the south-central part of the province, to Ottawa to pursue my bachelor's degree in education. I then went on to do my master's degree here at the University of Ottawa.

[00:01:58] And so for my PhD, I wanted to explore, to see other places, but I was still passionate about education in minority language contexts, so I wanted to discover another minority context while studying in French, of course. So, it was a great pleasure for me as part of my PhD to conduct a comparative study on the experiences of young people in schools in minority language contexts, namely in French-speaking Ontario and Corsica, where they have bilingual Corsican/French schools.

[00:02:31] And the experiences of these young people, particularly in relation to choosing a secondary school, why they continue or do not continue in French in Ontario, and whether or not they continue in Corsican in this context. So, it was very, very enriching. 

[00:02:45] And then, after my PhD, I received a postdoctoral fellowship to go to Harvard University. That's where I really studied educational technologies more intensively, but the absence of language there struck me because we carried out some great projects, very participatory critical projects with young people and digital technology, and I thought to myself: what does their language add? What are the silences that are being overlooked? So when I was hired at the University of Ottawa, I tried to really make those connections between digital technologies and the Francophone minority.

[00:03:28] Martine Turenne: So that's how we came up with the project called VRAenligne. Can you tell us a little bit about it and what motivated you to launch this project?

[00:03:40] Megan Cotnam-Kappel: Yes, with pleasure. The VRAenligne project consists of three research phases. VRA stands for vivre, réfléchir, agir en ligne (live, reflect, act online). It is a SSHRC-funded research project that I just presented at the last conference and that I am conducting in collaboration with my colleague Martine Pellerin.

[00:04:07] My colleague, Martine, is in Alberta, at the Saint-Jean campus, and we decided together to conduct a comparative project in two provinces, Ontario and Alberta. The three phases—live, reflect, act—are three phases of data collection that we are conducting with young people in high schools where we want to work with them to better understand what it means to be and act as an ethical citizen in the digital age.

[00:04:39] So, we imagined this project in three phases. The first phase involves collecting data from young people to try to better understand their experiences on social media. Then, reflecting on it, which involves their definitions and thoughts on the concept itself, what it means to them to be an ethical citizen on social media.

[00:05:06] And finally, the third phase, acting, focuses on the concrete actions they are already taking or suggesting we should take online to act as ethical citizens.

[00:05:19] Martine Turenne: And when you talk about ethical citizens, what exactly do you mean in concrete terms? What does it mean to be an ethical citizen in the digital age?

[00:05:29] Megan Cotnam-Kappel: Well, for us, we wanted to emphasize ethics in particular because, typically, what we see in schools is a more behavioral approach to digital citizenship. So often, digital citizenship is a contract that you sign at the beginning of the year, and there are posters in schools about protecting your password, not posting inappropriate photos, and respecting school equipment. 

[00:06:00] And so, explicitly naming ethics for us in this research, we wanted to explore young people's values, moral dilemmas, the difficulties they face, the responsibility they have, and their critical thinking skills.

[00:06:16] Through this research, we also wanted to explore with them what ethics means to them in relation to their experiences on social media. In their own words, they told us that digital citizenship typically means protecting oneself, and that ethics comes into play in their relationships with others.

[00:06:42] It was very, very enriching to hear this from the young people who explained it to us, but it's true that we hadn't necessarily thought too much about ethical citizenship on social media. However, when you ask us the question, yes, ethics is how we behave towards others, how we protect or fail to protect others in difficult situations, it's dialogue with others. 

[00:07:04] And these are the aspects we wanted to explore a little more in our research because this is where we would like to see more educational resources and more support for teachers to help young people who are going through difficult situations. They don't always know how to cope.

[00:07:21] Martine Turenne: Because schools focus their rules on fairly basic things, you want to go much further than that, beyond what schools currently offer.

[00:07:30] Megan Cotnam-Kappel: Yes, right now, there's really a gap in the curriculum that means schools are staying where they need to be in relation to the provincial curriculum. We talk about social media, but always in a very educational way, and we don't necessarily get into the extracurricular experiences that young people have, the difficulties they face, and the dilemmas they experience. 

[00:07:59] So the research I did during my postdoc at Harvard was about online dialogue and the difficulties young people have in communicating online. When a comment is problematic, instead of engaging, they don't know what to do, for example. And how they learn—they learn by observing other examples that may be positive or negative, and they often learn on their own how to navigate these difficult situations.

