Here it is: PDF of the full dissertation. Right-click and choose Save As…

mejias__networked_proximity.pdf (1.2 MB)

I’m removing all previously posted drafts from this blog.

There are important differences that make this final version much better.

Abstract

Networked Proximity:
ICTs and the Mediation of Nearness

Ulises Ali Mejias, 2007

The network as a map of interconnected elements or nodes has become a favored metaphor for describing a wide variety of social systems in our age. But the network is transitioning from being merely a way to describe social realities to serving as a model for organizing them. The large-scale adoption of information and communication technologies is producing new architectures of networked participation in which the social subject becomes a decentralized node, unbound by location or physical space. Nearness (in terms of social proximity) acquires a new significance, since the distance between two nodes—regardless of their physical location—is practically zero, while the distance between a node and something outside the network is practically infinite. Thus, physical proximity is replaced by informational availability as the basis for experiencing social nearness, resulting in a form of networked proximity characterized simultaneously by a sense of renewed connectedness to the local (hyperlocality), and a sense of distancelessness that makes any point in the network readily accessible. Hence, critiques of networked sociality need to account for the fact that the network is neither anti-social nor anti-local: it thrives on making social connections, and is indifferent to where nodes are located in relation to the social subject (physically near or far). Instead, critiques need to focus on the epistemological exclusivity engendered by the fact that nodes are only capable of recognizing other nodes. In other words, the network imposes a nodocentric filter on the social, and only elements that can be mapped onto the network (the nodes) are rendered as real. This model is then used to institute a paradigm of progress and development in which those elements outside the network can acquire value only by becoming part of the network. The social becomes subordinate to the economics of the network, and the network becomes a model of subjectivation that prepares individuals for entrance into this form of sociality. In this context, the paranodal—the space between nodes—becomes an important site for disidentification from the network, correcting the nodocentric tendencies of networked sociality and providing alternative models of social engagement.

[cc photo credit: striatic]

But is there something anti-social about imagining and organizing our social realities in terms of networks?

Most critiques of the rise of the network as a model for organizing social realities focus on what it has replaced: tightly-woven, location-specific communities (a community itself can be defined as a particular kind of network, but for the moment let’s stick to these conventional terms). Wellman (2002) traces how social formations have developed from densely-knit traditional communities to sparsely-knit but still location-specific “Glocalized” networks (think cities connected to other cities), to networks unbound to any specific physical space, or what he calls Networked Individualism, where “people remain connected, but as individuals rather than being rooted in the home bases of work unit and household.” (p. 5)

Thus, an important characteristic of Networked Individualism is the overcoming of physical space. Today’s networks connect individuals regardless of the distance between them. This has led various authors to announce—some with glee and some with regret —the Death of Distance. But more than its elimination, Networked Individualism promotes the reconfiguration of distance: it is not only our relatonship to the far that is changed, but also our relationship to the near. Of course, early on critics sensed a threat to the near in this reconfiguration, and saw in Networked Individualism the destruction of communal location-specific forms of sociality (i.e., the irrelevancy of the near). However, this has not proven to be necessarily the case, as Network Individualism can play a part in (re)connecting people to the local. The network then also becomes a model for “reapproaching nearness” (Mejias, 2005), with the added benefit that nearness now encompasses new forms of global awareness.

But this is where it starts to get tricky. Reapproaching the local thorough the network is not simply a case of arriving right back where we started after a process of dislocation and re-location. It’s not simply reaching our nose through the back of our head. The near that the network delivers is a slightly different near, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

It’s true that our relation to the near has always been regulated by some thing or other. Mediation between the individual and the world is not an invention of the network. But the point is to try to understand how the network mediates our understanding of the world, and how the network’s particular kind of mediation competes or participates with other forms of sociality.

My thesis is that the network undermines productive forms of sociality by over-privileging the node. It might be difficult to see this because nodes are not anti-social (they thrive by forming links to other nodes), nor are they anti-local (they link to nodes in their immediate surrounding just as easily as they link to other nodes). But what I am trying to say is that to the extent that the network is composed of nodes and connections between nodes, it discriminates against the space between the nodes, it turns this space into a black box, a blind spot. In other words, networks promote nodocentrism. In this reconfiguration of distance, new ‘nears’ become available, but the ‘far’ becomes the space between nodes. To ignore this dark matter is to ignore the very stuff on which the network is suspended, much like the fish ignoring the water around it.

How is internodal space collapsed? If roads and highways connect any two nodes, they also allow for the commuter to quickly bypass the space between the nodes. Those locations may be nodes in other networks, but from the perspective of the two nodes being connected, they do not matter. Of course, for networks unbound by physicality, the nature of what is black boxed is different. Wellman (2002) writes:

The Internet both provides a ramp onto the global information highway and strengthens local links within neighborhoods and households. For all its global access, the Internet reinforces stay-at-homes. Glocalization occurs, both because the Internet makes it easy to contact many neighbors, and because fixed, wired Internet connections tether users to home and office desks. (p. 4)

The point here is not so much that the Internet forces people to stay at home, and that it black boxes one’s surroundings. After all, the promise of pervasive computing and ‘the internet of things’ (incorporating objects outside the network into it) is that nodes becomes physically unbound, mobile, “ubiquitous.” The point is that instead of stay-at-home, the Internet reinforces stay-in-network. One can have all the interlinking of nodes one wants both at a local and global level, but one must remain in the network; one must adopt the network’s ontology of what constitutes a node, how links between nodes are to be established, and how to collapse the space between nodes (and I’m not even going to go, for a change, into issues of who controls and regulates the network). The network is an epistemology, a way of interpreting the world, a model for organizing reality.

We are told not to fuss about the space between nodes, because everything is a potential node and can be added to the network. Actor-network theory tells us to ‘follow the actors’ to uncover what kind of links they form with other nodes, thus giving us the framework to consider everything a node. But a network is the opposite of continuous space, so no matter how many nodes we add there will always be, necessarily, space between nodes. Without that space, there would simply be no network.

So what are the consequences of interpreting the social as a network? According to Vandenberghe (2002), scientific explanations of social realities as networks flatten the richness of symbolism and replace it with causality, reducing interaction to economic exchange governed purely by interest. In other words, social network theories fail to account for the ontological differences between humans and non humans, explaining human agency in dehumanized terms:

Being-in-the-world among humans and non humans is systematically displaced by a formal, atomistic, intellectualistic and pseudo-economic analysis of the vulgar interests of humans who link up with other humans and non humans, translating their interests in a reciprocal exploitation of each other’s activity for the satisfaction of the personal interests of each of the parties involved. Humans are thus no longer seen as co-operative ants, but as egoistic ‘r.a.t.s’ – i.e. as rational action theorists who behave like ‘centres of calculation’, strategically associating and dissociating humans and non humans alike, pursuing their own political ends by economic means. Conclusion: when science enters in action, meaningful action disappears and all we are left with is a pasteurized and desymbolized world of strategically acting dehumanized humans, or humants. (p. 55, my emphasis)

Not only are such explanations bound to yield limited understandings of the world, but when actualized as models for organizing the social, they institutionalize an individualistic form of interest as the only viable motive for cooperation. It might not seem like networked individualism is anti-social at first, because networks thrive on forming social links. But in the long term, the effect of reducing the social to transactions of capital (even if it is non-monetary ’social’ capital) is detrimental, since it subordinates the social to the rules of exchange. At that point, as Vandenberghe argues, “the economy is no longer embedded in the society… society is embedded in the economy” (p. 58).

The tyranny imposed by social network theories is that a node acknowledges only other nodes, and can relate to those nodes only in terms of commodified exchange. If something is not a node, it cannot be engaged in exchange, and therefore it has no value. Nodes take for granted the internodal space that supports the network (and it is often a question of literally “supporting” the network through the labor and decisions that happen in those dark internodal spaces). ‘So what?’ some might ask. Surely, we cannot pay attention to everything, and as a result we have developed self-interested strategies (predating networks) for making some things more relevant than others. My point is that although self-interest might be a functional principle to organize networks, even at a local level, it might not be sustainable as the basis for a social ethics, which requires a degree of selfless engagement. If we are going to go with the network metaphor, we need a praxis and an ethics, for engaging with the world beyond our interests, which means accounting for the space between nodes, becoming invested in the non-nodal.

References:

Mejias, U. 2005, Re-approaching nearness: Online communication and its place in praxis. First Monday, vol. 10, no. 3. Retrieved April 28, 2005 from http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_3/mejias/index.html

Vandenberghe, F. (2002). Reconstructing Humants: A Humanist Critique of Actant- Network Theory. Theory, Culture & Society Vol. 19(5/6): 51–67. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: SAGE.

Wellman, B. (2002). Little boxes, glocalization, and networked individualism. In M. Tanabe, P. van den Besselaar & T. Ishida (Eds.), Digital cities II: Computational and sociological approaches (pp. 10-25). Berlin: Springer. Accessed on October 3, 2006 from http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/publications/littleboxes/littlebox.PDF
Picture credit:

phauly

Introduction: Why Won’t Lyotard Go Away?

