Dispensing With Disposal: Families Maintaining Technology in Home Learning Ecologies

• In Event: Learning in Tech Ecologies: Coming Clean About the Ecological Consequences of "Educational Innovation"

Abstract

Glancing around one’s media ecology, it is common to find technologies in different stages of their life cycles or in various states of (dis)repair. Digital and analog tools are interleaved across learning environments, marking this heterogeneous technological moment. Despite dominant innovation narratives, trusted paper-based technologies like books or journals remain indispensable, durable reminders that “out with the old, in with the new” is not a universal value (Seely-Brown & Duguid, 2000; Stern, 2007). Whether digital or analog, cherished technologies endure because we have cared for them, and this caring labor contributes- at a local scale- to sustainability at a planetary scale. Poised between everyday caring and ecological catastrophe, many people strike a messy middle ground between holding on to the tools they have and adopting the latest, greatest gadget (Gabrys, 2013). This paper situates these tensions in everyday home settings and examines their relation to learning.
Resisting planned obsolescence often means learning new uses for old things and adopting new habits of mind (Jackson, 2014). Taking care of things (or taking care of others with things) is a delicate business, and in a throwaway economy, “maintenance is learning” (Brand, 1994, p. 127). Learning to care for technology can involve wrangling devices that must be upgraded to remain operational. It might mean cleaning desktops or clearing cookies to keep work processes flowing or programs up to speed. “Digital housekeeping” (Tolmie et al., 2010) is one way that householders manage the “mangle of technological practice” (Authors & Colleague, 2017) and maintain everyday routines. A technological ethic of care necessitates such routine maintenance (Puig de Bellacasa, 2011). Yet, despite growing interest in theorizing care in the learning sciences (e.g. Phillips & Lund, in press; Chapman & Shapiro, 2019), we do not yet have a clear understanding of what the implications of care are for learning technologies or how we might redesign devices or learning arrangements in educational contexts that value innovation over the tried and true.
This paper examines these contradictions in the context of families’ everyday media ecologies and asks about the ethico-epistemic value of technological care and maintenance. Drawing on ethnographic data from a study of thirteen families in two separate US cities, I articulate a notion of “cherished world thinking,” a response to Jackson’s (2014) “broken world thinking,” which has framed recent work in empirical studies of maintenance and repair. Through close microanalysis of video recordings, I illustrate how families enact different forms of repair and maintenance through their media engagement. For example, while preserving and re-reading Harry Potter books makes sense for one family, another family makes frequent use of product replacement plans, returning tablet computers to Best Buy whenever a screen gets cracked. I argue that disposal of technologies is not inevitable, nor is the drive for newness that fuels innovation paradigms in technology and learning designs (cf. Kelly, 2016). Decisions to maintain or replace things are implicated in how we arrange for learning and teaching in dynamic media ecologies, where the consequences of caring reach beyond private spaces of home to the planetary scale.

Author

• Deborah Silvis, Utah State University