[00:08:30] Right now, this kind of activity isn't included in the curriculum, so teachers tell us they don't necessarily see a place for these conversations. Research allows us to dig a little deeper and see. 

[00:08:46] And for us, we developed this three-phase data collection approach, and the schools we had the opportunity to collaborate with now want to adopt this data collection method to develop an educational resource, because based on their experiences with living and reflecting on the somewhat abstract concept of what it means to be an ethical citizen? Then, take concrete action. We see that yes, it's relevant for us in our research, but it can also be very relevant in the classroom as an intervention.

[00:09:19] Martine Turenne: You've been studying this issue for a number of years now, so perhaps it's premature to ask the question, but would you say that it's more difficult for young people to interact today than it was 10 or 20 years ago? 

[00:09:31] Let's say 10 years, because this phenomenon is fairly recent. Do you see a higher level of difficulty today, with greater fragmentation among young people, or is it too early to say?

[00:09:46] Megan Cotnam-Kappel: I don't know if I can say whether it's more difficult. I think every generation will have its own difficulties in terms of the experience of wanting to live and find their identity online, with all the risks and dangers that entails.

[00:10:05] But I was still very surprised, even impressed, by this data collection compared to that of 10 years ago. Young people were much more critical and understood more about bias and algorithms than adults might think.

[00:10:28] They didn't always have the academic words to explain it, but they told us, "We quickly realized that if we like certain content, we're going to get more of that content." So I don't know if it's easier, but they are more critical.

[00:10:42] Martine Turenne: Yes, because it's true that it was less well known five or ten years ago, whereas today young people have told me, "Yes, I talk about Greece, traveling to Greece with a friend, or I do a search, and then I see ads that pop up."

[00:10:55] So it's true that now they are very, very aware of this. Now, of course, things are changing rapidly, especially with artificial intelligence tools, such as ChatGPT, but there are many other tools now that are being added almost every day. Explain to us how these tools are used by the young people you work with.

[00:11:16] Megan Cotnam-Kappel: So what we decided to do in this research was to integrate a generative AI tool into the data collection process. And this was done in partnership with the school. 

[00:11:28] What we planned in the research was that we wanted young people to create artifacts that would represent these three different themes. During the first phase, since we wanted to better understand what they experience on social media, we wanted them to create a digital artifact that represented their online experiences.

[00:11:50] They could have created a more traditional digital poster, but after talking with school boards and thinking about the place of generative AI in their lives right now, we decided to use Canva Magic, which, similar to ChatGPT but based on an image, allows you to interact with generative AI, suggest an initial prompt, and then the poster comes out, and the young person could do several iterations before deciding on their image.

[00:12:26] They then submitted their image to us, the research team, along with all the iterations, so we could see all the different prompts they had used. Finally, they added a title and said whether or not they were satisfied with the image, and why.

[00:12:41] So, for us as researchers, it was very interesting because with a traditional poster, I would have placed much more emphasis on analyzing the poster, the choice of words, the choice of images, colors, but I wouldn't necessarily have had the textual data that I received here. 

[00:12:28] So here, I have the text, I can see the young person saying "a boy in his room, on his cell phone, surrounded by bubbles with questions" and see the image, and then he says "no, the young person should be sad, for example, on his phone."

[00:13:16] So we have some great data, and these are examples of their experiences on social media. But the image itself, yes, the young person adjusted it, but it's a dialogue, there's generative AI that chose the image, it may be stereotypical, so we also have to be critical of the image.

[00:13:33] So, what we decided to do in this research was, after each round of data collection—for example, we did a round of data collection on what they experience online—they created the image and shared it with us, along with all the prompts. During the next visit, we began with a co-analysis.

[00:13:51] And we told them, "Here are the images you shared with us, here are our initial interpretations, correct us, explain it to us." So I would say that generative AI added something here, but we still had to go back to the authors of these images to better understand their meaning.

[00:14:10] Martine Turenne: Yes, that's right, this dialogue with ChatGPT. We're hearing more and more that young people are confiding in ChatGPT, using it as a psychologist. Is this something you're seeing emerge in your research, the fact that they now endorse just about everything on ChatGPT: "Should I answer that, should I think that, should I go there?" Are you seeing this more and more in your research?