As I have suggested before, we have not done enough in the field of Education and Technology to address Lyotard’s concerns about the commodification of knowledge through the digital technologies we use (commodification means the transformation of things with no monetary value into things with monetary value —or commodities— through their subordination to the logic of capitalism). To put it in alarmist terms that are certain to catch your attention: If we are to take Lyotard’s analysis seriously, the gadgets and gizmos we are currently enamored with —edublogs, eduwikis, eduRSS feeds, and such— are nothing more than the tools of hegemonic capitalism.

Even if that sounds a bit harsh, the fact is that Lyotard provides a fertile framework for us to engage in an internal critique of our tools and methods. Only by engaging in such a critique can we guarantee the sustainability of our practice. To that end, Gane (2003) has done us all a big favor by summarizing the central concepts of Lyotard’s theory in his article Computerized capitalism: The media theory of Jean-François Lyotard. Gane describes the central themes in Lyotard’s critique as they relate to the new media, mainly:

that the computerization of society is accompanied by a new stage in the commodification of knowledge (The Postmodern Condition); that we are witnessing the speedup and extension of capitalist culture through the reduction of knowledge to information and information to bits (The Inhuman); and that new media technologies promote the streaming of culture (even oppositional culture) into homogeneous forms of capital that can be exchanged, received and consumed almost ahead of time (Postmodern Fables). (Gane, 2003, p.1)

In this post, I use elements from Lyotard’s theories to explore how the information and communication technologies that facilitate the social construction and aggregation of knowledge contribute to its commodification. I argue for a reframing of the concept of the digital divide as an important paralogical tool to resist this logic. This reframing is necessary because, currently, the digital divide is used in just the opposite way: to rationalize a model of progress and development where those aspects of our lives that are not technologized must become technologized, to the point where ubiquitous computing is normalized as the goal of innovation (and since technologizing and commodification are closely tied in capitalism, ubiquitous computing means ubiquitous commodification). In short, I attempt to reframe the digital divide as an instrument of resistance against the increasing commodification of knowledge, not as an ailment of the underprivileged.

What Is Paralogy?

Challenging the commodification of knowledge requires methods to un-think the logic of capitalism. One such method can perhaps be found in Lyotard’s notion of paralogy.

The etymology of this word resides in the Greek words para —beside, past, beyond— and logos in its sense as “reason.” Thus paralogy is the movement beyond or against reason. Lyotard sees reason not as a universal and immutable human faculty or principle but as a specific and variable human production; “paralogy” for him means the movement against an established way of reasoning. (Woodward, 2006)

A paralogy is a way to see things as more than commodities, to think outside the logic of capitalism. Paralogy plays an important role in challenging the role of innovation as it is traditionally understood (e.g., innovation as the creation of new things to consume and new methods for turning things into commodities). Lyotard sees innovation as “under the command of the system, or at least used by it to improve its efficiency” (1984, p. 61). Paralogy is diametrically opposed to innovation in the sense that it is a “creative and productive resistance to totalizing metanarratives” (Readings, 1991, pp. 73-74). Paralogy, according to Gane (2003),

concerns itself with everything that cannot be resolved within the (capitalist) system. In so doing, this form of resistance works by disrupting the instrumental logic of the modern order, producing, for example, the unknown out of the known, dissensus out of consensus, and with this generating a space for micro-narratives that had previously been silenced. (p.8)

But what ‘totalizing metanarratives’ supported by modern technologies (including technologies that facilitate the social construction and aggregation of knowledge) need to be resisted? Haven’t these technologies improved our lives by giving us new ways of re-assembling the social? Don’t they have the potential to engender more constructivist, active, distributed, connected or [insert your fav buzz word here] forms of learning? In short, what’s there to resist?

The Management of Social Knowledge

Lyotard’s critique of the new media is that it has established commodification and efficiency as the ultimate measures of the value of knowledge. According to Gane’s reading of Lyotard,

the emergence of new media has changed the form and status of knowledge, which is now judged less by its intrinsic value than by its performance, or rather by how economically valuable, efficient and programmable it is. Lyotard’s thesis then is that culture has been transformed by digital technology, which… follows the principle of ‘optimal performance’: ‘maximizing output (the modifications obtained) and minimizing input (the energy expended in the process)’ (Lyotard 1984: 44). (Gane, 2003, p.5)

The Knowledge Management movement, precursor and inspiration for the Social Software movement, sought to capitalize on knowledge that was held collectively by communities of practice. According to Chan & Garrick,

[t]his functional emphasis is traceable in its lineage to the popular belief, characterized by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995), that tacit knowledge can be converted into explicit knowledge through IT systems. By capturing knowledge, it can be more widely replicated and shared. By inserting human agency into the equation, these authors see possibilities to sort, convert, retrieve, and share knowledge actively. Henceforth, knowledge is transformed into a more tangible commodity. (Chan & Garrick, 2003, p.1)

Is this not the underlying principle and unmentioned mission of social software: to convert tacit individual knowledge into explicit —and commodified— social knowledge? As I have pointed out before in the context of social bookmarking and tagging: “the aggregation of inherently private goods (tags and what they describe) has public value” (Mejias 2005). But what happens when the public value is ultimately controlled by private interests? As anyone reading the blogs when Yahoo! acquired Flickr or del.icio.us could see, the commodification of social knowledge has very important consequences for the interests of users vs. corporations.

Hence the emphasis in the Open Source / Open Content movement to ensure that aggregated knowledge remains in the hands and at the service of the “public” (however one wishes to define this loaded term). This subversive application of technology is possible because the affordances of technology can be exploited either in the interests of commodification or against them, as Lyotard himself recognized even before the Open Source / Open Content movement gained mainstream recognition:

…Lyotard states, in the final passage of The Postmodern Condition, that new media technologies can be more than simply tools of market capitalism, for they can be used to supply groups with the information needed to question and undermine dominant metaprescriptives (or what might be called ‘grand narratives’). The preferred choice of development, for him at least, is thus clear: ‘The line to follow for computerization to take . . . is, in principle, quite simple: give the public free access to the memory and data banks’ (Lyotard 1984: 67). (Gane, 2003, p.9)

But the argument is larger than merely who owns the technology, and hence, who owns the accumulated knowledge. Open Source / Open content projects offer an alternative in terms of ownership (and that alternative is indeed important), but not in terms of what digitization does to knowledge. Even then, according to Lyotard, having free access to the technology would at least allow us to gather the information needed to ‘question and undermine dominant metaprescriptives,’ including the one that says that knowledge should be judged by how “economically valuable, efficient and programmable it is” (Gane, 2003, p.5). Are we in fact engaged in such questioning, or have we become distracted by the speed of innovation?

Innovation as an End

How is recognition achieved in the field of educational technology? While research and analysis are important, there is nothing in terms of generating ‘buzz’ like releasing the next big thing in educational technology: a new software program, a new platform, a new service, a new community or a new collection of content. In a system where attention has become a commodity, and the basis for a new economy, even code or content released under an Open paradigm needs to behave as a commodity in so far as it is forced to compete for the attention of users. Thus, the focus is not on questioning the logic of the system, but on creating more code and content. Even ’successful’ blogging is characterized by a simple formula: s/he with the most content generated/aggregated in the less time wins. I sympathize with Suchman when she expressed

… hope for genuinely new reconfigurings of the technological, based not in inventor heroes or extraordinary new devices, but in mundane, and innovative, practices of collective sociomaterial infrastructure building. (Suchman, 2005, p. 11)

Instead of the slow and painful work of infrastructure building, we pursue innovation in the form of vertiginous technological and content development. As Lyotard said: “To go fast is to forget fast, to retain only the information that is useful afterwards, as in ‘rapid reading’” (in Gane, 2003, p.10). Suchman (2005), quoting Barry (1999), suggests that:

there might actually be an inverse relation between the speed of change, and the expansion of inventiveness – that “moving things rapidly may increase a general state of inertia; fixing things in place before alternatives have the chance of developing.” (Suchman, 2005, p. 11)

Gane, in his summarizing of Lyotard, remarks:

Technological development then speeds up life and culture, while at the same subjecting them to principles of efficiency, performance and control. The digital transformation of culture, however, also has a further consequence, namely that in our day-to-day processing of short ‘bytes’ of information we ourselves become more like machines. In other words, through our use of new media technologies, we, as humans, become increasingly ‘inhuman’. (Gane, 2003, p.12)

What does this increasing inhumanity look like, and where does it lead?

Ubiquitous Computing, Ubiquitous Commodification

As educational technologists, we are often invested in augmenting the application of technology, which we justify by calling attention to the enhanced learning opportunities engendered in the process. However noble the intentions, this does not detract from the fact that more technology means a pronouncement, not a reduction, of the symptoms that Lyotard describes. Augmenting the application of technology points, logically, to ubiquitous computing, which —we tell ourselves— is all about empowering humans and privileging knowledge by getting the machine out of the way. Galloway (2004) summarizes the ethos of the movement thus:

ubiquitous computing was meant to go beyond the machine —render it invisible— and privilege the social and material worlds. In this sense, ubiquitous computing was positioned to bring computers to ‘our world’ (domesticating them), rather than us having to adapt to the ‘computer world’ (domesticating us). (Galloway, 2004)

But this rationalization of ubiquitous computing is flawed because it equates invisibility with the absence of influence. It is precisely about ‘domesticating’ our behavior to conform to the machine’s rules. Conditioning ourselves to ignore the machines means that they disappear only from our perspective, not from the perspective of someone without the technology, and certainly not from the machine’s perspective. Their agency and their impact on our behavior does not vanish. On the contrary, it is when we reach this state of conditioned forgetfulness that the commodification of knowledge becomes absolute, and that the status of certain metanarratives becomes incontestable.

