This week Utopia – funny how the utopian
visions are more terrifying than the dystopian ones isn’t it?
First I watched… and then I read...
Film
1: A Day Made of Glass 2. (5:58)
Augmented reality world: ‘hermetically
sealed’ like the buildings and as sanitised as the futuristic medical centre.
Don’t get me wrong, I do love the tricky
things that technology can do, I love being able to flick a message from one
handheld to another or to another device altogether… I would relish being able
to hold up my phone or tablet and ‘see’ real dinosaurs coming at me and I hope
to be able to do all these things one
day.
However, once these are commonplace will they
cease to create the wonder acted out in the video – and without wonder what
would be left? Definitely not the ‘human’: ‘as the patient lays etherised upon
the table’ (TS Eliot, ‘Prufrock’); and still they talk over his body – indeed
they take his body out of his body and discuss that. Pace Foucault!
And what a vision of education is created. Rather
than watching a whiteboard or interactive wall or PowerPoint 3.0 or video or –
as is the case now – sit still, be quiet and complete a worksheet; the best way
for children to learn is to do stuff – real stuff: grow vegetables and harvest
and cook them; raise chickens; work with old people in a day centre. And what
work our young could do: preparing meals, transcribing stories… singing with…
re-decorating – teaching how to use the web to construct their own wonders…
Of course we cannot blame technology for
de-naturing education – that happened long long ago – but the wonder of
technology lends glamour (in the old magical sense of the word) to something
that is currently so reduced, and thus lends spurious credibility and seduces
us, so there appears to be less of an imperative to fight for real education…
And of course a sneaky part of my brain
asks – and who makes these online razzle dazzle programmes or programs? Who
sells them and to whom? At the last Discourse Power Resistance Conference I
attended in the UK US
Fortunately education and the world is much
messier than the education business would like it to be…
Film
2: Productivity Future Vision (6:17)
In 1971 I was studying biological sciences at a
Technical College – day release from work – my employer paid me to attend and
paid for the course (none of this happens now – there goes teleology!) – in the
midst of this scientific day, we had general studies – because even as
potential scientists they thought it would be good for us to think, to discuss
ideas, literature, contemporary issues… engage in debate – learn how to think
for ourselves – produce arguments… engage in the sorts of things that make you
human. Anyway – I remember that back there in 1971 they argued that with
technology enhanced employment, productivity would be so increased that the
working week would be reduced for everybody as people shared the labour and
shared the profit…
Come 1983 or thereabouts – after several Right to
Work marches in the UK
Watching this film I am reminded of these things.
The film, as with ‘World of Glass’, portrays a world
where all the working ‘privileged’ are now on call 24/7. Labour is not shared out
and definitely neither is the profit. There is no work/life balance – rather the
child working at home on her homework can contact the mother working on the
other side of the world (why?) to help her – and all about them are people
shown constantly attached to work, as they travel, as they step towards a taxi,
as they sit in the hotel room prior to the meeting… Nowhere and at no time is
anybody free from contact, from duty and from labour.
Except perhaps those who are completely and utterly
excluded from work and labour. For where are the non-privileged? Where are those
without work and without income? Those disconnected from the web? As Macherey (in Walder 1990) argues:
the text says what it des not say – and there is a lot not said here – about
what sort and quality of life human beings could and should be living, about
who is ‘in’ society and who is excluded.
Coda: I come from the working class. I do not see
that my education has made me middle class, I did not want to be ‘socially
mobile’ and escape the class that shaped me – and frankly find the term
offensive. I wanted to be an educated working class person – still connected
umbilically to the forces and voices and feelings and values of my birth… My
class is flawed as are all people (though perhaps my class is the one that is
blamed for everything!) and some say that given our post-industrial world the
working class does not even exist anymore – but if it were still to exist – it
would be collectivist, it is
rude and bawdy, it is uproarious and disgraceful, it is disrespectful… and it
does not fit in this brave new world!
Film
3: Sight (7:50)
Interestingly I could not get this one to work –
might try again later…
Film
4: Charlie 13 (14:20)
“No more adventures! You’ll be safe – and
never have to worry about anything ever again…”
I run a positive thinking session for
students – not the bullying and unforgiving kind of session that people are now
revolting against – but one where we explore fear and the over-weaning power it
can have over us as human beings. We fear everything and nothing – and this
fear is fanned by the government as it exhorts or compels us to buy that
insurance policy and to worry that we haven’t enough invested in that pension… We
are taught that we can be safe – and to avoid risk. But to avoid risk is to
avoid life and living. To be alive is to take a risk – if we are not we are as
good as dead. The anodyne world that is depicted in this film is a living death
– and probably one of the reasons why I do like post-apocalyptic zombie films.
The freedom that Charlie is searching is
left unspoken – it is sketched in by the presence of the father and the compass
given by the mother – but really can it be worse than the reality that he is
fleeing?
Film
5: Plurality (14:14)
Again is depicted the control of the anodyne,
conformist bourgeoisie – where surveillance renders us all ‘safe’. Okay so they actually called him
Foucault - but the heart of this film was in the right place and I did enjoy it.
