ON THE TECHNOLOGY FETISH IN EDUCATION: ELLUL, BAUDRILLARD, AND THE END OF HUMANITY

Deron Boyles

Georgia State University

Kip Kline

Lewis University

Schools continue to purchase and install machines and practices from the world of communications technology. In turn, students and teachers are purported to be more “connected,” and this connectivity is widely viewed as having a positive influence on teaching and learning. In this essay, however, we argue that not only are these claims about better teaching and learning specious, but that the largely unreflective and zealous pursuit of new technologies by schools amounts to an acceptance of technological determinism and an adoption of a set of non-neutral ontological assumptions. Human interaction is always interpreted, but the mitigation of technology raises important questions about the

assumed neutrality of “technological innovation.”

 Evan Williams, a founder of Twitter, recently claimed that “the internet is broken.”

His chief concerns include the degree to which Facebook live streams suicides, Twitter trolls attack people with abandon, and “news links” lead to falsehoods. The assault on truth, we argue, is a direct result of one of Williams's other inventions: the blog. Blogs allowed narcissistic posting of virtually anything, resulting, on Williams’s own admission, in a culture of “extremes.”

The solution, for Williams, is not to reposition humanity as central to deliberation, but to shift reality to a consumer-pay model for content access. Ashe puts it:Ad-driven systems can only reward attention.

They can't reward the right answer. Consumer-paid systems can. They can reward value. The inevitable solution: People will have to pay for quality content.

Per Liam Mitchell, the preponderance of new communications technology has as a central belief the confluence of capitalism, collectivism, and technological determinism. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg said in 2013 that “The real goal is to connect everyone in the world and help people map out everything that there is.” According to Mitchell, “At best, this ideology is naive. At worst, it is helping to create a transnational, colonial, capitalist subject who is alienated from the product of their production/consumption, disillusioned with their mode of self –  representation, and ironically disconnected from their friends.”

More recently, in a twist on Mitchell’s concern, The New York Times highlighted a North Dakota

teacher, Kayla Delzer, who enacts Silicon Valley’s penchant for all things techno-education.

She is a “teacher influencer” who has her own brand and financially benefits from referrals to high-tech firms and education entrepreneurs. Education start-ups like Seesaw give her their premium classroom technology as well as swag like T-shirts or freebies for the teachers who attend her workshops. She agrees to use their products in her classroom and give the companies feedback. And she recommends their wares to thousands of teachers who follow her on social media.

As she puts it, “I will embed it [new technologies] in my brand every day.” The

commercial and ethical issues this raises are only indicative of the (logical?)consequences that follow from technophilia run amok.While it would be easy for us to critique the mercantile elements pervading technological “innovations,” they are not the focus of this paper.

Instead, we utilize Williams’assumptions and Zuckerberg’s ontology as indicative of the most recent instantiation of what Jacques Ellul called “technique”and what Jean Baudrillard considered simulated communication and the death of the real.

The paper proceeds in three parts: 1) elucidating Ellul’s seven necessary conditions of and for “technique;” 2) reconsidering Baudrillard’s simulation theory; and 3) positioning both theorists’ arguments in a revised claim about the role of humanity in a world of ubiquitous technology. Implications for a more critical understanding of education are explored to develop counter narratives to challenge the overwhelming influence of technique and simulation