Big Thinking Podcast · Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Génération connectée : les jeunes face aux dilemmes éthiques du numérique

August 29, 2025·35 min·1 clip

Martine Turenne opens by framing the episode around a plain but urgent question: how do young people see their place in a digital world that shapes daily life and civic life too? She introduces professeure Megane Cottenham-Cappell and her project VRA en ligne, which looks at ethical citizenship in online spaces, especially among francophone youth. The conversation begins with her academic path and the route it took through Ottawa and Corsica. It then turns to the research itself. Turenne asks how the project handled youth perspectives without turning them into generic opinions about social media. Cottenham-Cappell explains that the team worked with images the students had produced, then brought those images back to the young authors for co-analysis. That mattered because the images were treated as interpretations, not just artifacts. The dialogue is clear about what AI did and did not do in the project. Generative tools helped produce the visual material, but meaning still had to be worked out in discussion with the students who made it. The exchange also touches on the idea that young people use ChatGPT as a confidant or even a psychologist. Cottenham-Cappell says that was not a major part of this research. The study stayed closer to social media than to broader AI use. Even so, the episode leaves room for the wider question of how digital tools shape judgment. One image stands out: a student-created image of a teenager in free fall, phone in hand, smiling moments before impact. That image became a starting point for classroom discussion. Instead of asking whether students liked social media, the researchers asked what the image meant and what it revealed. The result is a conversation about method as much as topic. It shows how research can move from broad concern to concrete, student-generated evidence. It also shows how the symbolic language of youth can be read without being overwritten by adult assumptions. The tone stays measured throughout. The questions are long and layered. The answers are allowed to unfold. By the end, the episode has built a small but useful case for listening carefully before drawing conclusions about youth, technology, and ethics.

As heard by us

A careful look at how young people imagine ethics and risk in digital life.

Martine Turenne guides a careful conversation about how young people make sense of ethical life online, especially in a space that is also civic.

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Why you'd press play

Hear how francophone youth think through digital ethics, not just digital habits.

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