the politics of facebook
while reading this Guardian UK article on the politics and theories of the people who own/run/manage facebook is sort of scary – the vision of the funders/founders and their views on information gathering and links to megacorps and the CIA, as explained in this video, etc. (although what’s discussed there doesn’t freak me out as much as i expected for some reason. neocons with a techno-utopian bent? meh.) – instead of running off to put on my tinfoil hat and immediately delete my facebook account, i am going to choose to apply the last paragraph of danah boyd’s recent post about SNSs in classrooms, the discussion of which is somewhat related:
Finally, please adult world, I beg you… stop fearing and/or fetishizing technology. Neither approach does us any good. Technology is not the devil, nor is it the panacea you’ve been waiting for. It’s a tool. Just like a pencil. Figure out what it’s good for and leverage that to your advantage. Realize that there are interface problems and figure out how to work around them to meet your goals. Tools do not define pedagogy, but pedagogy can leverage tools. The first step is understanding what the technology is about, when and where it is useful, and how it can and will be manipulated by users for their own desires.
in addition to that fine argument, very simply, if facebook is a tool being used by anti-multicultural neocon billionaires who are trying to take over the world, i’d rather be in on the game than delete my account and not see what’s happening.
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I think saying that “tools do not define pedagogy” is a little like saying “guns do not kill people, people do.” It is technically correct and yet misses the point. The tools we use in the classroom say a great deal about what we are teaching our children and how they will come out. Case in point the original effect of the classroom bell that announced when everyone should go to their next class was that it conditioned factory workers to respond to whistles about when to take breaks or change stations. It became less useful as an instructional arrangement when we stopped educating tomorrow’s manufacturing class, but the correlation is more than coincidental. Tools do not define pedagogy, they simply say a lot about what we expect from it and what our conscious and subconscious goals are. A futture anthropologist hoping to learn about how we structured our society and what our ideals were would turn to our instructional tools as one way to understand us. This implies that tools are a key part of defining our pedagogy don’t you think?