Materialist Perspectives on Digital Technologies

Abstract

The present article brings critical media research and science and technology studies (STS) into dialogue with approaches to digital literacy and digital competencies in educational contexts. In particular, it focuses on material aspects of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as technical infrastructure, economic conditions, ecological consequences, and code-based as well as embodied forms of impact, and argues that digital applications and devices have ambiguous and often contradictory affordances and effects that need to be addressed in academic literature and pedagogical practice. The main objective is to inform on-going debates on the nature and content of digital literacy and digital competence from a critical materialist vantage point, and to facilitate learning and teaching about, rather than with, digital technologies by highlighting salient issue areas in need of continued critical attention.

Bringing Materiality into Thinking about Digital Literacy

“…As I have suggested elsewhere (Pötzsch 2016(Pötzsch , 2017(Pötzsch , 2018(Pötzsch , 2019; see also Hoechsmann and Poyntz 2012, Golden 2017, Fuchs 2017, digital technologies have a material dimension that needs to be taken seriously in attempts to properly understand, appropriate, challenge, and possibly subvert the ways these technologies operate in given socioeconomic and political contexts. For a widening of the conceptual frame of critical digital literacies, issues such as material infrastructure, energy consumption, working conditions, resource extraction, waste management, and embodied effects connected to the digital economy become important elements that need to be taken into consideration.…”

“…The current rapid growth of the digital economy leaves increasingly problematic societal and ecological footprints (Maxwell and Miller 2012;Pötzsch 2016;Qiu 2016;Fuchs 2017). The often-presumed affordability of apparently inexpensive digital devices and applications merely redistributes costs in a familiar pattern where (again) the global South and disenfranchised groups in the North are forced to bear the brunt of negative impacts regarding ecological degradation and economic exploitation.…”

Critical Digital Literacy: Technology in Education Beyond Issues of User Competence and Labour-Market Qualifications

“…In a similar manner, Saariketo (2014, 32) has voiced a need for "critical technology education" that manages to complement the transfer of instrumental user skills "with an understanding of how the digital society functions and whose interests steer it", while Hoechsmann and Poyntz (2012, 162-163) point to underlying logics of capitalism as a veritable "elephant in the room" in thinking about technology-use in schools. The two authors show that digital technologies enable "increasing corporate governance of everyday life" (2012,162) and demand critical attention to "how young people's privacy and identity are being shaped by commercial intrusions" (see also Pötzsch 2016).…”

“…Structural issues such as economic inequalities, environmental footprints, and new forms of management and control are key aspects to be taken seriously in debates about digital technologies in education and beyond (Pedersen 2008;Jarrett 2008;Fuchs 2012a/b;Gehl 2014;Harcourt 2015;Pötzsch 2016;Zuboff 2019). Multiple forms of exploitation and accumulation as well as an increasing quantification and subsequent commodification of identities and social relations are not exceptions, but constitute the fundamental logics of operation of digital technologies in contemporary capitalism (Fuchs 2017).…”

What’s in a wiki?

“…In a code-based, 'software society' (Manovich, 2013), technological awareness becomes an important prerequisite for agency; in fact, the concept loses its relevance unless reconfigured and understood within a broader perspective that involves technological as well as economic and political aspects (Coole and Frost, 2010; van Dijck, 2009;Pötzsch, 2017). As many researchers are now arguing, an understanding of the inherent agency of software and algorithms is particularly crucial for anyone involved in education (Saariketo, 2015;Pötzsch, 2016;Williamson, 2014).…”