Conceptualizing Our Relationship With Online/Digital Platforms in Terms of Pedagogy

• In Event: Platform Pedagogies: Examining the Public Good in Learning, Schooling, and Educating Across Emerging Platforms

Abstract

Objectives and Theoretical Framework
The use of the term platform has grown in recent years to suggest a closed, programmable, proprietary online site that can be accessed across many different devices (from desktops to mobile phones); and which builds relationships, interactions and data about those interactions within its system (Gillespie, 2010; Plantin, Lagoze, Edwards, & Sandvig, 2018). Recent scholarship suggests that these platforms are manifestations of contemporary forms of capitalism (Srnicek, 2016; Zuboff, 2019). Yet such approaches to the study of platforms conceptualize the platform–user relationship significantly in terms of how the asymmetric/unequal relationship between the platform and the individual effectively surveils and controls people through the production of knowledge about them (datafication). This paper attempts to theorize user interactions, activity and relationships with digital platforms in terms of pedagogy; and to consider political social and educational implications.
As a theory of power, pedagogy (the structural relationship surrounding teaching and learning) shows how what actually happens as people "learn" the behaviors and actions of dominant ideological positions. For example, Bernstein (1973, 1990, 2000) systematically showed that it is the process of pedagogization (how human activity becomes framed as authorized school knowledge) with its control over forms of knowledge and language that creates and maintains unequal power relations. Understanding how pedagogic authority works - how knowledge itself is framed and classified though what Bourdieu called "symbolic violence" (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990) - points not just to how people become incorporated in their social order but the huge range of techniques that shape, support and prohibit such forms of subjectification. The neo-institutionalist school of sociology examination of world schooling (Baker, 2014) demonstrated the wider success of pedagogization into hitherto unschooled domains (Sefton-Green & Erstad, 2018) thus offering a template to make sense of how pedagogic regimes work in principle.

Methods and Data Sources
How then might theories of pedagogy help make sense of the power of platforms? First, a theory of pedagogy directs attention to the processes by which users learn behaviors, language, modes of interaction, meanings and indeed subscribe to the risks, benefits, comforts and values of the platform. Following ethnographies of algorithmic identities (Bucher, 2018), Facebook (Miller et al., 2016), or affinity learning (Ito et al., 2018), I suggest it is generative to look at forms of participation and interaction as modes of learning. This perspective gives insight into the pleasures and rewards of belonging and participating on platforms and also helps us to make sense of how to participate, how to behave and how to engage with each other across platforms.
The second avenue of enquiry examines how the spread of platforms and their successful incorporation of compliant subjects should be seen in terms of the wider spread of pedagogization (Sefton-Green & Erstad, 2018) into everyday life.

Results and significance
Understanding the spread of platforms and the compliant behaviors they enact can profitably be understood as the apotheosis of the "totally pedagogicized society” (Tyler, 2004) as much as contemporary political appeal is framed in terms of surveillant control (Zuboff, 2019).

Author

• Julian D Sefton-Green, Deakin University