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Chapter Fourteen Visibility, Blogging, and the Construction of Subjectivity in Educational Spaces
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chapter four teen Visibility, Blogging, and the Construction of Subjectivity in Educational Spaces a su nc ió n l óp ez -v ar el a a zc ár at e As part of a blogging project on personal democracy, Julie Barko Germany wrote in 2008: Four years ago, in the middle of the 2004 primaries, the online political community heralded the rise of the political blogosphere as an evolution in—and improvement upon—the printing press. Political bloggers became the new pamphleteers, and more than one journalist compared online political discussion groups, blogging communities, and listservers to coffee houses, where people go to get their daily fix of information. It is not a coincidence that we embraced the metaphors of the printing press, which once led Western Europe to question the traditions established by religious and political authorities, and coffeehouse, where so many connections were made, business transactions were conducted, and ideas were debated during the Enlightenment.1 Barko regards the rise of the blogosphere as being part of an ongoing development of free speech and education since the Enlightenment. The dawn of digitization has, for that matter, always carried with it the legacy of Enlightenment ideals of free speech, accessible education (Condorcet), and democratization. Has the digital age, with its transhumanist or posthumanist explorations into the improvement and extension of human life as a radical realization of individuality thus more or less materialized the seeds of Enlightenment? The question may be too broad to answer here—and it may be an all too problematic question, since the opposite can be (and has been) formulated just as easily: that 241 242 Asunción López-Varela Azcárate the age of digitization and ‘‘googlefication’’ may have endangered the legacies of the Enlightenment by endangering the future of the book as a cultural medium, copyrights, and, precisely, the open access to books and information safeguarded by libraries.2 Nevertheless, current debates on e-learning and, in relation to this, participation culture are informed by late-eighteenth-century ideals concerning the advancement of learning (only consider the encyclopedia, at once an icon of both the Enlightenment and, in its computerized version, the age of digitization, representing a pursuit of integrated but also democratized knowledge). Here I raise the question if, and if so to what extent, new technologies have produced new media literacies and modes of learning, or if such technologies rather materialize ideas on education that have long been part of our Western cultural canon. The first part of this chapter is concerned with the effect of new media technologies on communication , subjectivity, and dialogic interaction (Bakhtin). In close connection with this, I then consider such technologies, and their uses, in the light of participatory culture (Jenkins). Elaborating on the growing body of literature on online education, literacy, and participation, I explore the uses of e-learning through blogging as an intermedial practice. If education produces subjectivities,3 and if education is itself premised on particular subjectivities to be produced, what are the interrelations between e-learning and digital modes of subjectivity? humachines and humachine environments As the result of technological developments in biology, the spheres of techno and bio have increasingly merged. According to Bernard Stiegler, subjectivity has always already been prosthetic, but during the last three to four decades the prosthetic has become more and more pronounced as a formative dimension of subjectivity in its posthuman configurations . The resulting integration of human and machine, as Mark Poster puts it, ‘‘constitutes an interface outside the subject/object binary.’’4 Interfaces are devices or systems that allow unrelated entities to relate and interact with each other: interaction modalities. With the emergence of the information age, such interfaces can no longer be thought of as external to the subject, but rather signal a change in the relations between humans and machines. This change is enumerated in Poster’s concept of humachines: a dimension in-between subject and object. According to Poster, such humachines and the networks of digital information have profoundly changed the conditions of culture.5 The [18.207.126.53] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 11:03 GMT) Visibility, Blogging, and the Construction of Subjectivity 243 Internet no longer fits the frameworks of earlier modes of communication in real space, producing a new materiality of interaction where the virtual has taken on actual dimensions. Whereas ‘‘old’’ media such as print and radio are, for Poster, fixed outlets that typically lend themselves to state control, the Internet...