The Digital Age and Its Discontents: Critical Reflections in Education

Matteo Stocchetti

doi:10.33134/hup-4

Abstract

Three decades into the ‘digital age’, the promises of emancipation of the digital ‘revolution’ in education are still unfulfilled. Furthermore, digitalization seems to generate new and unexpected challenges – for example, the unwarranted influence of digital monopolies, the radicalization of political communication, and the facilitation of mass surveillance, to name a few. This volume is a study of the downsides of digitalization and the re-organization of the social world that seems to be associated with it. In a critical perspective, technological development is not a natural but a social process: not autonomous from but very much dependent upon the interplay of forces and institutions in society. While influential forces seek to establish the idea that the practices of formal education should conform to technological change, here we support the view that education can challenge the capitalist appropriation of digital technology and, therefore, the nature and direction of change associated with it. This volume offers its readers intellectual prerequisites for critical engagement. It addresses themes such as Facebook’s response to its democratic discontents, the pedagogical implications of algorithmic knowledge and quantified self, as well as the impact of digitalization on academic profession. Finally, the book offers some elements to develop a vision of the role of education: what should be done in education to address the concerns that new communication technologies seem to pose more risks than opportunities for freedom and democracy.

Highlights

Technology, Society and EducationMatteo StocchettiArcada University of Applied SciencesThe Digital Age and Its Discontents is a book project inspired by Sigmund Freud’s reflection on the downsides of progress
Rather than expressing a supposedly benevolent capitalist spirit that nurtures the innovation of new financial instruments, the high risks associated with them testify to the need to keep such profit-seeking spirit at bay, this is increasingly difficult in the present political configuration
The case of military technology demonstrates how deeply current digital innovation is linked to the advancement of the security interests of coercive state apparatuses such as the military and the intelligence services, together with the private companies that benefit from such interests

Summary

Introduction

Imagine a student enrolling in an Introduction to Philosophy course. She checks the required readings, sources the relevant materials and blocks out the required time in her agenda. MOOCs offer many advantages, allowing people to study wherever and whenever they want, interacting with leading scholars and other students from around the world They promise to broaden access to those who do not have the opportunity or means to participate in traditional forms of location-based higher education, and to allow older people to ‘up-skill’, re-train or enjoy the pleasures of learning. Against these democratizing and empowering claims, some humanities scholars have voiced scepticism as to whether MOOCs can deliver the sort of intellectual training and personal cultivation (Bildung— discussed more extensively below) that is provided within the walls of the university, where staff and students interact face-to-face, in relatively intimate settings, to discuss issues they deem important rather than being driven by external definitions of relevance. We suggest that far from confirming the sceptics’ perceived incompatibility between a technology-intensive environment and the Bildung ideal, experiences with MOOCs to date may serve to promote several of the values of the humanities

Conclusion

A Decade of MOOCs

Findings