[00:14:36] Megan Cotnam-Kappel: Not in this research. For some, it was the first time they had really used an image generation tool, and in conversations about ethical citizenship during this data collection that took place last year, so 2024-2025, we didn't have a lot of discussion about the place of generative AI. 

[00:14:59] But that being said, we had limited the research to social media. So I would say that in conversations on social media, there were few instances where it was mentioned. 

[00:15:09] But, I would say, once again, just for the visual productions we created with generative AI, what was interesting was the very symbolic element of what the young people came up with. 

[00:15:23] So, for example, we had a student who created an image of a teenager in free fall, and he put in the instructions, "a teenager in free fall, phone in hand, very happy, who doesn't realize that his parachute isn't open."

[00:15:41] And it was the young person who came up with that, it was the young person who had written part of the script, "very happy, two seconds before impact," and we took that image and discussed it as a class. It was very interesting, rather than asking them whether they liked social media, yes or no, the very symbolic aspect...

[00:16:05] Martine Turenne: Were there any others like that that surprised you or touched you among the images you saw?

[00:16:12] Megan Cotnam-Kappel: More than just a child who had drawn a picture of their face that was erased or very dark, so we saw that as a symbol of a certain loss of identity, whereas we imagine that social media allows us to perhaps better construct or better express ourselves.

[00:16:33] We saw masks, sometimes a whirlwind on the face, and generally, because we had asked them for an image that represented their experience on social media, and the majority had a dark, stressful, isolating side to it.

[00:16:52] Beautiful images, sometimes, it was a young person looking at their phone and behind them there was a forest, a beautiful, magical rainbow, which they couldn't see behind them because they were looking at their phone.

[00:17:08] And during the co-analysis, the teachers were there, the school administration came, and they told us that they didn't know that these were their students' experiences on social media, because you don't see that in the classroom, you don't see that side of things. So it was striking for them.

[00:17:30] And another reason why we thought that this use of generative AI allows for critical conversations, allows us to explore these profound metaphors that come from teenagers who ask for "a young person in free fall," is that it's very creative and very meaningful too.

[00:17:50] Martine Turenne: It really speaks volumes about the state of mind of these young people. Coming back to their presence on social media, in your research, you are at such a stage in your research, what are the main lessons you have learned so far about their presence on social media?

[00:18:12] Megan Cotnam-Kappel: So what we wanted to do was start from the fact that this research is really focused on the voices of young people, so we started from their experiences and then asked them what it might mean to be an ethical citizen. 

[00:18:26] And in the third phase, we asked them what actions would you take? And it's from these actions that we have more leads to think about what it means, in practice, to be and how we, as adults, can better guide young people to become and act as more ethical citizens on social media.

[00:18:49] And in our analyses, we grouped all of this data from young people into three components. For them, there was a component of "being" an ethical citizen, which includes the emotions, identities, and attitudes of citizens. So, many of them talked to us about the pleasure of acting as an ethical citizen, but also about the emotions, sadness, or isolation that I mentioned.

[00:19:19] The "doing," the concrete actions they shared with us, were very clear: comment on or report harmful content, withdraw from a discussion that becomes toxic. The list of "what we should do" was as long as the list of "what not to do," and we asked them for their recommendations, and not doing this was as important as doing that.

[00:19:46] And thirdly, "knowledge." So this critical awareness that some of you shared with us during the first visit, others recognized the importance of, and here is the place of school at all three levels, obviously, if we had more space to talk about their being, more space to talk about doing, but knowledge, understanding the power of these algorithms, better understanding misinformation, how networks can alter our identities and our experiences. 

[00:20:17] That's where the young people had several ideas for us. They didn't always agree that it was their teachers' place to have this conversation, but as we discussed it, they told us that not everyone had the chance to talk about it at home, and not all parents know what's going on online.

[00:20:36] So we asked them, if it doesn't happen at home, then does school have a role to play, and then they understood a little better. And to start earlier, so we wanted to do this survey in high school because young people of that age have more experience, but they told us that this intervention should have been done in sixth or fifth grade, earlier, before they had to go through the difficulties they experienced at that age, so that's interesting for us too.

[00:21:12] Martine Turenne: Yes, that's very interesting because basically what you're saying is that schools and curricula still didn't cover this aspect very much, even though it's a fundamental part of their lives. And then, basically, these are gaps that persist, and we can say yes, we need to educate them, but the fact remains that it's still in its infancy.

