Which digital for which society ?

On Wednesday April 5th, a meeting was organized with the François 1er high school and students from the Fontainebleau Political Studies Institute at the Damesme campus in Fontainebleau, as part of the UPEC cultural festival. 

The afternoon was divided into several parts. First, a theatre-forum scene was performed by 2nd year Master's students in European and International Studies. Then, a first version of the documentary produced by Yves Lechermeier was screened.

As a reminder, Forum Theater is a method of interactive theater created by Augusto Boal in Brazil in the 1970s. The idea is to start with a collective problem and play out a scene on the subject. The audience can intervene to add a character or a situation, making the space and the play their own. The audience is no longer merely passive, but becomes active.

The scene that was played denounced the overuse of digital tools and the risks of misusing them. To provide a more detailed picture, the scene depicted an evening out with friends, to celebrate the promise of recruitment of a young woman, then on work-study with the META group. During the party, and under the influence of alcohol, the young woman bared her breasts, and some of her friends filmed and photographed her. Unfortunately, a photograph of the young woman's naked body was posted on social networks by a person who was not even present at the party, without the principal concerned being aware of it. The photo circulated rapidly, reaching tens of thousands of retweets a few days later. On Monday, just as she was returning to work, her manager called her in to tell her that she wouldn't be getting a permanent contract after her work-study contract, because she had tarnished the image of the META brand. As you may have guessed, he had seen the photograph posted on Twitter. Stunned, she didn't immediately understand what he was referring to. The scene ended like this. The high school and university students then took the floor to give their opinions on the scene they had just seen. Reactions were swift. The scene was then performed a second time. But this time, spectators were invited to raise their hands whenever they wished to interact with the actors, directly on the set (where the scene was played).

This theatre-forum experience was appreciated by all. The actors did a fantastic job. 

After having had a snack, all of us returned to the auditorium where, after a brief presentation by director Yves Lechermeier, has been screened a first (unfinished) version of the 2022 Students Citizen Assembly (SCA) documentary. The film depicts the first day of the 2022 SCA kick-off, October 10, 2022, which the director spent alongside students discussing the “digital and education” topic. There we saw various moments from that day: first plenary lectures, then deliberations and finally restitutions. Although students were not very talkative in the early afternoon (deliberations), they were assisted by benevolent facilitators and gradually opened up. This gave rise to intense reflections and, in fact, top-quality restitutions.

Written by Victor Pires Henriques

Translated by Dylan Breviere