We should not seek to domesticate or naturalize technology. Instead, we should strive to retain its artificiality in our lives. This is not the same as prescribing a Neo-Luddism. I firmly believe, like Lyotard, that the flexible affordances of technology can open up ways for critique and introspection. But this can only be achieved if we avoid taking technology for granted to the point of making it invisible. The key is to reaffirm the differences between those aspects of our lives that we have (intentionally or unintentionally) opened up to technologizing and those that we have not, not with the intention of establishing a wall between them but, on the contrary, with the intention of mapping the tensions, influences, and overlaps between the two. This is where I believe the digital divide as paralogy can re-enter the picture.

Digital Divide Redux

Most of the discourse surrounding the digital divide (cf. Sassi 2005) centers on the ‘problem’ of those who have no access to technology, and what the role of those who do have access should be in addressing this problem. The digital divide has become a metanarrative in its own right, establishing that the inevitable goal is more technology, applied to more aspects of our lives, and available to more people. Only then will the playing field be leveled, and true progress will be achieved, we are told.

I do not mean to suggest that some of the problems of our age could not be alleviated with more technology or, more accurately perhaps, with a more even distribution of the technology we already have. But here I am interested in the discourse invoked by the word ‘divide.’ As I have summarized elsewhere (Mejias, 1999), the discourse of Modernity relies on a distinction between modern societies and pre-modern societies to establish a primacy of the former over the latter, a primacy defined to a large extent in terms of technological progress that pre-modern societies must strive to achieve. Massey (1999) has argued that this dynamic enacts in space what is assumed to be a lag in time:

When we use terms such as ‘‘advanced’’, ‘‘backward’’, ‘‘developing’’, ‘‘modern’’ in reference to different regions of the planet what is happening is that spatial difference are being imagined as temporal… The implication is that places are not genuinely different; rather they are just ahead or behind in the same story: their ‘‘difference’’ consists only in their place in the historical queue. (Massey 1999, quoted in Rodgers 2004, p.14)

However, it is not simply a matter of waiting for those ‘laggards’ to catch up. As anyone who has seriously studied the development of the so-called Third World can surmise, capitalism requires the existence of lack for the many in order to generate plenty for the few. The digital divide, in other words, is there by design. May (2004), reviewing Huw’s The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World (2003), remarks:

Huws’s corrective reminds us that the ‘freedom’ of the nomad is bought at the cost of the call-centre operatives’ lack of control over their working life (always being available for us means not being available for themselves)… [R]emember that you can only detach yourself from the real because of the continuing drudgery of the cybertariat [the cyber proletariat]. (May, 2004, p. 3, my note)

To reduce very complex political and economic processes to their most simplistic form: the wealth and materials necessary to maintain the lifestyle of the ubiquitous computing nomad are abstracted from the labor of those who are —to paraphrase Freire (1970)— objects, not subjects in the system. [The image of the nomad used here implies 'wireless' mobility, and is not related to the Deleuzian imagery that implies the dynamism of being, which I have referred to before.]

Thus, the current discourse on ubiquitous computing operates at two levels. At the personal level, ubiquitous computing implies a decrease of the digital divide by diminishing the demarcation between the technologized and non-technologized aspects of our lives. At the social level, ubiquitous computing implies an increase of the digital divide in the form of a greater demarcation between the digital-have’s and the digital-have-not’s.

It is in this sense that I argue for the need to reclaim the digital divide as a paralogy to resist the ‘rationality’ of capitalism and ubiquitous computing: At the personal level, the digital divide can help us question the ontological assumptions we make with each new introduction of technology into our lives. At the social level, the digital divide can help us disrupt the narrative of underdeveloped digital have-not’s that need to ‘catch up.’

Bridging Divides Through Reconfigured Nearness

By this I do not mean to suggest that we embrace the paralogy of the digital divide as a way to protest the supposed separation that technology effects between us and reality. For example, I begin to suspect a move in the wrong direction when Gane writes:

The point here is not simply that machines are taking over operations that used to be performed by human minds, nor is it that information is evaluated according to instrumental principles of ‘use’. It is rather that the digitalization of data tears both cultural artefacts and sensory experience from their moorings in physical time and space. The result is what Lyotard terms a ‘hegemonic teleculture’, in which writing, the memorization or inscription of culture, and even events themselves take place at a distance. And this situation demands, in turn, that the very idea of experience in the ‘here and now’ be rethought. (Gane 2003, p.13)

Indeed it needs to be rethought, but perhaps Lyotard did not go far enough in reconceptualizing nearness when he wrote:

What does ‘here’ mean on the phone, on television, at the receiver of an electronic telescope? And the ‘now’? Does not the ‘tele’-element necessarily destroy presence, the ‘here-and-now’ of the forms and their ‘carnal’ reception? What is a place, a moment, not anchored in the immediate ‘passion’ of what happens? Is a computer in any way here and now? Can anything happen with it? Can anything happen to it?’ (Lyotard 1991, p.118; in Gane 2003, p.13)

According to Gane, Lyotard “argues that these combined processes ‘abolish local and singular experience’, hammer ‘the mind with gross stereotypes’, and leave ‘no place for reflection and education’” (Lyotard 1991, p. 64; in Gane, 2003, p.14, my emphasis). Here I must take exception with Lyotard. The splitting of reality into two —one local reality, one online— is unsustainable, as it leaves us with a ‘virtual’ reality that we have no way of transforming with the tools of our ‘real’ reality. It also ignores the multiple and complex relations between the online realm and the local (starting with the human body itself!), connections which must be critically explored in order to reaffirm technology’s potential to facilitate “reflection and education.” Not only is the computer indeed here and now, but it serves as a plane in which other here and now’s are actualized. This is the reconceptualization of nearness that we must undertake, in light of the new —and not always unproblematic— dynamics of telepresence and telepistemology. [I am attempting to do this, as well as deal with the misconception of virtuality (using the work of Deleuze and others) in upcoming work.]

Technology And Choice, And The Choice Not To Choose Technology

What will a reconceptualized theory of nearness, a theory of nearness that takes virtuality and telepresence into account, give us? For one thing, it will open up ways to use the paralogy of the digital divide in redefining our relationships with technology. We know that humans do not exclusively determine technology (social determinism), and that technology does not exclusively determine humans (technological determinism), but that both mutually determine each other. But, as Suchman (2005) argues, “mutuality does not necessarily imply symmetry… persons and artifacts do not constitute each other in the same way” (Suchman, p. 5).

The acknowledgment of this asymmetry, engendered by the paralogy of the digital divide, is important because it can help us realize the ways in which technology cannot improve us. According to Rivers (2005), technology can’t improve us not because technology is evil or biased or anything like that, but because from an ontological perspective, it is we who improve technology:

The assumption that technology is innate in humans implies that it may lead to improvements in ourselves, but this assumption is untenable. The reverse is true: it is we who help to improve technology. It would be naive to suppose that technology is capable of improving us ontologically. It cannot be used to improve and perfect our own being. (Rivers, 2005, p. 3)

Rivers means that, although Being is fluid and dynamic, ontologically Being is what it is, and cannot be improved into Being Plus, or Super-Sized Being. Technology and science can make our lives easier, or laden with commodities (usually at the cost of making someone else’s lives less easy and less filled with commodities), but they cannot really change the nature of our being.

But if we improve technology, and not the other way around, how do we realize technology’s potential for reflection and education? Not through technology itself, but through the choices we make about the use of technology in our lives, choices that can become clearer if we keep the paralogy of the digital divide in mind. Rivers explains how, on the positive side, technology shapes the world by offering us more possibilities to act upon it, while on the negative side, technology often presents us with the illusion that the only way to change the world is by choosing technology:

Technology influences the manner by which we express ourselves in the world, and it does this by creating possibilities. These possibilities exist in a relationship to technology which makes them possible; that is, technology gives rise to possibilities that did not exist before. Yet these possibilities have a direct bearing on how we act. The world is continually shaped by technology because it is one of the several conditions that allow us to choose. But technology also gives the false impression that it is the only possibility, especially the only solution to problems, which either ignores or distorts the diversity of options. Although technology increases some possibilities, its success suppresses others; that is, increased technology reduces alternative possibilities. (Rivers, 2005, p. 9)

In other words, more technology (à la ubiquitous computing) reduces alternative choices. The digital divide as paralogy increases our awareness of the diversity of options, in the sense that it introduces the possibility not to use technology in some aspects of our lives, or to choose to use it purposefully by thinking about how the technologized parts of our lives should relate to the non-technologized parts. As Suchman argues, citing Barad (1998), it is in establishing these boundaries that we create meaning and assume accountability:

As Barad points out, boundaries are necessary for the creation of meaning… Because the cuts implied in boundary making are always agentially positioned rather than naturally occurring, and because boundaries have real consequences, “accountability is mandatory” (187)… As Barad puts it: We are responsible for the world in which we live not because it is an arbitrary construction of our choosing, but because it is sedimented out of particular practices that we have a role in shaping (1998: 102). (Suchman, 2005, p.10-11)

The Digital Divide, Technology, and Openness To Being

Establishing the digital divide in our lives is not about drawing a clean boundary that delineates mutually exclusive realms of action (the digital and the non-digital). On the contrary, the digital divide is a fuzzy, permeable, ever-shifting boundary that calls attention to the fact that we are constantly negotiating how meaning is created across these two realms. Thus, drawing the digital divide at a personal and inter-personal level implies making a series of conscious decisions about the extent to which, for example: our participation in online communities is balanced with our participation in onsite communities; the knowledge gained online is applied onsite, or vice-versa; social agency is delegated to code in order to create new social formations; etc.

