Digital Literacy - A Good Influence

Jack: Hello. My name’s Jack.

Rowan: And I’m Rowan.

Jack: Welcome to this week’s Premier Skills English podcast.

Rowan: In the Premier Skills English podcast, we talk about football and help you with your English.

Jack: We talk about all sorts of things, really. I mean, last week you and Rich were pretending to be pirates.

Rowan: That’s true, but it was Rich’s last week on the podcast.

Jack: Yes - and it was good fun. I hope you all enjoyed Rich’s new job fantasies last week. What do you think he’s going to do now, Rowan?

Rowan: I think he’ll probably go for the job in the circus. I can’t really see him as a James Bond type spy or a pirate captain.

Jack: I think you’re right. Quite a few of our listeners think that Rich will make a good spy. MoBeckham said he’ll be a successful spy because he’s smart and clever. Emmanuel Kwarteng also thinks he’ll be a good spy. Coreuser from Jordan however does not think he’ll be a good spy.

Rowan: No, but Hsn from Turkey thinks he’ll be successful in whatever job he chooses, which is a very nice thing to say.

Jack: Yes. And there are lots of really kind messages to Rich from people who are sad to see him leave. We are really going to miss him, but like all of the listeners who got in touch, we wish him well.

Rowan: What are we going to do without him?

Jack: I know.

Rowan: No, I mean today. What are we going to do today?

Jack: Right ... erm of course. Today ... So today, we’re going continue the series of podcasts we’ve been making about Digital Literacy.

Rowan: OK. So we made one podcast about functional skills and language you might need if you have a problem with a digital device.

Jack: And we made another about how to spot fake news.

Rowan: Yes. In that podcast we were trying to help Rich to stop being so gullible.

Jack: That was just a performance for the podcast, you know. Spotting fake news is a really important skill. There’s so much information online these days; if you don’t know how to evaluate it to see if you can trust it, then you might get hurt.

Rowan: Well, maybe. It’s certainly embarrassing if you find out you’ve been sharing something that’s not true. Today, we’re going to talk about something different. Did you see the news about the Facebook whistleblower?

Jack: I did. They have raised some interesting questions about the power of big social platforms. And we’re going to talk about one aspect of this today.

Rowan: In the roleplay, Jack is a bit worried about his niece who is about to get her first smartphone.

Jack: I ask Rowan for some advice and we talk about influence and influencers.

Rowan: But before we start the role-play, it’s time to look at last week’s football phrase.

Football Phrase

Jack: Every week we challenge you, our listeners, to work out our football phrase.

Rowan: We explain a word or phrase and you have to guess what it is. If you can work it out, write the word or phrase in the comments section.

Jack: We’re going to give you one more chance to guess now and then we’ll tell you the answer.

Rowan: Last week’s football phrase was free agent. This phrase describes a player who is not bound by a contract and so can join any team at any time. Clubs often sign free agents on short-term deals outside of the transfer window.

Jack: I thought that this one was quite difficult but lots of you got it right. Well done to Emmanuel from France who was the first with the correct answer.

Rowan: And congratulations to Mehmet Sisman, Hsn and Mobeckham from Turkey, Hayato from Japan, ArthurSandman from Brazil, Nebuwea Chizoba from Nigeria, Bagas from Indonesia, WSanta from Argentina, Thomassi from Hong Kong, AbdlRhman from Egypt, Emmanuel Kwarteng from Ghana and Mario Martinez and Gerardo94 from Cuba.

Jack: The correct answer to last week’s football phrase was free agent. We’ll have a new football phrase for you to guess at the end of the podcast.

Role-play

Jack: Now it’s time for this week’s role-play. This week the topic is social media and the impact it has on our lives.

Rowan: While you listen to the roleplay we want you to try to answer a question. The question is: Who is more worried about the effects of social media, me or Jack?

INT CAFE

Rowan: Hi Jack - How are you doing?

Jack: Rowan! Hi. I’m good, thanks. Actually, I’m really glad you’re here. I need your advice.

Rowan: Of course. What’s the problem?

Jack: OK. You know I have a niece?

Rowan: Yeah ...?