[00:21:32] Megan Cotnam-Kappel: Yes, and talking with the teaching staff, of course, as I had missed, if it's not an explicit part of the graduate program, and we know that teachers are very busy and have a lot to take in, especially now with generative AI, conversations are added to the mix and that adds a lot to their workload. 

[00:21:58] But we also often hear that they are not sufficiently knowledgeable. So, often the first reaction from a teacher will be to say, "Right now, it's not in my curriculum, and I'm not an expert. I don't know enough about this new platform, which is the most popular, and we haven't necessarily had a lot of professional development on this issue." 

[00:22:24] So the first piece of advice I always give them, whether they are parents or teachers, is that they have a lot to contribute in terms of how to communicate with someone who thinks differently, how to manage their emotions, how to better understand and develop critical thinking skills with regard to the place of digital technology in their lives, which networks they use and why. How do they make informed choices about what content to share or not share? What thought process do they go through before deciding whether or not to post a comment, photo, etc.?

[00:23:00] Adults have a lot to contribute, regardless of whether they are experts on the platform. They are experts in the thought processes we engage in before these exchanges, in listening and asking questions, and in being curious about what they are experiencing. 

[00:23:22] They had a lot to tell us, and I wasn't an adult who played an important role in their lives, so I thought to myself that if we had their trust, then that was a great starting point, and that's what I shared with them. 

[00:23:36] We can undoubtedly provide better guidance to teaching staff for these discussions, but fortunately, they already have it, as do parents. With this project too, it's already an issue that we've had from the school board.

[00:23:52] The school boards that participated were very receptive. The school board in Ontario, with whom I collaborated, changed their ethical citizenship plan for the digital age. Yes, thanks to this collaboration with our project, they said they would like to explicitly integrate ethics into their plan. They changed the contract that young people sign at the beginning of the year to emphasize this ethical component and to include a discussion with parents before signing.

[00:24:26] I don't know if you have children who have to sign contracts, but often it's a signature without necessarily a critical discussion about the place of digital technology in their lives. But regardless of age, here we have integrated this ethical issue for the school board. 

[00:24:42] So we're already seeing very concrete results, and that's encouraging for us as a research team, because we believe that by listening to young people's voices and experiences, we can really better understand how to guide them.

[00:24:58] Martine Turenne: Did the young people you met talk about the violence they see on the internet, sexually explicit content, and so on? Did they talk to you a little bit about how it affects them and why they seek out this type of content? Because, well, it's very, very, very popular.

[00:25:16] Megan Cotnam-Kappel: So, in the case of my data collection, which took place in a classroom, we heard a few anecdotes about experiences that young people had heard about other students in the school in relation to sexual images. 

[00:25:30] But there are relatively few examples of this. My colleague in Alberta had more examples in her data collection where, in our representation of what we experienced online, we wanted to go into detail about me, what I experienced, which was having to see violent images, etc. 

[00:25:53] Generally speaking, I would say that we didn't go into that level of detail in the discussion because we also wanted it to be a space where everyone could share without recounting their own experiences. If the data collection had been individual, I think we would have had a lot of examples if they had been individual interviews. 

[00:26:13] But in this research project, we were much more focused on the educational aspect; we wanted to have a collection experience that could be turned into an educational experience. And I think the reality is that it's very sensitive for a teacher to address an issue where young people can talk in such detail about experiences that are really difficult.

[00:26:32] So, I think the question remains: how do we find that balance? Because if we ask them a question about their experiences on social media, we have to be prepared for that conversation, but it didn't often happen during a collection because we were always in a large group.

[00:26:54] Martine Turenne: I understand that there is inevitably a form of self-censorship that will occur because, well, there are things we don't want to discuss in a group, and they are at an age where they are still processing information, so they are still wondering whether something is right or wrong, which is why it's so important to have ethics.

[00:27:14] You are also an expert on digitization in linguistic minority communities, of course. The young people you met are French speakers, so they're in Ontario and Alberta. Is there a difference? Is their way of life, on social media or with ChatGPT, different from young people who would be in their mother tongue all the time, so to speak, because we know that a lot of things happen in English on the web?

[00:27:43] Megan Cotnam-Kappel: Yes, so since I started working here at the University of Ottawa, when I said that I was trying to bring together two fields of research, namely social networks and young people, digital technology, where a lot of research is conducted in English and researchers can go into great detail, for example, an entire career on how to engage in dialogue on Twitter. 