To Gochenour (2006), for instance, it no longer makes sense to talk about online communities versus onsite communities. Instead, he talks about distributed communities that encompass both online and onsite elements. These distributed communities are assemblages of digital and non-digital actors where the boundaries of the digital divide are constantly having to be redefined, and this is in itself a form of reflection and action, a praxis:

In the realm of distributed communities, we engage in daily acts of bringing forth new worlds with others, we recognize others as human subjects with whom we wish to co-exist, and who have equal rights to realizing their individual becoming… We do this not in an immaterial realm devoid of relation to the real ['cyberspace', or 'virtual reality'], but in a concrete world of community, where the linguistic worlds that we bring forth with others have the potential to bloom into worlds of action. (Gochenour, 2006, p.16, my note)

Or as Rodgers (2004) puts it:

There is no such place as ‘cyberspace’. Rather, there a millions of on- and offline spaces, frequently intersecting and each having an impact on both the user and non-user in how space is constructed and how it evolves. (Rodgers, 2004, p. 15-16)

To become aware of the intersections we have come to occupy, and to become involved in critically asking how our choices about technology have given shape to those particular intersections, is to use the digital divide as a paralogy, and to create opportunities for authentic reflection and education.

However, the increasing presence of technology in the world, its move towards ubiquitousness, can make it more difficult to engage in this critical exercise. Technology is an expression of our openness to being (Rivers 2005), our freedom to choose even against freedom. Because technology simply mirrors and amplifies the context and conditions that have given it shape, it can result in less freedom, not more. Thus, in order to change technology we need first to change ourselves: “If we change present conditions and the demands they make upon us, then we can change technology (Rivers, 2005, p. 3-4).” This process is, however, sometimes made more difficult by technology. To quote Rivers again: “although technology increases some possibilities, its success suppresses others” (Rivers, 2005, p. 9).

For a long time, educational technologists have put their faith in technology as a way to change education, and even the world. But meaningful change cannot come from the technology as long as the technology contributes to the commodification of knowledge. Thus, if we hope to change technology we must change “the present conditions and the demands they make upon us” (Rivers, ibid) first. This might not require something as dramatic as a revolution or the overthrow of capitalism, but a ’simple’ reaffirmation of the digital divide: a critical awareness of what aspects of our lives have been commodified by technology, which ones we want to reclaim, and the tension which results from this division. Recognizing this divide is key to challenging the logic of ubiquitous commodification.

References

Barad, Karen (1998) Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality. differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies,10, 88-128.

Chan, A. & Garrick, J. (2003). The moral ‘technologies’ of knowledge management. Information, Communication & Society, 6(3), 291–306.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder.

Galloway, A. (2004). Intimations of everyday life: Ubiquitous computing and the city. Cultural Studies, 18(2-3), 384-408.

Gane, N. (2003). Computerized capitalism: The media theory of Jean-François Lyotard. Information, Communication & Society, 6(3), 430–450.

Gochenour, P. H. (2006). Distributed communities and nodal subjects. New Media & Society, 8(1), 33–51.

Huws, U. (2003). The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Lyotard, J.-F. (1991) The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Cambridge: Polity.

Lyotard, J.-F. (1997) Postmodern Fables. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.

May, C. (2004). The cybertariat and the nomad [Review of the book The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World]. Information, Communication & Society, 7 (3), 423–439.

Massey, D. (1999) Power-Geometries and the Politics of Space-Time. Heidelberg: University of Heidelberg Press.

Mejias, U. A. (1999). Sustainable Communicational Realities in the Age of Virtuality. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 18(2), 211-228. [A version of this article can be found at http://ideant.typepad.com/ideant/2003/08/sustainable_tec.html]

Mejias, U. A. (2005), Tag Literacy. Accessed on Feb. 24, 2006 from http://ideant.typepad.com/ideant/2005/04/tag_literacy.html

Readings, B. (1991). Introducing Lyotard: Art and politics. London: Routledge.

Rivers, T. J. (2005). An introduction to the metaphysics of technology. Technology in Society, 27, 551–574.

Rodgers, J. (2004). Doreen Massey: Space, relations, communications. Information, Communication & Society, 7(2), 273-291.

Sassi, S. (2005). Cultural differentiation or social segregation? Four approaches to the digital divide. New Media & Society, 7(5), 684–700.

Suchman, L. (2005). Agencies in Technology Design: Feminist Reconfigurations. Published by the Department of Sociology, Lancaster University. Accessed on Feb. 24 2006 at http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/sociology/papers/suchman-agenciestechnodesign.pdf

Woodward, A. (2006). Jean-François Lyotard. In The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed Feb. 21, 2006 from http://www.iep.utm.edu/l/Lyotard.htm

Tags

digital.divide
Lyotard
ubicomp
nearness
paralogy
educational.technology

Back from Barcelona, where we had a wonderful time! Currently swamped with work and life, so the summary of the congress is going to have to wait a bit. However, I wanted to share the link to an article I just wrote for Knowledge Tree. The following is from their abstract:

Innovations in educational technology are often seen as
opportunities to transform learning, and social software (blogs, wikis,
social bookmarking, etc.) is no exception. But are the tensions between
pedagogies and social software the result of attempts to make the
latter conform to traditional teaching practices, or are they signs of
real opportunities for rethinking learning processes?

In this article, Ulises explores the role that social software can play in new models of learning and participating in society. While social software can connect learners to new resources and to each other in new ways, he argues that its true potential lies in helping us figure out how to integrate our online and offline social experiences. Thus, social software must live up to its name by relating to the individual’s everyday social practices, which include interacting with people online as well as people without access to these technologies. He concludes that social software can positively impact pedagogy by inculcating a desire to reconnect to the world as a whole, not just the social parts that exist online.

Additionally, there’s also going to be a live panel with me and the other authors of this edition of the journal tomorrow, November 2. Unfortunately, since the main location is in Australia, the time is at midnight US EST. Perhaps a bit too late for most of you (and me!).

Abstract

Innovations in educational technology are often seen as opportunities to transform learning, and social software (blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, etc.) is no exception. But are the tensions between pedagogies and social software the result of attempts to make the latter conform to traditional teaching practices, or are they signs of real opportunities for rethinking learning processes? In this article, I explore the role that social software can play in new models of learning and participating in society. While social software can connect learners to new resources and to each other in new ways, I argue that its true potential lies in helping us figure out how to integrate our online and offline social experiences. Thus, social software must live up to its name by relating to the individual’s everyday social practices, which include interacting with people online as well as people without access to these technologies. I conclude that social software can positively impact pedagogy by inculcating a desire to reconnect to the world as a whole, not just the social parts that exist online.

Introduction

Information technology is often said to be revolutionary… but the actual practice of computing is anything but. Indeed the purpose of computing in actual organizational practices is often to conserve and even to rigidify existing institutional patterns (Agre 2004:para. 22).

In seeking to do things in new ways with a computer, it is useful to clarify how we do them now and how we came to do them that way and not otherwise
(Mahoney 2004:para 53).

Each new wave of technological innovation promises to revolutionize education, as we know it. In the past couple of decades, we’ve heard about the potential of multimedia and e-learning to transform the way we learn. Despite isolated achievements, the success record is on the whole not very encouraging, and there is no reason to assume that the outcome will be any different in the case of the latest craze in educational technology: social software (software that allows people to interact and collaborate online or that aggregates the actions of networked users). The reason for this has little to do with the technologies themselves. It is relatively easy to incorporate new technologies into the learning process if the goal is to merely replicate the traditional ways of doing things without significantly disturbing institutional values. But what is more difficult, and for this very reason perhaps a more worthy exercise, is to introduce new technologies while we step back and question the pedagogical principles that inform our educational models.

It is in this sense that I think an exploration of the tensions between pedagogy and technology should be undertaken: not so much from the traditional perspective of how technology can or cannot support certain pedagogical principles, but rather from the perspective of a re-evaluation of teaching practices in light of the possibilities that new technologies may introduce. In other words, if pedagogy is concerned with the purposeful application of learning strategies, and educational technology is concerned with the creation of new tools and systems for learning, the traditional way of framing the tensions in the convergence of pedagogy and technology has been to see how we can make a new technology ‘fit’ the established pedagogical principles endorsed by our institutions. What is required at the moment, however, is that we examine the tensions created when new technologies question and even subvert traditional pedagogical principles. This is, admittedly, dangerous ground because ultimately it means questioning the goals of our educational institutions, facing the choice of whether to evolve or become obsolete in the process.

But the framing of the tensions between pedagogy and technology cannot be approached exclusively from a pedagogical-technological perspective. These tensions are ultimately tensions within the social, frictions between society’s view of how to form ideal citizens and the values that inform the design and distribution of technologies. These complex tensions include, among other things, issues of access and knowledge diffusion: what factors determine who has access to the technology, and what mechanisms are in place to facilitate or obstruct the diffusion of knowledge from technologized to non-technologized realms of social life.