Jack: You see, my sister has asked me for some advice and I don’t know what to tell her. My niece is turning 13 this year and so my sister is getting her a phone.

Rowan: A smart phone?

Jack: Yes. Exactly.

Rowan: What do you mean exactly?

Jack: You know ... teenage girls and social media. My sister wants to know what I think and with all the stories in the news about how these things can be a dangerous influence for teenagers, I don’t know what to tell my sister.

Rowan: Yes - it’s a difficult question for a parent ... or an uncle.

Jack: So what do you think?

Rowan: I think it’s like everything in life. It can be good and it can be bad. It depends on how you use it.

Jack: But we never had this problem when we were growing up. There was no such thing as influencers when we were kids.

Rowan: No, but you must have had role-models. They were similar, weren’t they.

Jack: I suppose.

Rowan: In fact, it’s better these days. You can follow your heroes and role-models directly. Did you know that Cristano Ronaldo has over 450 million followers. Who do you follow?

Jack: I follow Arsenal’s official channels and the Premier League. And some vlogs about music and photography.

Rowan: And I bet you get lots of great information from these vloggers and blogs.

Jack: I know. I think that Facebook and Google’s algorithms work well for me. I also get loads of content from Reddit. I really like that you can subscribe to and unsubscribe from different topics and subreddits.

Rowan: Yeah. You need to be active and understand how it all works.

Jack: But I don’t understand. I mean ... I was reading an article about influencers on instagram and I hadn’t heard of any of them. I’m still not sure how some of them make money. I took a look at some of the pictures they share and it’s really not for me. As you say, you have to find the right people and topics to follow and subscribe to and then you’ll find content that interests you.

Rowan: So there’s your answer. You should tell your sister to help your niece to subscribe to topics that she’s interested in and to make sure she follows people who are going to be positive role models.

Jack: I think that’s good advice. Thanks Rowan.

Role-play feedback

Jack: Before the roleplay, we asked you a question. The question was: Who is more worried about social media? Me or Rowan.

Rowan: I think we are both a bit worried about the impact of social media, but in the role-play, Jack was more concerned than I was.

Jack: So this podcast is a bit different. We do want to focus on language as always, but we also want to focus on some of the problems of social media. These are new problems that have grown out of the way the internet works and are an important part of digital literacy.

Rowan: However, I think it’s important to recognise that these problems have come about as a side effect of social media and the internet. I still think that the internet offers more advantages than disadvantages to young people, you just need to know to use it responsibly.

Jack: We’re talking about influence today and three sorts of influence that can be positive and negative and we’ll try to explain the vocabulary that we used in the podcast as we go along.

Rowan: But first, we should make sure everyone knows what the word influence means.

Jack: Yes of course. Influence is a noun and a verb. The verb to influence means to change or affect what someone or something does. It’s used a lot to talk about what changes or affects children as they grow up. You can talk about the people that influenced you when you were growing up. These are the people that helped you when you had to decide what to study or what you wanted to do as a job, for example.

Rowan: The noun form influence is used to talk about the same thing. You can say that something is a good or bad influence on someone and in the past you can say that a person had a strong influence on you. My grandmother had a very strong influence on me when I was growing up.

Jack: The first sort of influence that we want to talk about are role-models. A role-model is a person that you admire, somebody that you copy, that you try to be like. On social media, some people are a bit like professional role models, they are called influencers and they use their popularity to persuade people to buy things.

Rowan: Who were your role-models when you were a kid, Jack?

Jack: Erm ... when I was little, I think my role-models were Michael Jackson and Crocodile Dundee.

Rowan: I’m not sure they were a very good influence.

Jack: No, but when I was a kid, they were really remote. You couldn’t interact with them like you can today.

Rowan: I think this is a good thing. My nephew is a massive fan of Cristiano Ronaldo. I think he’s a really good role-model in lots of ways. He follows him on social media.

Jack: To follow is an interesting verb. It used to mean to walk or travel behind someone, and go wherever they go. It still means that you can still follow your friends on a walk in the woods, but it’s more commonly used online.

