Degrees of deceptions: Faking of and in the credential society

• In Event: The platformisation of education

Proposal

How do we know whether we are chatting with a real person on social media or just a social bot? How do we know whether the news in the media are true or faked? The challenge of established modes of verification and the loss of public trust in the media world have gained much public attention in recent years. Far less attention has been paid to a similar trend in the sphere of education, where fake degrees and other credential have gained in importance. A recent BBC report speaks of more than 3,000 degrees (including master's degrees, doctorates and PhDs) that were issued by one internationally operating diploma mill alone and sold to UK-based buyers, including members of the army, in 2013 and 2014. This case is just the tip of the iceberg which points to a much more fundamental challenge that established technologies of credentialisation are encountering in an age of increased geographic mobility, with new copy technologies, and where non-degree (micro) credentials are mushrooming as part of life-long learning. The challenge is essentially the results of an intensification, digitalisation and internationalisation of the credential society, to use a term that Randall Collins coined almost four decades ago (Collins, 1979).
It is against this backdrop that the paper will examine the different attempts to make use of blockchains as a technology of authentication of credentials and the platforms they create. I will first develop a theoretical framework that draws on political and economic sociology as well as critical media studies. This framework helps to explore the enabling conditions of authority. A retroductive approach will inform the case study that studies the extent to which these new technologies and platforms establish new forms of transnational private authority, or ab extrastatecraft as Keller Easterlings calls the new emerging infrastructure enabled by the new technologies (Easterling 2014). The paper will conclude by discussing the implications for universities and other educational providers and the re-articulation of the complex relationship between knowledge, power, authority and legitimacy in a digital age, that some refer to as new Dark Age (see e.g.Bridle, 2018).

BRIDLE, JAMES. (2018) New Dark Age. Technology and the End of the Future. London: Verso.
COLLINS, RANDALL. (1979) The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification. New York: Academic Press.
Easterling, Keller (2014) Extrastatecraft: the power of infrastructure space. Verso Books.

Author

• Eva Hartmann, University of Cambridge