Because societies are in a constant state of flux, there is no permanent resolution to these tensions. Thus, the present article is a guide not in the sense of contributing step-by-step instructions for applying social software to learning, but in the sense of providing one possible framework for understanding these tensions. The framework is partly influenced by the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995). Although my engagement of his work here is extremely superficial, I do borrow from him the concepts of becoming (in opposition to a static definition of being), nomad thought (as the constant re-orientation of knowledge that facilitates becoming), and the virtual (not as a separate form of reality, but as the Whole behind the actualization of all things). My use of these concepts will become clear in the course of this article.

The latest ‘social turn’

What is really going on is a major shift in the way that we are able to communicate, collaborate and share things with each other using online technologies. The key to this is not the technology itself—there is remarkably little that we can do now that wasn’t possible 5 years ago—but rather the critical mass of connectivity between people that we are finally reaching… The real story is about ease of use, availability, culture change and most importantly network effects… (Bryant 2005:para. 4).

… if you look at the kinds of problems we are trying to solve now … it seems pretty clear that the key issues relate to people and the way they communicate and organize themselves… (Pincus 2005:para. 1).

To some, recent developments on the Internet signify an important social turn, a new concern with the social lives of users (or at least with what software developers think the social lives of users should look like). To others, the Internet has always been a social space, and what we are currently seeing is simply an increased awareness of the possibilities that this entails. In this sense, Internet software has always been ‘social software’ of sorts.

As with all labels, there is some ambiguity and controversy over what kinds of things are supposed to be included under the ‘social software’ label, or how it differs from previous labels such as ‘collaborative software,’ ‘groupware,’ etc. Without necessarily wanting to enter into that debate, I will only say that to me the label has come to define both a particular wave of applications and a historical moment in which these applications have gained mass popularity. After all, in order for a network to function, its number of members needs to reach a critical mass. While the percentage of people in the world with access to the Internet is still relatively small (15%, according to the 2005 Internet World Stats), it is large enough to be said to constitute a critical mass.

While by no means conclusive or definitive, this is a list of the kinds of applications that I associate with social software:

• multiplayer gaming environments: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs), Massively-Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), etc.
• discourse facilitation systems: synchronous: instant messaging (IM), chat; or asynchronous: e-mail, bulletin boards, discussion boards, moderated commenting systems (e.g. Slashdot, Plastic, K5)
• content management systems: blogs, wikis, document management (e.g. Plone), web annotation utilities
• product development systems: especially for Open Source software, e.g. Sourceforge
• peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing systems: e.g. Napster, Gnutella, BitTorrent
• selling/purchasing management systems: e.g. eBay
• learning management systems (LMSs): e.g. Blackboard, WebCT, Moodle
• relationship management systems: e.g. Friendster, Orkut
• syndication systems: list-servs, RSS aggregators
• distributed classification systems: e.g. Flickr, del.icio.us.

Each one of these categories is constantly evolving, introducing new features in existing products or introducing new products altogether. The difference, for instance, between a discourse facilitation system such as a bulletin board and a moderated system like Slashdot is enormous, and the management of social transactions much more sophisticated. The above general classification also does not do justice to the nuances between technologies, as is evident by the fact that things like blogs and wikis are listed under the same category. But the intention is to arrange technologies according to the kind of social function they seek to manage (learning, selling, classifying, defining communities, etc.). In practice, of course, most social software products incorporate functions from more than one category, depending on the needs of a particular audience.

Improvements in social software are usually motivated by one of two things: the challenges of handling larger networks of users in ways that allow the individual to still derive some meaningful social value from the experience or, on the other hand, the challenges of providing more ‘intimate’ or ‘authentic’ (closer to everyday life) social experiences. The former goal requires, as I explore in an upcoming paper, that users relegate more of their social agency to the code. The latter requires that users are given tools for enacting social agency in new ways (ways which simulate or enhance older forms of social agency).

With respect to social software for learning, it is interesting to note that learning management systems have been slow to incorporate many of the improvements made in other types of social software (recall earlier point about institutional resistance to questioning pedagogical principles). However, we should not make the assumption that learning management systems are the only type of social software capable of facilitating learning. Other types of social software are providing more interesting innovations. It is the possibilities for learning that we have glimpsed somewhere in the convergence of these other kinds of social software (e.g. gaming + relationship management; classification + file sharing + discourse management, etc.) that are potentially more pedagogically subversive.

Learning as (endless) becoming

Do the challenges posed by social software to traditional educational models go further than the challenges posed by previous forms of e-learning? I believe that, potentially, they do. Satisfying the supposed requirement for learning anytime and anywhere has meant a prioritization of the individual over the social; it is the individual’s time, goals and interests that are catered to. While this is liberating in many accounts, it sometimes comes as a detriment to the social aspects of learning. The benefits of a socialized learning experience can outweigh the benefits of an individualized learning experience, because it forces the learner to apply knowledge through interaction with the world. What social software can do is to reintroduce the social back into the learning equation, while preserving some of the advantages in personalization that e-learning and flexible learning have introduced.

At a more fundamental level, models of learning based on social software can facilitate the shift from what Brown and Duguid (2000) call learning about to learning to be, or to give a more Deleuzian connotation, to learning as becoming. Learning about implies a passive consumption of knowledge in the form of facts. Learning to be implies the application of knowledge in the development of skills that allows us to fulfill a particular (professional or non-professional) role in society. But to highlight the fact that being is not static, I’m using learning as becoming to signify an ongoing process. Learning, as constant becoming, is the work of nomads, to use another Deleuzian image explained below by Semetsky (2004):

Nomads must continuously readapt themselves to the open-ended world in which even the line of horizon may be affected by the changing conditions of wind, shifting sands or storms so that no single rule of knowing that [learning about] would ever assist nomads in their navigations, perhaps only knowing how [learning to be, or learning as becoming] would (Semetsky 2004:447, italics in original; my additions in brackets).

Semetsky continues by quoting Casey. ‘The local operations of relay must be oriented by the discovery (and often continual rediscovery) of direction (Casey 1997:306)’. Becoming, as this continual rediscovery of direction, takes place in relation to the world and to others. What social software can do is to help us re-situate learning in an open-ended social context, providing opportunities for moving beyond the mere accessing of content (learning about) to the social application of knowledge in a constant process of re-orientation (learning as becoming). Of course, non-technologically enhanced forms of social learning (i.e., the traditional classroom) can, and should, achieve this as well. After all, it is the people who make learning happen, not the technology. But the difference between online and offline social learning lies in the types of networks that social software grants access to; networks which provide social opportunities beyond the local. At the same time, this does not mean that social software ‘virtualizes’ the application of knowledge (makes it somewhat less real) by situating it in cyberspace, beyond the local. In fact, it is the opportunities that social software affords for transferring knowledge between online and offline realms of reality, between the local and the global, that make learning as becoming possible.

The tensions between social software and everyday social practices

Let’s step back and build technology that will make sense in the everyday lives of those who use it, that will empower them to use their evolved brain in a meaningful way (boyd 2004;para. 38).

Eventually, living in a world of continuous computing will be like wearing eyeglasses: the rims are always visible, but the wearer forgets she has them on—even though they’re the only things making the world clear (Roush, 2005:para.36).

We spoke to 6,000 people and found that young males are embracing new technologies much faster than women and the over-45s…(BBC News, 2005:para.7).

These quotes subtly tell the story of the tensions between new technologies (such as social software) and their application. As the first quote suggests, we want these technologies to relate to our everyday practices, to make sense in terms of our daily needs, and easily integrate into our lives. However, as the second quote predicts, it is clear that as these technologies evolve, they will increasingly provide an altered—supposedly ‘enhanced’—view of our social lives, to the extent that discontinuing their use will be like removing a pair of badly needed glasses. The question then arises of the widening gap between the everyday social practices of those with access to social software and those without, the ones who can afford glasses (or are more adept at using them) and the ones who cannot. To speak of access is in many ways to speak of privilege, resource availability and—as the last quote reminds us—of the social biases (in this case, gender and age) that come into play in the development of a technology.

The traditional way to approach the intrinsic disparities in the distribution of technology has been to establish the goal of guaranteeing universal access to technology, so that one day everyone will be able to benefit from it in the same way. I’m generally an optimist, but I believe that this is not going to happen anytime soon, for reasons that are well beyond the scope of this article to examine. Faced with this reality, the challenge is then to frame the problem not in terms of future possibilities, but present responsibilities. In that light, I would like to suggest that the issue is not universal access, but rather the way in which those who benefit from access to the technology are able to transform those benefits into benefits for the greater society, extending the value of social software beyond the privileged social spheres that have access to it.

In other words, it is not necessary to universalize access to social software in order to make its benefits available to society as a whole. It is social software’s potential for fomenting dialogue, forming solidarities, coordinating action, distributing information and increasing understanding that make it an important tool for those invested in social equality. But this doesn’t mean that users of social software constitute some sort of elite group supposed to act on behalf of humanity. Looking at the world through glasses is only one of many ways to perceive the world, and even the blind can contribute new insights into reality. Thus, the challenge for social software users is to contribute to a social cause in a way that enhances and aligns with—not disrupts or fragmentizes—other forms of activism.