Rowan: To follow someone online, you have to click on a button on their social media page. If you do this, you will get updates and content from that person whenever they post something online.

Jack: As well as following individuals, you can follow organisations. I said in the role-play that I follow Arsenal’s official channels. We use the word channel to talk about the different social media platforms. So official channels are the pages and profiles that are maintained by organisations. I follow Arsenal on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

Rowan: You need to be careful though because there are sometimes unofficial channels as well and they can be a source of fake news. You need to make sure you follow the official channels.

Jack: To follow is very similar to the word subscribe. In the past, to subscribe meant to pay to receive a newspaper or magazine regularly. I had a National Geographic subscription for a few years when I was a teenager.

Rowan: I think that’s still the main meaning of the verb to subscribe but you can also subscribe to newsletters and companies when you give out your email address online. The negative form, to unsubscribe is probably used more often. I get loads of emails from companies that I have somehow, mostly by accident, subscribed to. I try to unsubscribe, to stop receiving the messages, but I still get so many.

Jack: The second sort of influence we want to talk about are google and facebook’s algorithms.

Rowan: The word algorithm is quite complicated. It means the set of rules that you can put into a computer to solve a problem. But more commonly than that, it means the way that facebook and google and lots of other online companies decide what content to show you.

Jack: When you search for something on google, the search engine does more than just look for the words that you have searched for. There is a set of rules that include where you live and all sorts of other information that google has stored about you to filter and present what google hopes is the best information for you.

Rowan: Facebook and twitter work in the same way. When you open these websites, you see news on your feed. This is selected for you based on the algorithm and the information these websites store about you.

Jack: So if you follow someone on line, you will start to see stories from them and also from people that are similar. So if you follow Cristiano Ronaldo, you may also see stories about other Manchester United players.

Rowan: I think some social media websites are watching everything you do online and so you have to be careful what you search for or your news feed might end up full of adverts for stuff you don’t like.

Jack: Can you think of any consequences of this sort of influence? This is a big topic that’s going to be in the news for a long time.

Rowan: What’s the third sort of influence?

Jack: So as well as role-models and the big social media algorithms, there is another sort of influence that worries me. However, this sort of influence has been around forever, social media has just made it a bit stronger. This is the influence of your friends and peers.

Rowan: When I was growing up, teachers would warn us about the dangers of peer pressure. Your peers are the people that are the same age as you. So this normally means your classmates and school friends.

Jack: When people around you are doing something, then you might feel pressure to do the same thing. I think that social media makes this worse because when you share things online, your friends can click on the like button and that makes people happy.

Rowan: It’s nice to be liked and to have people support you online. But this can add to the pressure to do things or to try to be like other people online. There has been some research that suggests that some teenagers are made unhappy because they are trying harder to fit in and get likes.

Jack: Yeah. And kids can be hard on each other. Some kids were picked on when I was at school and I hate to think what sort of abuse they might have received online. You have to be careful who you connect with online.

Task

Jack: Your task this week is to think about who has been the greatest influence in your life. What person, perhaps someone you know, perhaps a role model has had the biggest influence on you? How would your life be different without their influence? Leave your answers in the comments section on the page for this podcast or in the review section in Apple podcasts.

Football Phrase

Rowan: OK - our football phrase. So regular listeners will know that every week, we challenge you to work out a mystery football phrase.

Jack: This week’s football phrase is playing ******* *** *****. This is a style of attacking play that involves short passes to teammates who manage to find space behind the opposition midfielders and in front of the opposition defenders to probe the defence for weaknesses and spaces to attack. When a team plays in a 442 formation, you can talk about the 2 defenders as the defensive **** and the 4 in the middle are the midfield ****. Palace attacked Leicester by playing ******* *** *****, with short five-yard passes to try to find a way through to goal.

Rowan: If you know the answer to the football phrase, leave a comment on the page for this podcast on the Premier Skills English website. If you have a football phrase that you would like us to use in the podcast, just get in touch and let us know.

Jack: Before we finish we just wanted to say that we hope you found this podcast and the vocabulary useful and we hope all of you stay fit and healthy.

Rowan: Bye for now and enjoy your football.