Sian's Digital Culture blog

An attempt begin to apply Hand’s chapter to our concern with technology and education. The full Hand reference is:

Hand, M (2008) Hardware to everywhere: narratives of promise and threat, chapter 1 of Making digital cultures: access, interactivity and authenticity. Aldershot: Ashgate. pp 15-42.

Hand offers a usefully broad overview of the politics of digital culture, aligning with what are, arguably, the dominant themes in popular cyberculture – visions of the dystopic and the utopic. But Hand takes these beyond the realm of the aesthetic to consider their place within a rigorous understanding of global politics and the power issues surrounding the flow of information.

He contrasts two broad narratives within the field of digital cultural studies: those relating to the digital as ‘promise’, and those which see it as ‘threat’, identifying a shift in the scholarship around this area from the generally hopeful (even utopic), to the negative (dystopic) and finally to a more even analytical focus on the ‘local and empirical’. These are all moves we can see within the scholarship of e-learning also, though the tendency toward the utopic is arguably still the most prominent among those who specialise in the field.

What Hand calls ‘first generation’ web studies tended to see the online as representing a separate cultural domain, a ‘cyberspace’ or ‘somewhere else’ in which there was a new freedom and autonomy from existing power structures and modes of meaning-making which depended on embodied co-presence. Utopic visions of such a domain tended to cluster around the idea of cyberspace as a place where the failings of western democracy might be addressed, or even fixed. For some, it was an anarchic space of free information flow existing beyond state control.

The apparently democratic and radical ‘freedom’ from the ‘obstacles’ of time, space and conventional modes of meaning-making informed many early and technophilic visions of the potential of e-learning, and to a large extent continue to do so. Such narratives, for Hand, also feed into discourses surrounding globalization and the emergence of forms of democratic governance which extend beyond conventional notions of the nation-state. Such discourses might be perceived as broadly ‘utopic’ (the internet as working against social exclusion and as enabling more active citizenship and responsive government), or ‘dystopic’ (the internet as a means of extending and strengthening the grip of ‘reflexive capitalism’, and enhancing potentials for surveillance and state control). Again, these are discussions which impact on institutional and governmental policies relating to the impact of technology upon the project of education.

In the section of the article entitled, ‘Infoscapes, Zones and Divides’, Hand talks more about the shift in scholarship away from the 90s vision of an autonomous cyberspace toward an attempt to understand in more depth how the digital and non-digital cultures intersect and interact, and how digitality re-structures the physical spaces we inhabit – an increasing focus on the inseparability of the online and the offline. Wired cities, some argue, represent a fundamental challenge to the urban landscape where ‘real’ public spaces intersect seamlessly with the ‘electronic city’ and global modes of civil interaction. In terms of education, such a view perhaps problematises the centrality of the idea of the ‘campus’, and the ‘institutional capital’ symbolised by university, college or school ‘real estate’. Visions of e-learning as an enhancement technology which does not fundamentally change anything about educational practice are brought into question in this view, and we are asked to engage with the idea of the digital as a global, boundariless educational media domain which radically shifts our notion of what constitutes the ‘university’ or ‘school’.

Of course, in this view there are issues of inclusion, exclusion, surveillance, privatisation, control and cultures of consumption, which Hand covers in some depth. Issues relating to exclusion and access are of course prominent in e-learning discussions, both explicitly (widening participation, equality of access to technology) and implicitly (particularly perhaps in the way in which ‘access’ concerns become refracted into the generationally-determinist discourse of the ‘digital native’). Control and surveillance are perhaps less prominent in e-learning scholarship than they might be, with the utopic tendency toward openness and democratisation being recently most prevalent in relation to the way in which we talk about ‘web 2.0’. As Hand points out, however, digital culture may be ‘participatory in that is constantly in flux’ but that does not make it ‘inherently democratic’ (37).

Hand ends by returning to the two dominant narratives – the broadly utopian and dystopian – which we are currently exploring via the film clips. There is on one side the view of the democratizing effects of technology and associated notions of empowerment, and on the other the ‘de-democratizing’ vision of technology as a means of ‘surveillance, privatisation and commodification’. Each of these visions are expressed both in the popular cybercultures represented by the film clips, and in the discourses surrounding e-learning and the impact of digital culture on education. It might be interesting to explore further, in twitter and associated blogging, this latter, e-learning specific theme over the coming days.