Ensuring that the benefits of social software reach all circles of society will require that we focus not on the virtuality of social interactions, but on their reality. For a long time we have lived with the misconception that what we do online is virtual, and that since virtuality is a lesser form of reality (or a higher form, depending on who you ask), the consequences of our actions there have little to do with the ‘real’ world. But by adopting a Deleuzian view of virtuality as a Whole from which everything is actualized, we are able to interpret all phenomena, whether online or offline, as actual rather than virtual (c.f. Horwitz, 2003). This is a process I explore in my ongoing work on the pedagogy of nearness (c.f. Mejias 2004, 2005), a philosophy of learning that seeks to simultaneously reduce the irrelevancy of the Near (the devaluation of our immediate surroundings) and the transcendence of the Far (the view that ‘virtual’ space and time is irreal). In other words, Nearness, in the sense I am using it, does not refer to spatial and temporal distance, but to immanence: the desire for connection and understanding, the nomad’s learning as becoming.

Social software and new pedagogies: An (upcoming) case study

I am interested in exploring how the desire for Nearness can be actualized through social software. Thus, I have put together a course that I am teaching this Fall (2005) on Social Software Affordances (See Useful Links for course syllabus). I will end this article by briefly discussing the structural aspects of the course in relation to some of the issues raised so far.

The goal of the course is to explore, through hands-on experimentation, how various social software tools can be used in conjunction with one another to facilitate learning. The class basically functions as a dynamic research community, iteratively collecting information, sharing it with peers, organizing it, and analyzing it individually and collectively. A distributed classification system is used to collect and organize information, RSS feeds are used to share that information with one another, blogs are used to analyze and comment on research, and the class as a whole edits a wiki that synthesizes all the work. Together, the class is addressing questions such as: What is ’social’ about social software? How is the notion of community being redefined by social software? How is social agency shared between humans and code in social software? What are the social repercussions of unequal access to social software?

Additionally, the class is also tackling the question of whether social software can be an effective tool for individual and social change. Each learner is undertaking an ‘issue entrepreneurship’ assignment (c.f. Agre, 2004) which involves identifying a social cause they are interested in and using social software tools to attempt to make a meaningful contribution to the cause at three different levels: personal, local, and global. Learners use their individual blogs to post updates on their progress, inviting comments from their peers. They are not graded on whether they succeed or fail in making a meaningful contribution, as long as they document their experience and can discuss how social software contributed to their success or failure. My hope is that through this assignment and the rest of the class, we inculcate in each other a responsibility for converting the benefits of social software into benefits for a larger part of society.

I don’t see how we can call it ‘social’ software otherwise.

Useful Links

Social Software Affordances course syllabus

References

Agre, P. E. 2004, ‘The practical republic: Social skills and the progress of citizenship’ in Community in the digital age: Philosophy and practice, eds. A. Feenberg & M. Bakardjieva, pp. 201-223, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD.

Agre, P.E. 2004 Internet Research: For and Against’ in Internet Research Annual Volume 1: Selected Papers from the Association of Internet Researchers Conferences 2000-2002, eds. M. Consalvo, N. Baym, J. Hunsinger, K. Bruhn Jensen, J. Logie, M. Murero & L. Regan Shade, Peter Lang, New York.
Retrieved September 6, 2005 from http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/research.html

BBC News, 2005, ‘Why technology misses the masses’. Retrieved September 6, 2005 from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/4208658.stm

boyd, d. 2004, ‘Autistic Social Software’, unedited version of presentation to Supernova Conference. Retrieved September 6, 2005 from http://www.danah.org/papers/Supernova2004.html

Brown, J. S. & Duguid, P. 2000, The social life of information, Harvard Business School Press, Boston.

Bryant L. 2005 ‘Blogs are not the only fruit’ in Headshift. Retrieved 6 September, 2005 from http://www.headshift.com/archives/002270.cfm

Consalvo, M. Baym, N. Hunsinger, J. Bruhn Jensen, K. Logie, J. Murero, M. & Regan Shade, L.(eds.) 2004, Internet Research Annual, Volume 1: Selected Papers from the Association of Internet Researchers Conferences 2000-2002, Peter Lang, New York.

Horwitz, N. 2003, The reality of the virtual: Continental philosophy and the digital age. Unpublished Dissertation, Loyola University, Chicago, Illinois.

Mahoney, M. 2004 ‘The Histories of Computing(s)’ in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews vol. 30, no. 2, 2005, pp. 119-135. Retrieved September 6, 2005 from http://www.princeton.edu/~mike/articles/histories/kingscch.htm

Mejias, U. 2004, ‘Movable distance: Technology, nearness and farness’. Retrieved April 24, 2005 from http://ideant.typepad.com/ideant/2005/01/movable_distanc.html

Mejias, U. 2005, ‘Re-approaching nearness: Online communication and its place in praxis’, First Monday, vol. 10, no. 3. Retrieved April 28, 2005 from http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_3/mejias/index.html

Pincus, J. D. 2005, ‘Computer science is really a social science’. Retrieved September 6, 2005 from http://research.microsoft.com/users/jpincus/cs%20SocSci.html

Roush, W. 2005, ‘Social Machines’, reproduced from the print version of Technology Review August 2005 in Continuous Computing. Retrieved September 6, 2005 from http://www.continuousblog.net/2005/07/social_machines.html

Semetsky, I. 2004, ‘The role of intuition in thinking and learning: Deleuze and the pragmatic legacy’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 36, no.4, pp. 433-454.

“The frank abolition of all distances brings no nearness… Everything gets lumped together into uniform distancelessness.”

(Heidegger, 1971, pp. 165, 166)

Heidegger’s remark seems to call attention to the fact that technology’s much celebrated victory over distance fails to deliver everything it promised. While technology might be able to facilitate our drawing near to things once considered far, much more than technology is required to bridge the existential gap between the knower and the known. Distancelessness, in other words, is not the same as nearness. Hours of watching television or surfing the internet might increase our knowledge about the object of our attention, but might not necessarily result in a feeling of being closer to it. In fact, the whole experience might result in an increased feeling of alienation from the object and from the ‘real’ world, as we consciously or subconsciously realize that our efforts have failed to produce meaningful nearness. And yet, contrary to Heidegger’s assertion, some kind of crossing of distances must bring nearness, if the words ‘far’ and ‘near’ are to have any meaning at all! Is it that the distances that technology helps us traverse are of little consequence in existential terms, or that we have not yet fully understood what it is that technology brings near or pushes far, and how this shapes our relationship with the world? This essay constitutes an attempt to shed some light on the issue of how technology is changing our ideas about distance. My argument rests on the proposition that we need to start thinking of distance in more sophisticated ways than the traditional temporal/spatial approach, and that we also need to realize that some kinds of distances, paradoxically, are necessary in the production of nearness.

Before modern communication technologies, this distance was defined basically in Euclidean terms, since the opportunities for communicating with others were completely determined by temporal/spatial distance. As Borgmann (2000) suggests:

In a premodern setting, what is present in space and time has prominence since a resort to elsewhere and elsewhen is slow or laborious. To the prominence of presence corresponds a focal area of nearness that is centered on my body. Within the circle of proximity, things and persons present themselves in their own right and are known directly, by acquaintance rather than description. Objects that are remote in time and space, however, I know indirectly, by having information about them… In this way a substantive metric of nearness and farness underlies or is inscribed on the formal metric of Euclidean space… The substance of farness lies in the reference of signs to things and persons that are concealed by distance in space and remoteness in time. (p. 95-96)

It is not my intention to provide here a detailed analysis of everything that happened in the move from such a setting to our current times. Suffice it to say, again in the words of Borgmann, that “Information technology in particular does not so much bring near what is far as it cancels the metric of time and space” (2000, p. 98). The so-called ‘death of distance’ means that suddenly the remoteness of objects is no impediment to accessing them in some mediated way. But this new ordering of distance affects not only what is far, but also what is near. In contrast with the premodern setting, where communication with the near was convenient and communication with the far was difficult, modern information and communication technologies (ICTs) make it largely irrelevant whether we are communicating with someone down the hall or halfway across the planet, and whether we are doing so synchronously or asynchronously in one case or the other.

But while the metric of space and time may have become somewhat redundant, I wouldn’t go as far as proclaiming its annihilation. Not only does it continue to play an important part in our experience of the world, but more to the point of my argument, its rules continue to largely influence how we associate value judgments with distance. For instance, many critiques of modern technology hinge on the argument that an increase in mediation automatically results in a lamentable decrease in the quality of communication; in other words, the more mediation that is required in the act of communication, the worse the interaction is deemed to be. This kind of judgment carries with it, implicitly, a bias towards face-to-face communication as the prime model for communication. Consequently, these critiques tend to approach the question from the perspective of what we lose in mediated communication compared to face-to-face communication, not of what we gain that face-to-face communication is unable to provide. In other words, an IM chat with someone hundreds of miles away is critiqued from the perspective of how much richer that conversation would be face-to-face, not from the perspective of how impossible that conversation would be without IM. More nuanced critiques might concede that the benefits of an IM conversation in circumstances where face-to-face communication is an impossibility outweigh the detriments. But these same critiques would still condemn an IM conversation carried on with someone in the next cubicle, in light of the possibility of having that same conversation face-to-face (I myself have presented such arguments on occasion). Are there really no circumstances under which we could argue that having an IM chat with someone in the next cubicle is preferable to having a face-to-face conversation? It is as if the discussion of the affordances (what the technology makes possible, and what it makes impossible) of any technology that mediates communication must begin from the position that any deviation from face-to-face communication already entails a loss. The propensity to see things this way is, as I will explore more fully below, a remnant from the days when indeed communication with the far implied an increase in mediation, and this increase in mediation resulted in a decrease in the quality of communication. Today, this bias against mediation serves as a way to express the anxiety we feel as we find the Euclidean logic behind our traditional understanding of distance undermined by ICTs.

