Abstract
As we begin to witness a new phase in the integration of digital social media platforms with educational institutions, we ought to ask how learning exchanges may be altered as a result. Looking to transformations in knowledge exchanges outside of formal education, we find that these technologies have already modified the ways in which communities engage with each other. Gerlitz and Helmond explain that the Like Economy built into all major social media platforms flattens exchanges between users to engagement metrics. With online communities increasingly isolated from each other thanks to inscrutable recommendation algorithms, the most frequent cross-community exchanges manifest in outbursts of rage, producing a so-called ‘Dislike Society’. Practitioners would rather briefly unite to tear down other ways of living than to build new ones. Within the Dislike Society, any form of knowledge that could shape new communities is lost to the governance of algorithms in what Bernard Stiegler calls ‘proletarianisation’. To re-apply knowledge to the improvement of life, as suggested by Whitehead, the attention of learners needs to be shaped in response to new technological conditions. This is best achieved within the educational institutions that now face a reorganisation by the same companies that brought us the Dislike Society.
Highlights
Whilst educational institutions have seen creeping integration of external software and digital platforms for years, the recent COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the reliance on commercialgrade, pre-packaged products like Zoom, Microsoft 365 and G-Suite
The allure of simplicity in familiar software to structure and deliver education comes at the price of control, for teachers and learners, over the learning exchanges they have with each other
Outside of brick-and-mortar institutions, the knowledge that stitches society together is already being ravaged by an economy that prioritises ‘engagement’ over the livelihoods of individuals and their communities
Summary
Whilst educational institutions have seen creeping integration of external software and digital platforms for years, the recent COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the reliance on commercialgrade, pre-packaged products like Zoom, Microsoft 365 and G-Suite. As negative reactions to it are measured as engagement, the node in question gains connections and can be recommended to other users who would otherwise not encounter anything like it in their environments This can create a Cambrian explosion of hatred, producing exchanges across filter bubbles that would not arise out of positive affiliation. In the Dislike Society, despising each other is an assertion of free will To heal from this toxicity in digital social media, we need to engage in long processes of reconstructive knowledge to produce new methods of harnessing it to more curative ends. One of the key hallmarks of the Dislike Society is its outbursts of generalised opposition against content shared across filter bubbles It does not allow for new norms to be established in response to the needs of new online-offline co-created localities and rigidly maintains the filter bubbles produced by its algorithms. This time we need to take it literally and begin building together
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