Without a doubt, new digital technologies are affording us with important possibilities for transforming the ways we interact and communicate (Dickel & Schrape, 2017, p. 52). However, the field of educational technology, argues Selwyn (2011), is marked by technological utopianism which at times has exaggerated that potential (p. 713). As such, the responsibility of the educational technologist has come to seen to be to “harness the power of technology” (Selwyn, 2011, p. 713). Proponents see digital technologies as means for bringing about a “new social order,” pursuing the improvement of education according to social constructivism, by supporting various forms of informal student-centered learning (Selwyn, 2011, p. 713). This positivist idealism is of course driven by a noble desire to improve education. However, argues Selwyn, this positivism has become “hegemonic”, leading scholars to become evangelical about the prospects of the technology, and ultimately unwilling to consider more critical perspectives, and thus finally bringing into question credibility of the field as an area of serious academic study (p. 713).
A prime example is the adoption of blogging, among the leading Web 2.0 tools, which educational technologists have become eager to mobilize (Chong, 2010, p. 798). Blogging is seen by cyber-utopians as a central component in the grand democratization of content (Kelly, 2005, n.p.). The blog, which is short for “web log,” was first perceived as a form of diary, and as such is a typical part of the utopian culture of broadly sharing personal information that resulted from the push by the data-mining behemoths of Web 2.0 (Chong, 2010, p. 799). Acknowledging the popularity of Web 2.0, TIME magazine’s 2006 Person of The Year was “You”, referring to the content creators on social networking sites, wikis and blogs.
This technological utopianism is rooted in a long-standing Western intellectual tradition, harkening back to the Enlightenment ideal of progress (Selwyn, 2011, p. 715). The transforming potential of technology has been ascribed to almost every new medium of communication, including radio, tape recorders, Super 8 cameras, videocassettes, cable TV, and finally the Internet (Dickel & Schrape, 2017, p. 50). In the wake of the dot-com Bubble of the late 1990s, the term Web 2.0 announced a second wave of technological utopianism. With little regard for empirical evidence, social-networking and the “wisdom of the crowd” was anticipated to transform traditional cultural industries (Dickel & Schrape, 2017, p. 50). Kevin Kelly (2005), founder of Wired Magazine, building on Marshall McLuhan’s idea of a “prosumer,” predicted:
In the near future, everyone alive will (on average) write a song, author a book, make a video, craft a weblog, and code a program… What happens when everyone is uploading far more than they download?… Who will be a consumer? No one… The producers are the audience, the act of making is the act of watching, and every link is both a point of departure and a destination (n.p).
In To Save Everything, Click Here (2013), Morozov criticizes contemporary “solutionists” and their naive assumptions. He denounces the way “Internet centrism” has confused our discussions about public policy (p. xiv). Although we may be tempted to frame complex cultural and political phenomena as “transparent and self-evident processes that can be easily optimized”, this usually results in overly simplistic solutions that end up doing more harm than good (p. 5). Proper empirical analysis is replaced by platitudes like embracing “openness,” “sharing” and “virality”, and letting technology run its inevitable course so that our problems can take care of themselves (Carr, 2013, p. 45).
However, on January 20, 2017, Bartlett’s headline for his article in The Telegraph declared, “The utopian dream of the Internet has become a nightmare — and Donald Trump is its spawn” (n.p.). The technological utopianism that made many of Silicon Valley’s digerati giddy with anticipation for the democratizing possibilities of the Internet collapsed with the election of the most dangerously authoritarian U.S. president in modern times, propelled to office by a sophisticated covert Russian influence campaign that hijacked the gears of the Internet to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s election chances with a litany of “fake news” (ODNI, 2017, n.p.).
Bartlett rang the alarm more than a year before the even more damming revelations emerged about the Facebook users’ data being mined by Cambridge Analytica (2018, n.p.). There were numerous dubious overlapping relationships implicated in the affair. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and de-facto campaign manager, was in business with Yuri Milner, who had made investments in Facebook and Twitter that were backed by hundreds of millions of dollars from the Kremlin (Drucker, 2017, n.p.). Kushner’s business partners included Goldman Sachs and George Soros, who heads the Open Society Foundation, and important backer of the Open Source movement, and Cadre has attracted venture capital funding from backers including PayPal founder Peter Thiel, who became one of Donald Trump’s most trusted advisers (Eaglesham, Chung & Schwartz, 2017, n.p.).
