Resistance is Futile: Cognitive dissonance, temporal refusal, and the e-learning environment as cyborg

Abstract

This study uses interpretive sociological methods to explore parallels between fictional accounts of cyborgs and educational technology-based practices currently present in some e-learning environments. Specifically, the cyborg in fictional accounts (Star Trek and Doctor Who) and the cyborg in academic accounts (Donna Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto) are used to frame an analysis of the potential of regarding e-learners as cyborgs. Two social scientific concepts are revisited in this analysis: cognitive dissonance (social psychology) and temporal refusal (critical sociology). These conceptual lenses reveal that the various modes of operating in the online classroom have assimilating tendencies threatening to draw us into a mass social delusion. Considering the science fiction trope, ''Resistance is Futile'', the author proposes that the promotion of ''best practices'' sublimates us into the domination of a particular educational philosophy. Recognizing this type of oppression provides space for temporal refusal -withdrawing from the potentially assimilating ''Borg'' when it threatens to be disadvantageous to education. Her conclusions lead the author to suggest the need for a critical reflexivity in teachers to identify and take advantage of opportunities to resist the absorption of distinctiveness in the online educational environment.

The Anatomy of Frank and Stein. An Ontological Exploration of Cyborg Identity, Culture, and Education

“…The same logic is apparent in the torrent of new vehicles, new clothes, new smartphones, new tablets, new refrigeratorsand today: new lovers, spouses, friends, circles, and networksthat define the social and economic dynamic of contemporary capitalist society. This already eroded and undermined quality of revolutionary objects and moments resonates with Haraway's (1991, p. 149;cf also Allen 1998;Gough and Gough 2017, Rose 2015, Gourlay 2012, Pickering 2003 view of the cyborg as 'a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction'. 1 These revolutionary semantics play the same crucial role in today's rendering of tech-enhanced human identity-formation and subjectivity.…”

“…What happens to identity when potent tech machinery is added to biological frames or patterns of thinking and self-reflection? The approach I'm interested in resembles that of Rose (2015, p. 318, cf Haraway 2003, who claims that cybernetics (the ideational and theoretical domain of cyborgism) is commonly taken to denote the automated, interconnected functioning of computers, machines, and organisms. The organism [Rose continues] is typically understood as human-based but with free will and independence incapacitated.…”

Technological Unemployment and Its Educational Discontents

“…Here, Rose's analysis of acceleration arrives at very similar conclusions to those in Maggi Savin-Baden's study of digital tethering (2015). However, not everyone agrees with Savin-Baden (2015) and Rose (2015), and opinion is divided on the merits of slowness versus acceleration in higher education.…”