Liked the concept of ‘plurality’ being verboten – here because it flags up a
time traveller come to warn them of the consequences of the all-seeing
surveillance system to which they have subscribed and which is literally
inscribed in their DNA; but all these safe Utopias render plurality paradoxical
and that is especially evident when Foucault himself time travels back with his
warning.
The reading:
Core
Johnston
Lakoff and
Johnson (1980) argued that our speech, thoughts, and actions are based upon
metaphors. These metaphors are so entwined in our lives that they are invisible
to us; however, since our conceptual system defines our reality, we only
understand reality through metaphor.
What is so potentially ‘dangerous’ about these metaphors is
that people are unaware that they and we are thinking metaphorically. There is
the assumption that the world and our language is autochthonous – springing
from the earth itself rather than shaped by us and our ideologies, beliefs or
lack of beliefs, our cultures and families. Once we understand that we are
metaphorical we have the power to explore those metaphors to see what they
reveal back to us about how and what and why we are thinking.
As cultural
metaphors become tacitly understood, individuals and their communities can
choose to accept or reshape metaphors, thus changing reality for that
community. As we become aware of metaphors, we can determine the accuracy and
appropriateness of them (Sims, 2003)…
This underscores the point that we need to be conscious of
metaphors – and then we can wittingly express ourselves through our chosen
metaphors.
Some of the metaphors this piece discusses include:
… information
superhighway and even the Web, provide an initial structure to Internet
experiences, they also “carry with them the entailments of government funding,
teams of experts, and large bureaucracy.” [8]
Potentially
interesting there – taking away our own agency – and giving the power to
governments…
As these
Internet and computing metaphors, such as the Web, become embedded in our
society, they in turn spawn new metaphors for understanding our experiences.
For example, computer and Internet metaphors now determine our very sense of
selves: We describe ourselves and others as binary; we describe our brains as
hard drives or storage systems; we talk about thoughts as being coded in memory
(Denny and Sunderland , 2005).
Creating ourselves in binary form – dialect, oppositional –
reduced (see ‘Plurality’ notes).
Wyatt (2004)
also examined the metaphors used to describe the Internet “in order to
understand the perceptions and expectations of some of the actors involved in
its shaping.”[11]
She uncovered six main metaphorical themes in Wired:
“revolution, evolution, salvation, progress, universalism, and the ‘American
Dream’.” [12]
These metaphors often promoted a form of social justice and global access,
change, and equality.
Metaphors
of space and time also discussed in this article… war, destruction, arming and
fighting back… decay, destruction… revolution and salvation… This makes it
sound like ‘all human life is here’ or is possible here – but …
Discussion
With ‘A journey into silence:
students, stakeholders and the impact of a strategic Governmental Policy
Document in the UK’ (in Social Responsibility
Journal, Vol. 5 No. 4, 2009 pp 566-574)… we undertook a discourse analysis of that
policy document to uncover the metaphors that the government was using in
discussing technology – and education, justifying our method thus:
“Crowther and Mraovic (op cit) offer a
paradigmatic model with respect to the application of the critical and
analytical tools of literary theory to organisational documents with a special
focus on accounting documentation. The authors provide an informed overview of the
theoretical field alongside a discussion of the ‘myths’, ‘truth’ and
ideological signs of organisational documentation. Citing Levi-Strauss (1980)
and Leach (1982, 1983) they argue that ‘to decode the message embodied in the
myth as a whole [one] must search for the structural pattern underlying the
entire series of metaphors’ (Crowther op cit; 77) where language is the
ideological sign … [offering] concrete not abstract views of the world …
inseparable from the social praxis and class struggle’ (Ibid; 93). This model
offers an explanation at organisational level, and we have developed this work
further to explore societal issues via the critical analysis of a government
document. The framework for our analysis suggests that the government text in
question offers a series of metaphors that construct myths around education. [new
bold/ital]
Our
conclusions were that those that were unsuccessful in the education system were
themselves blamed – branded as Special Educational Needs or cognitively
impaired. The solution that was offered was that they be individually plugged into
remedial packages to be ‘fixed’. This pathologising language and
those metaphors served to construct a Foucauldian medical model of education
‘failure’, denying government and institutional agency in creating inequality –
and dislocating individual fragmented people away from their collective class
or cultural positions when ‘fixing’ them.
Welcome
to Utopia!
More
recently we (me with Tom Burns and Debbie Holley) developed an interest in the
metaphors that students themselves use about education – but also when they are
*in* virtual spaces. We linked this to Soja’s ‘third space’ and analysed the
avatars that the students created for themselves as embodied metaphors.–
Sinfield et al (2012) ‘The shipwrecked shore and other metaphors…’, in
Investigations Vo 8, Summer 2012.
This is
leading us to use visual Literacy as part of our academic and digital literacy
work with students – harnessing the power of metaphor as conceptualisation process and therefore as research tool –
which we are introducing to first year students to get them thinking
divergently and rigorously about research. We also explore the visual as a
learning/meaning making tool in its own right – as students draw their learning
– as part of the understanding process – and to develop their own mnemonic
aids.
… and we are
interested in working with others who are using metaphors, animations and the visual
in their teaching, learning, assessment and research practices.
