“Face/Book/Net/Work” and the Dream of Limitless Freedom

In my understanding, there are two central aspects involved in the idea of the “Face/Book/Net/Work” in regards to the educational environment. The first is the concept of social networking in the general sense of actually being able to create a network of individuals in a digital online environment for any number of personal and professional reasons and the supposed and real rupture of time and space that has occurred because of such digital networks. The second (similar yet distinct) component involves active online collaboration where scholarly research and pedagogical issues of information sharing and knowledge production take place within such a digital space. Being able to digitally network is one thing, but using digital networks for educational and pedagogical action opens up new spaces for the ongoing process of creating, distributing, and sharing knowledge and could possibly produce radical changes in the educational process.

Recently on the website for Blackboard™, the company that produces tools and technology for online, social, and collaborative educational institutions, there was an advertisement for one of the company’s products that showed a student sitting on a library floor and holding a book out in front of her. In the digitally altered image the upper half of the student’s body is divided and framed by a yellow border which includes a different background from that of the library, suggesting that the student may be physically connected to the textual materiality of books, and symbolically connected to knowledge, but that she can metaphysically exist at the Great Wall of China at the same time that she is grounded in the material institution. The tagline that runs beside this visual metaphor of freedom reads: “Suddenly, no limits.” The fact that the student is not reading the book, but is abstractedly looking off into space, signifies, for me at least, the actual role of social networking, online collaboration, and the rush to digitize the educational experience because, and I stress the causal nature of the “because,” the technology that allows us to do these things is, as the website states, “transformational.”

I am certainly not suggesting that social networking and digital pedagogical tools are unproductive or less intuitive methods of sharing, collaborating, learning, and teaching. Rather, I am critiquing the implied suggestion presented in the image and the discourse that surrounds the non-critical acceptance of digital technology, which is that the digital experience will free us in some way from constraints involving movement, space, and the labour required as students and teachers. The image, in other words, embodies a commonly held belief in the idea that digitization makes social networking, collaboration, and information sharing new, easier, and better rather than simply different, accessible, and alternative.

In order to get a more rounded view on the subject, however, and in the spirit of the topic, I asked my fellow graduate students on the Editing Modernism in Canada blog about their experiences with social networking. This idea of freedom from traditional networking models was, perhaps not surprisingly, one of the first responses I received. The feeling of being unrooted from traditional physical constraints is clearly a benefit of social networking, online presence, and self-marketing for graduate students. Being able to virtually present papers at conferences around the world is a benefit for those whose funding doesn’t allow them to travel to overseas destinations. And this, by its very nature, is transformational, if we understand the word to mean the transformation of past experiences and ways of working into different ways of doing the same thing we have done in the past.

In an altogether different response to my question, however, another graduate student remarked on the way in which digital social networking, blogging, and online collaboration can actually lead to less freedom for graduate students (at least at this moment in the early days of digital social networking as an institutional model for research and pedagogical practice). Rather than having been liberated from the necessity of print journal publications through alternative publishing formats, students, my networked peer responded, are required to maintain...