However, my project is not simply to recommend that we learn to accept the annihilation of the metric of time and space and move on with our lives. Distancelessness, as Heidegger suggests, is not the same as nearness. The concept of distance continues to be useful, I think, as a way to measure the existential nearness between us and what we seek to know. When seen as a moment, not as a permanent state, distance can help us to take stock of our position in relation to where we want to be. This fits nicely with my interest in normative theorizings of technology, in arguments for the use of technology to increase our understanding of the world, ontologically reintegrating ourselves into it, to use an image by H.S. Bhola (1992) that I am fond of paraphrasing. In order to do this, I am proposing that apart from temporal/spatial distance, we need to consider epistemological distance and ontological distance.

The tyranny of temporal/spatial nearness

Before I get into the details of what I mean by epistemological and ontological distance, I would like to delve deeper into the question of how, despite the redundancy of the metric of time and space brought about by ICTs, certain manifestations of temporal/spatial distance continue to influence how we think about nearness in an online setting. I call this the temporal/spatial bias.

The temporal/spatial bias is just what its name suggests: a set of assumptions (based on our experience of time and space) that influences how we construct meaning about nearness and farness. I am interested in how these assumptions inform value judgments about online technologies. My observation is that, despite the supposed annihilation of the time and space metric in online communication, temporal/spatial distance continues to be used instinctively as a benchmark when describing distances in the online world. This is particularly the case in normative assessments of online experiences, when we are trying to argue that the distance that mediation introduces between the knower and the known is detrimental. As I illustrated above, some arguments propose that any kind of face-to-face communication is better than any kind of online communication because it is immediate and synchronous. The implication, based on traditional temporal/spatial assumptions, is that farness translates into an increase in mediation (the farther the object, the more mediation is required), which in turn results in more impurities introduced into the process. In other words, the use of any instrument to mediate communication is seen as a lesser form of perception than what can be experienced directly by the body, because in some way or another this mediation constitutes a decrease in the quality or amount of data that could be gained through one’s senses.

I am not arguing that the outcome of replacing direct interaction with mediated interaction is something that should not be analyzed and, when appropriate, critiqued. I wish instead to point out how the idea of temporal/spatial farness is used to critique the quality of mediated experiences even when those experiences represent the only opportunity for interaction, or when the knowledge that can be derived from those experiences is something that could not be acquired through any other means.

I would like to use two simple metaphors to make the point that direct experience is not always better than mediated experience. First, consider the use of a mirror to look at the reflection of our face. Obviously, the use of this instrument constitutes a form of mediation, since given our anatomies it is impossible to focus our eyesight on our own face. Without the mirror’s mediation we would have no first-hand knowledge of our own countenance. While it is true that not all knowledge about ourselves comes from our reflected image, the specific knowledge of how we look to others can only be gained through representation. Second, consider the act of star gazing. Not only is the knowledge derived from celestial observation greatly delayed temporally (to the extent that some of the stars we look upon may not even exist anymore), but the spatial distance reduces information emanating from gigantic suns to tiny points of light. And yet, this limited, mediated information has proved incredibly useful for various purposes including navigation, calendar calculation, scientific and religious construction of theories about the nature of the universe, etc.

In presenting these two simplistic examples, I wish to point out that mediated perception, while different from unmediated perception, can provide kinds of knowledge not available through the latter. This lesson can be transposed to our analysis of online experiences. While we need to be mindful of the advantages of face-to-face communication, we also need to acknowledge the kind of insights (about ourselves, about our world) that can be gained through online experiences that cannot be gained through unmediated perception. Categorical denunciations of virtuality only serve to reify the idea of cyberspace as an alternate, autonomous reality, not as a new part of reality that must be integrated and balanced with the other parts. As Wilson argues, the function of our most important technologies is not (or at least should not be) “to replace the natural world, but to display it” (p. 2000, p. 69). Likewise, the function of communication technologies is not to replace the richness that temporal/spatial nearness affords, but to facilitate communication that temporal/spatial distance would make impossible. The fact that this implies a degradation in temporal/spatial nearness is countered by the fact that this kind of communication provides new knowledge and new dimensions of being; in other words, new opportunities for nearness of a different sort.

Epistemological distance

What am I trying to imply by saying that things can be epistemologically near or far? This conceptualization of distance has to do with the degree to which I can justify my knowledge of something based on my current assumptions. One thing is epistemologically nearer than another when my knowledge of the former is relatively more justified (to me, at least) than my knowledge of the latter.

The interesting thing is that the temporal/spatial bias would suggest that things are epistemologically near when they are near in terms of the space and time metric, when in fact (because of the ‘annihilation’ of this metric) this is no longer necessarily the case. To understand how this works, let’s consider the variables of synchronicity and mediation when looked at from the perspective of epistemological distance.

Synchronicity refers to the timeliness of experience; it describes whether experience is immediate or delayed. Because of the temporal/spatial bias, the common belief is that synchronous experiences translate into epistemological nearness (in other words, knowledge about something that is immediate is assumed to be more justified); consequently, asynchronous experiences translate into epistemological farness (that is,  knowledge about something that is delayed is assumed to be less justified). However, because of the abolishment of temporal/spatial distance, what is temporally/spatially near is not necessarily what is epistemologically near; something can be asynchronous or delayed and be epistemologically near (e.g., knowledge gained through an email exchange with someone, whether down the hall or hundreds of miles away, whose ideas are epistemologically congruent with mine), while something can be synchronous or immediate and be epistemologically far (e.g., knowledge gained through a face-to-face conversation with someone whose ideas are epistemologically incongruent with mine). So epistemological distance is a function not of things being synchronous or asynchronous, as the temporal/spatial bias would suggest, but of an altogether different measure: how justified is my knowledge about something.

The same kind of argument can be made about mediation, which I am using here to mean the degree to which an original object is technologically represented, or mediated, in order to be engaged remotely. In other words, mediation describes whether an experience is concrete or represented (actual or virtual, in the common parlance). Because of the temporal/spatial bias, the common belief is that unmediated experiences translate into epistemological nearness (in other words, knowledge about something that is concrete is assumed to be more justified); on the other hand, mediated experiences translate into epistemological farness (that is, knowledge about something that is represented is assumed to be less justified). But again, because of the ‘abolishment’ of temporal/spatial distance, what is temporally/spatially near is not necessarily what is epistemologically near. Something can be mediated or represented and be epistemologically near (e.g., the email exchange in the example above), while something can be unmediated or concrete and be epistemologically far (e.g., the face-to-face conversation in the example above). Again, nearness in this case is a function of how justified I feel my knowledge of something is, not how far or near in temporal/spatial terms it is from me.

According to the logic I just described, knowledge of things in cyberspace might be more justified (to me) than knowledge of things in my own neighborhood. This is not unproblematic. I have warned previously (Mejias, 2004b) of what can happen when what is spatially near becomes irrelevant in comparison to what is, thanks to technology, spatially far but epistemologically near. The argument just presented is not so much a refutation of this as it is an attempt to further explore the dynamic. As Dreyfus (2000) has argued, epistemology (the Cartesian flavor, at least) can be limiting if it positions the subject as detached from the world, the internal mind as separate from the external body and world, the knower as the skeptical, independent entity that must question the reality of the known. In such a scenario, it doesn’t really matter whether epistemological distance is related at all to temporal/spatial distance, and the knower might not care that he or she is embedded in a social world more immediate than the online world; since such view argues that the knower is separate from the world no matter what, things can be spatially near or far without serious consequences to their epistemological availability. Hence the critique of Cartesian epistemology as a way of knowing: “Taking the skeptic seriously and attempting to prove that there is an external world presupposes a separation of the mind from the world of things and other people that defies a phenomenological description of how human beings make sense of everyday things and of themselves” (Dreyfus, 2000, p. 53). Thus, given the need for something to link temporal/spatial and epistemological distance to a more normative notion of nearness (a notion of nearness that specifies how the individual should relate to the world), I turn to a discussion of ontological distance.

Ontological distance

What am I trying to imply by saying that things can be ontologically near or far? While epistemological distance has to do with degrees of knowledge justification, ontological distance has to do with degrees of agency: the ability of subjects to act upon things, to bring things existentially nearer by making them part of their sphere of action. One thing is ontologically nearer than another when I am more capable of interacting with the former than with the latter.

Again, the temporal/spatial bias suggests that things are ontologically near when they are near in terms of time and space, but upon closer examination we can see that this might not be necessarily the case.  We can look at the variables of synchronicity and mediation again and derive similar observations to those we derived for epistemological distance: Whereas the temporal/spatial bias leads us to assume that synchronous and unmediated objects are ontologically nearer, the diminishing primacy of time and space brought about by ICTs confirms that asynchronous and mediated objects can be ontologically near as well. In other words, it is possible for the subject to have a higher degree of agency in relation to something that is remote or mediated as opposed to something that is immediate and unmediated. For instance, my actions can have weightier significance and meaning in an online asynchronous forum than in a face-to-face forum in my neighborhood.

