engleski

The Wretched Of The Network Society: techno-education and colonisation of the digital

While elements of postcolonial theory have been successfully applied to educational theory and practice, its achievements have, by and large, been neglected in the context of information and communication technologies. Based on recently developed research approach called digital postcolonialism, this chapter explores the important role of education in human settlement of the digital in regards to transfer of inculcated knowledge, values, representations, human relationships and ideology. Using Foucault’s concept of power/knowledge, it examines transformation of hegemonic relationships pertaining to traditional education within the new digital worlds, and reveals new mechanisms of oppression and exploitation employed in (re)production of the existing social relationships. ‘Out of the ruins’ of the Jan van Dijk’s and Manuel Castells’s mass society, this chapter uses postcolonial theory to explore radical educational opportunities enabled by digital technologies in the context of the network society. The chapter draws on the recently established research project funded by the University of Zagreb which explores opportunities for developing various postcolonial perspectives in the context of the digital (‘Digital Postcolonialism’). This research perspective extensively draws from works of libertarian thinkers such as Ivan Illich, Everett Reimer and Paul Goodman, and the wide body of research developed by ‘third generation’ of Frankfurt School thinkers such as Douglas Kellner and Andrew Feenberg. Libertarian and critical views to the relationships between education and technologies are placed in postcolonial perspective through works of classic authors such as Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Syed Hussein Alatas. The idea of settlement into the digital is informed by Henri Lefebvre’s concept of production of space, and various streams of thought from Jean Baudrillard’s postmodernism to Jaron Lanier’s explorations of virtual reality. The quest for new radical informal learning spaces within the realm of information and communication technologies reaches much deeper than using new tools and tricks in the processes of learning and teaching. Instead, it implies a multiplicity of technological and social challenges and opportunities, subjectivities and perspectives, and the interplay between diverse analog and digital practices. Using (post)colonial approach, this chapter creates a specific conceptual framework that might shed a new light to the question of power/knowledge in contemporary education, and help us identify opportunities for new forms of radical educational engagement in the age of the network.

information science, digital postcolonialism, critical theory

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