[00:28:06] And in my field of research, sociolinguistics and minority education, I realized that there is very little research that addresses the question you just asked me. Is the experience different for a Franco-Ontarian on social media than for a Francophone in Quebec or someone in a majority environment?

[00:28:27] And then generally the students would tell me in French, these are my private communications, the discussions were very, very rich, but I always had to go further: "And when do you choose whether it's in French or English?" It's in English, for sure. There was a lot of resistance to the place of French in their public life, on social media.

[00:28:51] That doesn't mean it doesn't exist, of course, we have French speakers in Ontario, in certain circles who are very proud and who will publish content in French. But in the same way that we say that our French-language schools have a dual mission, first, educational and second, cultural and linguistic.

[00:29:10] I would say that our interest as a minority community, our interest in social media and the place of digital technology more broadly in our students' lives, is twofold because, first, there is the educational aspect: how to protect them and ensure that they have positive experiences on social media.

[00:29:35] But secondly, there is the chance that with some guidance, with the opportunity to form more bilingual or French-speaking communities in public spaces, they will develop this identity, this desire to identify as French-speaking online.

[00:29:58] This is a goal that our English-speaking colleagues don't have, but which is very interesting for us. And that's why I've focused my new research chair on a new concept, that of digital fulfillment. 

[00:30:12] Martine Turenne: Yes, tell us a little about this concept. It's completely new. I wanted to know if you created the term or if it's something [...].

[00:30:21] Megan Cotnam-Kappel: I decided to create this term because I thought that beyond acquiring technical skills, beyond access to more technology, more training, more resources, I would like to imagine a situation where our Francophone minority communities use technology to thrive, to strengthen our cultural identity, to create communities, spaces for ourselves, to keep our language alive. 

[00:30:52] And this is an important shift in perspective because we are not always trying to catch up with another group; it is a way of imagining that, for us, a digital future could reflect our languages, cultures, and values.

[00:31:06] And that is the mission of my Chair in several research projects, [...], this research project here on the ethical citizenship of young people, is how, by better supervising these young people, they may choose these digital spaces in French thanks to our interventions that begin with their experiences.

[00:31:31] Martine Turenne: In closing, Megan, what do you hope your research will change in the way we educate about digital citizenship?

[00:31:40] Megan Cotnam-Kappel: So, the changes that we have already fortunately seen in the field with the school board that I had the pleasure of collaborating with on this project are what I would like to see on a provincial scale and in other contexts.

[00:31:55] I would like to see a strategic shift toward this relational ethical dimension and an understanding of young people's experiences and voices. Research can become outdated in a few years. If we publish a guide with 10 tips or pieces of advice for effectively supervising young people, it may no longer be relevant.

[00:32:21] So the approach is to start with discussions about what they are experiencing, to take into account what they are experiencing. I would also like to see more training. We are obviously starting with training at the University of Ottawa, but I would like to have more resources for these adults, not only for teachers, but as we said, for parents, for community members who are willing to have this discussion at the beginning of the year, when signing the contract, but also throughout the year in the car, if we're going to the rink during dinner, to be able to ask these questions, to listen and to start from the experience of their young people. 

[00:33:07] And generally, methodologies such as those that involve young people are very, very rich. Obviously, they take time, but they are very rich because we don't start from adult concepts that are sometimes a little too far removed from the reality of young people's lives. We really talk about their concrete experiences.

[00:33:24] Martine Turenne: But it's a great program, I'd say, and I really wish you good luck because it's true that there's a need for it, obviously not just in Ontario, but in all Canadian provinces, and teachers are saying the same thing: we don't have time to integrate them, we don't know how.

[00:33:40] So yes, it's a really great program. Well, Megan, I wish you the best of luck going forward. And thank you very much for the interview.

[00:33:48] Megan Cotnam-Kappel: Thank you very much, Martine. It was a pleasure.

[00:34:02] Martine Turenne: Thank you for listening to Congress in Conversation, and to my guest, Megan Cotnam-Kappel. I would also like to thank our friends and partners at the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the production company CitedMedia, without whom this podcast would not be possible, and of course, La Conversation Canada, our partner for this special feature

[00:34:35] You can find previous episodes of the Big Thinking Podcast on your favorite podcast platform. Let us know what you thought of this episode by connecting with us on social media. À la prochaine.