Thiel’s Founders Fund was one of the earliest investors in Facebook. Thiel was also the founder of the CIA-backed Palantir Technologies, which specializes in big data analysis for the intelligence community, and which coordinated with Cambridge Analytica in their intrusion into Facebook (Kharpal, 2018, n.p.). Although the company denies the connection, the majority of security analysts are convinced that Palantir is the principal company behind the design of software used for the NSA’s PRISM program (Paganini, 2013, n.p.). PRISM was a successor program to the Total Information Awareness (TIA) surveillance program, the aim of the Information Awareness Office (IAO) established in 2002 by DARPA, which created the Internet in the first place (Harris, 2006, n.p.). TIA’s goal was to knit government intelligence and surveillance programs with data mining knowledge derived from the private sector, to create a resource for the intelligence and law enforcement communities (Poindexter, 2002, n.p.).
Following public criticism that this technology could potentially lead to a mass surveillance system, IAO was defunded by Congress in 2003. Annie Jacobsen, author of The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, believes the downfall of the program was largely attributable to the backlash against the logo, featuring the mystical pyramid and all-seeing eye casting its vision over the globe (Kessler, 2015, n.p.). However, several IAO projects continued to be funded and merely run under different names, as revealed by Edward Snowden during the course of the 2013 mass surveillance disclosures. PRISM’s existence was revealed when The Washington Post and The Guardian published documents leaked by Snowden, which exposed the involvement of Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, YouTube, AOL, Skype and Apple. A source told the Washington Post that with PRISM, the NSA can “quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type.” (Carlson, 2013, n.p.).
Effectively, the innocent public, inebriated by the illusory promises of technological utopianism, have unwittingly supplied troves of their personal data to platforms whose ultimate purposes are either commercial or for government surveillance, or both. Carr (2013), in his review of Lanier’s Who Owns the Future? describes his observations as follows:
The Net’s workings, he argues, have been shaped by an ideology that, although well-intentioned, has deformed our commercial and social relationships. By mistaking free information for freedom, the network’s designers and defenders have inadvertently created a system that centralizes power and profit. Companies such as Google and Facebook take in billions of dollars by hosting online exchanges, but the people who actually create whatever is being exchanged — words, ideas, works of art — often get nothing. The joy of participation, they’re told, should be compensation enough (p. 45).
Educational technologists have not escaped this same error. As a consequence, instructors have felt compelled to view the platform as a positive technological development and to pursue ways to incorporate it into their own modes of teaching (Chong, 2010, p. 800). There have been several reports of the success of blogging across various levels of acfademia (Chong, 2010, p. 800). The Melville committee, which was established in 2008 as a result of discussion between colleagues in the U.K.’s Higher Education Academy and the Joint Information Systems Committee, concluded that publishing platforms, such as blogs and social media like YouTube, were valuable in providing multiple types of collaboration and partnership in learning (as cited in Deed & Edwards, 2011, p. 12).
Chong’s investigation reported finding encouraging results with the use blogging as an instructional tool to introduce students to academic research (Chong, 2010, p. 800). Chong studied the case of three students, who apparently “resoundingly affirmed” that the option to blog during their learning “made a difference” (Chong, 2010, p. 804). It’s hard to understand how a unanimous affirmation from only 3 people can be considered “resounding.” While all three indicated “quite keen” as their level of enthusiasm for blogging, when asked whether or not they were interested in continuing to blog beyond their schooling, they indicated three different responses: “not keen at all”, “quite keen” and “very keen” (Chong, 2010, p. 804). Similarly, Yang and Chang (2012) attempted to demonstrate that, statistically, a higher number of students approved positively of using blogs, and thereby aimed to suggest that blogging is a welcome addition to the learning environment. However, their interpretation of their own data is misleading. A simple majority is not enough to conclude that blogging is seen as worthwhile by a significant enough number of students to justify its broad adoption. In Yang and Chang’s (2012) study of 71 students found that despite a majority (56.34%) liked blogs, nearly half of them (43.66%) did not. That is nearly half of the students (p. 133).
“Apart from the possible problem of resistance if not of outright rejection by students”, explains Chong, “from an educator’s point of view, the free-flowing, informal and often fragmentary nature of blog discourse is, in the first place, hardly the ideal writing style for academic purposes” (Chong, 2010, p. 800). Chong adds that the case against blogging might be overstated, and that the problem may not be with the tool itself but how it is used (Chong, 2010, p. 800). Researchers have reported on how blogging had resulted in enhancing critical thinking and problem-solving skills, and improving a broad range of academic writing skills (Chong, 2010, p. 800). As the above evidence suggests, the problem is not that there is no value in blogging, but it has been at times too enthusiastically promoted.