Ontological distance involves an assessment of temporal/spatial distance and epistemological distance. Ontological distance combines our perception of where objects are in time and space with our knowledge about those objects in an effort to figure out what they mean to us, what types of actions are possible. Ontological distance helps us acknowledge that Object X, at a particular temporal/spatial and epistemological position, has a particular meaning, and that certain actions are or are not possible based on that meaning. This search for the relationship between meaning and action, as Dourish (2001) explains, has been the project of phenomenology:

What the phenomenologists have explored is the relationship between embodied action and meaning. For them, the source of meaning (and meaningfulness) is not a collection of abstract, idealized entities; instead, it is to be found in the world in which we act, and which acts upon us. The world is already filled with meaning. Its meaning is to be found in the way in which it reveals itself to us as being available for our actions. It is only through those actions, and the possibility for actions that the world affords us, that we can come to find the world, in both its physical and social manifestations, meaningful. (p. 116)

Ontological distance tracks our uncovering of meaning in the world, and indicates the degree to which this world is available to us for action. A change in ontological distance signifies a change in this availability, and thus a change in meaning: Things that are ontologically far from us are experienced abstractly, offering us little opportunity for involvement; conversely, things that are ontologically near are experienced as part of our sphere of action-things that we can change and that can change us. In this light, Bhola’s (1992) call for the ontological reintegration of the individual to the world can be interpreted as the abolishment of ontological distance by re-inscribing the individual into the world as a full agent, or to paraphrase Freire (1972), by transforming the individual into a subject-not an object-of history. The important point to make here is that while things might be epistemologically nearer than ever (due to the availability of information), and while temporal/spatial distance does not matter as much, they are also more ontologically distanced than ever, in the sense that we are not always fully empowered to act upon them.

This lack of ontological nearness is a phenomenon that I do not intend to address right now. Suffice it to say that it involves power dynamics that include the use of technology (mainly, mass communication technologies) for the specific purpose of creating ontological alienation within oppressed classes. At the same time, however, technology also offers new affordances or possibilities that can bring ontological nearness. For example, technologically facilitated shifts in temporal/spatial distance can, as I have discussed, provide better perspectives or vantage points from which to learn about the world and learn about ourselves-perspectives that would be impossible to acquire without technological mediation. Likewise, shifts in epistemological distance can allow us to reassess the assumptions that justify our knowledge, creating opportunities for critical thinking and the questioning of things as we have assumed them to be. These shifts, if properly channeled, can result in an ontological re-approach or re-integration to the world.

Conclusions

Most critiques against technology’s objectification of the individual and the world revolve around the assumption that we should strive towards temporal/spatial nearness. As I have tried to show in this paper, this bias no longer yields a meaningful model for understanding a world in which ICTs play a major role. Thus, a re-evaluation of what nearness means to us is in order. My argument is that we should strive towards ontological nearness, and take advantage of the unfolding affordances created by ICTs to manipulate temporal/spatial distance and epistemological distance to attain this goal, even if this manipulation entails an increase, not a decrease, in those types of distances.

My point, then, is that nearness can be engendered by distance; or to articulate it in a less paradoxical way: cultivating certain kinds of farness at certain times can eventually lead to more meaningful forms of nearness. As I have argued, distances do not necessarily diminish meaning when they produce information that would otherwise not be available to us, or when they represent steps on the road to increased understanding. Thus, the goal of a pedagogy of nearness (a pedagogy which I plan to define and develop more fully in a later project) is to use temporal/spatial farness to reveal new information, and epistemological farness to challenge our assumptions and justifications. Both distancings can be important tools in the process of figuring out what is our current ontological position vis-à-vis the world, and whether this position is satisfactory to us.

One of the biases I hope my argument can begin to dispel is that a simple, linear progression towards nearness in all of the three distances discussed is the desired goal. The process of understanding and acting upon the world requires moves that are multifaceted and complex, moves that simultaneously require nearness in one type of distance and farness in another. Sometimes a distancing in one axis is required before nearness in another can be achieved, which in turn causes a shift in another axis, and so on. For example, a temporal/spatial distancing from my surroundings can lead me to an epistemological re-assessment of them, which can lead to new ontological approaches to those same surroundings.

What role can technology play in this process? To begin with, we need to abandon previous biases and acknowledge that not all the farness that technology introduces is damaging, as not all the nearness that it engenders is (from an ontological perspective) as helpful as we would like to believe. Ultimately, we need to acknowledge that technology’s power in allowing us to manipulate distances should be placed in the service of a larger goal. This goal requires that we remain conscious of technology’s possibilities as well as its limitations in facilitating ontological nearness. This kind of view of technology (which is itself part of an ontological reintegration to a world in which ICTs are increasingly part of our lives) is what constitutes the difference between “using the real world as a metaphor for interaction and using it as a medium for interaction” (Dourish, 2001, p. 101). In other words, we should not seek to design a virtual world where technology affords a virtual ontological nearness, but we should seek to design technologies that afford ontological nearness to the actual world, even if that nearness is incomplete and must be supplemented by non-technological means.

References

Benjamin, W. (1988). Illuminations. (H. Arendt, ed.), New York: Schocken Books

Bhola, H. S. (1992). Literacy, knowledge, power, and development: Multiple
connections. Springfield, VA: DYNEDRS.

Borgmann, A. (2000). Information, nearness, and farness. In K. Goldberg, (Ed.) The robot in the garden: telerobotics and telepistemology in the age of the Internet. (pp. 90-107). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000.

Dourish, Paul. Where the action is: the foundations of embodied interaction.  Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001.

Dreyfus, H. (2000). Telepistemology: Descartes’ last stand. In K. Goldberg (Ed.), The robot in the garden: telerobotics and telepistemology in the age of the Internet.  (pp. 48-63). Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Freire, P. (1972). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder

Heidegger, Martin; translations and introduction by Albert Hofstadter. Poetry, language, thought. 1st Perennial Classics ed. New York: Perennial Classics, 2001.

Mejias, U. (2004a). Weapons of mass communication. Retrieved January 3, 2005 from http://ideant.typepad.com/ideant/2004/05/weapons_of_mass.html

Mejias, U. (2004b). Re-approaching nearness: Online communication and its place in praxis. Retrieved January 3, 2005 from http://ideant.typepad.com/ideant/files/mejias_nearness.pdf

Wilson, C. (2000). Vicariousness and authenticity. In K. Goldberg, (Ed.) The robot in the garden: telerobotics and telepistemology in the age of the Internet. (pp. 64-89). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000.

Alfred Schutz’s work on phenomenology provides a framework for addressing this question. In his 1932 book, The Phenomenology of the Social World (Northwestern University Press, 1967), he writes:

In order to observe a lived experience of my own, I must attend to it reflectively. By no means, however, need I attend reflectively to my lived experience of your lived experience. On the contrary, by merely “looking” I can grasp even those of your lived experiences which you have not yet noticed and which are for you still prephenomenal and undifferentiated. This means that, whereas I can observe my own lived experiences only after they are over and done with, I can observe yours as they actually take place. This in turn implies that you and I are in a specific sense “simultaneous,” that we “coexist,” that our respective stream of consciousness intersect (p. 102).

Simultaneity, the ability to experience our consciousness in parallel, is a defining feature of face-to-face interactions. The outcome of this inter-subjectivity is not that we are able to “read” the other person’s mind. It is simply a realization that “I am experiencing a fellow human being.”

Of course, Schutz points out that relationships can also be based on quasi-simultaneity, such as the relationship I form with an author when reading a book, with a tool maker when inspecting tools and wondering how they were made, or–we can assume–with someone through an email exchange or online chat.

The question is whether people are able to influence each other’s behavior as effectively in a quasi-simultaneous relationship. To Schutz, the concept of social action itself is grounded on simultaneity: “In order to act socially upon an Other’s consciousness, I must pay attention to the flow of his [sic] consciousness as it occurs” (p. 148). The question then becomes: what kind of transformative prescence can I be in the consciousness of someone I only know asynchronously? Obviously, I can’t really effect the consciouness of the author of a book (especially if he or she is dead!), but what about someone with whom I communicate online, asynchronously?

Another question motivated by my reading of Schutz relates to the experience of consociates (the people I experience directly) and contemporaries (the people I know exist, but don’t experience directly). Schutz says of the latter: “while living among them, I do not directly and immediately grasp their subjective experiences but instead infer, on the basis of indirect evidence, the typical subjective experience they must be having” (p. 143). Schutz remarks that the concepts of consociates and contemporaries function as “two poles between which stretches a continuous series of experiences” (p. 177), which leads me to think of online relationships as “quasi-consociates,” people I can experience in a semi-direct way. The question, then, is not only whether the ways in which quasi-consociates shape each other’s consciousness constitutes sustainable social action, but also whether an increase in the number of quasi-consociates results in a decrease in the number of consociates (especially if we buy into the research that says our brains can only handle an average of 150 consociates). Or to put it in Hector Jose Huyke’s words: does an increase in quasi-consociates at the expense of consociates result in a “devaluation of what is near?” What does that mean for society and social action?