Journal of Applied Social Theory
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‘Thou art a scholar; speak to it…’: Digital Pharmakology and the Future of Academic Practice
Get PDFAt no point in history has the education system been so intimately entwined with a globalised, market-driven, technical system. As Bernard Stiegler has argued, this synchronization of the education system's mnemotechnical capabilities with technical systems of production is unprecedented (Stiegler, Technics and Time, Vol.3, 2001). Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the figure of the scholar; a nexus of personal drives and social influence, public and private spheres, (mnemo)technology, educational institution and market influence. This paper argues that the confluence of these factors raises urgent questions as to the future of digital technology in education, and scholarship in general.The paper will address these issues through two interrelated discourses: one which reads digital technology through the figure of the pharmakon (that which can be both poison and remedy), and the other which aligns the scholar ‘to come’ with a future it must remain impossible to pre-programme, predict or know in advance. Both strands of the paper follow the work of Jacques Derrida and — via the work of Donald Winnicott on the Transitional Object — Bernard Stiegler, but resituate their argument within the realms of academic practice and technology enhanced learning. It argues that Derrida's reading of the pharmakon in Plato’s Phaedrus (Derrida, La dissemination, 1972), in which he deconstructs Plato’s opposing of anamnesis and hypomnesis (between ‘originary’ knowledge and hypo-mnemetic writing as its technological and supplementary contamination), and Bernard Stiegler's repositioning of this through his reading of the technical/'transitional object' (Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 1971), suggests that the inherently 'pharmakological' nature of tekhnē gives us a framework to think through the position, application and impact of the digital upon academic scholarship. By reading this against Derrida’s distancing of ‘the future’ (le futur) from the ‘to come’ (l’avenir), however, we can also suggest how digital technology provides conditions for a scholarship ‘to come’; one which can look the radically ambiguous technological condition of the modern academic institution in the face and speak to it.It begins, however, with Hamlet, and with the odd suggestion that only Horatio, the scholar, can speak to the spectre of a King who demands justice
Collapsed publics: Orality, literacy, and vulnerability in academic Twitter
Get PDFThis paper outlines ways in which scholars build identity and connection on open networked platforms such as Twitter, and considers the risks and benefits of networked participatory engagement. The paper reports the findings of an ethnographic study examining the digitally-networked practices of scholars from a range of disciplines, identity positions, and geopolitical locations, and explores participants’ experiences of care and vulnerability within open, networked academic systems. The paper draws on White and LeCornu’s (2011) visitors and residents continuum, Veletsianos and Kimmons’ (2012) concept of Networked Participatory Scholarship (NPS), and Ong’s (1982) theories of secondary orality and secondary literacy to explore networked scholars’ practices and experiences. It examines ‘academic Twitter’ as a phenomenon in which oral and literate traditions – and audience expectations – are collapsed, creating a public that operates on very different terms from those of academia. The paper’s findings examine the risks of this collapse, yet also show that networked engagement – in which personal identity signals, humor, and expressions of commonality are found to be the dominant means by which scholars build networks ties – can result in opportunities and affinities that institutional scholarship may not offer. The substantive goal of the paper is to offer a portrait of networked scholars’ experiences and practices related to engagement, and to consider the tensions these practices raise within the contemporary academy
Digital selves, digital scholars: Theorising academic identity in online spaces
Get PDFAs the digital world becomes enmeshed with our physical world, identities become public by default, and this can have disastrous consequences for those whose digital identities are deemed socially unacceptable. For scholars, considerations of public identity are especially critical, as academia functions in many ways as a reputational economy (Willinsky, 2010). Thus, while concerns over digital footprint are widespread amongst the general population, they become particularly pressing for academics, but avoiding digital spaces entirely is increasingly a non-viable option as institutions of higher education expand into digital domains. As well, there are many affordances made possible by various forms of digital scholarship (Veletsianos and Kimmons, 2012). Many scholars are therefore tasked with the necessity of navigating a digital culture that is quick to judge and reluctant to forgive.In this paper, we theorise the ontological foundations of (digital) identity in order to better understand the complexity of academics’ online participation. We explore the conceptualization of identity as fixed and unitary or as a coherent whole from which we might select ‘acceptable identity fragments’ to present in public online spaces (Kimmons and Veletsianos, 2014). Then, employing a poststructural lens, we theorise the effects of such a modernist epistemology on digital identity and scholarship, including the repercussions of seeing identity as fixed, unitary, and controllable on diverse digital phenomena: cultural hysteria around the permanence of digital footprints; a decreased collective capacity for forgiveness as we lose the ability to forget past misdeeds (Ambrose, Friess, and Van Matre, 2012); increasing occurrences of cybervigilantism in response to acts taken out of context (Ronson, 2015). Finally, we theorise the possibilities and challenges offered by a reimagining of digital selfhood in poststructural terms, as fluid, never complete, and conferring a constrained agency