Another potential justification for encouraging students to become accustomed to blogging is that it can help them build such skills towards continuing to use them as they advance in their academic careers. Shema et al. (2014) showed that academic blogging bolstered subsequent citations of published works (p. 1025). Given that citations must accumulate over time, they are not the best measure of a work’s influence. Using altmetrics, which count citations or mentions in specific social web services, where citations may appear earlier on, Thelwall et al. (2013) found that citation counts were positively correlated with platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, and Mendeley readership counts (p. 2).
However, a the London School of Economics’ Impact Blog (n.d.) noted, “metrics or indicators can tell us about many aspects of potential occasions of influence, but not what the outcome of this influence was” (n.p.). There are numerous ways of measuring research impact, including in the academe, or in the industry or in changes to public policy. But these areas are also affected by multiple influences, such that it is not possible to reliably determine their influence (Impact Blog, n.d., n.p.). The same applies to blogging. We should not feel impelled to impose such platforms as educational tools merely in response to the hype. There are numerous useful tools and strategies at our disposal, and blogging is one of them. We should be open to using any, but, where possible, measure our choice through empirical observation, which may also involve investigating their political and commercial circumstances.
References
Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections (2017, January 6). Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Bartlett, Jamie (2017, January 20). The utopian dream of the internet has become a nightmare – and Donald Trump is its spawn. The Telegraph.
Carlson, Nicholas (2013, June 7). PRISM Is Also The Name Of A Product From Palantir, A $5 Billion Tech Startup Funded By The CIA. Business Insider.
Carr, N. (2013). Techno-fix troubles. Nature, 495, 2011.
Chong, E. K. M. (2010). Using blogging to enhance the initiation of students into academic research. Computers and Education, 55(2), 798–807.
Deed, C., & Edwards, A. (2011). Unrestricted student blogging: Implications for active learning in a virtual text-based environment. Active Learning in Higher Education, 12(1), 11–21.
Dickel, S., & Schrape, J. F. (2017). The Logic of Digital Utopianism. NanoEthics, 11(1), 47–58.
Drucker, Jesse (2017, November 5). Kremlin Cash Behind Billionaire’s Twitter and Facebook Investments. New York Times.
Eaglesham, J., Chung, J., & Schwartz, L. (2017, May 3). Trump Adviser Kushner’s Undisclosed Partners Include Goldman and Soros. The Wall Street Journal.
Harris, Shane (2006, February 23). TIA Lives On. National Journal.
Morozov, E. (2013). To Save Everything, Click Here: the folly of thechnological solutionsim. New York: PublicAffairs.
Kelly, Kevin (2005, August 1). We Are the Web. Wired Magazine.
Kessler, Matt (2015, December 22). The Logo That Took Down a DARPA Surveillance Project. The Atlantic.
Kharpal, Arjun (2018, March 27). Palantir worked with Cambridge Analytica on the Facebook data it acquired, whistleblower alleges. CNBC.
Paganini, Pierluigi (2013, June 17). Palantir Technologies is considered the principal company behind the design of software used for PRISM program, think of it as the work of a single company is truly an understatement. Security Affairs.
Poindexter, John (2002, August 2). Overview of the Information Awareness Office. Federation of American Scientists.
Selwyn, N. (2011). Editorial: In praise of pessimism-the need for negativity in educational technology. British Journal of Educational Technology, 42(5), 713–718.
Shema, H., Bar Ilan, J., & Thelwall, M. (2014, May). Do blog citations correlate with a higher number of future citations? Research blogs as a potential source for alternative metrics. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 65(5), 1018-1027.
Solon, Olivia (2018, April 4). Facebook says Cambridge Analytica may have gained 37m more users’ data. The Guardian.
Thelwall, M., Haustein, S., Larivière, V., & Sugimoto, C. R. (2013). Do Altmetrics Work? Twitter and Ten Other Social Web Services. PLoS ONE, 8(5), 1–7.
Yang, C., & Chang, Y. S. (2012). Assessing the effects of interactive blogging on student attitudes towards peer interaction, learning motivation, and academic achievements. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 28(2), 126–135.