Digital Amplification of the Mega Self

I've finished Crawford's The World Beyond Your Head, and I've been ruminating on it for a couple of weeks.  Crawford makes a number of educational criticisms in this philosophical treatise that attempts to free us from Enlightenment thinking gone mad.  This post is on how digital economics amplify and feed off our sense of self.

Crawford's historical argument is that the Enlightenment rejection of authority has been amplified by neo-liberal values and digitization, turning what was once an early scientific rejection of church authority (rationality vs. superstition) into a sort of hyper-individualism that rejects obvious facts about reality in favour of opinion.  In our modern world opinions have the weight of truth, the irony being that the Enlightenment push to free people from authority has enabled individualism to such a degree that it is now ushering in a new era of superstition.

This person-on-a-pedestal is happily embraced by modern marketing which will go to ridiculous lengths to emphasize just how individual you can be if you all buy the same thing.  The modern, insulated self is also coddled by digital media designed to cater to your every whim.  Whole worlds are made where people feel they are accomplished because they followed the script of a game.  Ask any student, they self-identify with their social standing in game play, yet their greatest achievements don't actually exist.  The scripted interactions in gaming lead many people to believe that they've done something other follow a process they were supposed to complete.  You can never win a video game, you can only finish it, like a book.

Crawford uses the example of Disney's original cartoons in comparison to the modern Mickey Mouse Clubhouse to emphasize this change in how we (teach our children to) approach reality.  The original cartoons emphasized the tension between what we want and what reality demands with characters battling the elements, often with machines that don't work as they're supposed to.

The modern Disney playhouse teaches children an almost deified version of technology.  The machines are psychic, performing their functions perfectly before you even are aware that you need them.  Any problems are resolved by the machines, there is never a question of them not working.  Classic Mickey can often be seen repairing broken machines, modern Mickey is permanently happy as the machines resolve every problem that might arise, it almost plays like an Apple ad.  Digital environments designed to cater to your every whim... sounds like the perfect twenty-first century learning environment.

Mickey Mouse Clubhouse (2014) - Mickeys Space... by Zy-Video

Gamification in education tends to play much like Mickey's Clubhouse, offering an experience so safe that it's virtually (pun intended) meaningless.  When you can't fail, you can't succeed.  When you're following a script instead of self-directing your learning, you're not really learning.  I'm a massive fan of simulation, even digital simulation, but gamification isn't that.  In my simulations students often fail.  If they didn't, it wouldn't be a worthwhile simulation.  What I hope the simulation does is give them the space away from worldly cost concerns to experiment and try more radical approaches.

When I was a younger man I played paintball a fair bit.  When I played, I often tried to live out silly movie fantasies.  I wouldn't have done this with real bullets, but in paintball it isn't for real, right?  One time I left my gun behind and ran straight to the other team's flag, grabbing it and legging it while they were all standing around getting their defence set up.  I didn't even get hit because no one was ready.  Another time I tried to do the Arnold-Terminator thing, walking down a road, slowly taking aim and shooting people and ignoring the fact that they might get me back.  I shot six people before someone calmed down enough to get me. When they play paintball, most people run and hide like it's real.  They do the same thing in video games, camping or hiding even though the entire thing is bogus.  If simulation becomes real in the mind of the user, it ceases to have the same effectiveness as a learning tool; just ask Kirk.

Pedagogically, educational technology suffers from much of the same marketing creep as Mickey's Clubhouse.  It often tries to do too much, but it's also infected with attention grabbing nature of the digital economy it's derived from.  The software we use in education is derived from platforms designed to ensnare attention for as long as possible in order to make money from it.  In an economy where nobody makes anything, the only value people have is as consumers.

Crawford goes into detail about how we don't have a digital technology attention issue, we have a digital economics issue.  Machines are designed to keep user attention because the economy that profits from it made them that way.  We build machines to ensnare user attention (familiarity helps this, it's why education is 'given' tech 'for free').

We children of the Enlightenment, having freed our minds from superstition and social authority by amplifying individuality, ushered in scientific and industrial revolutions.  The Enlightenment championed democracy rather than the mystical divine right of kings, but something insidious latched on to that democratic push.  Democracy became democratic-capitalism and now we're saddled with an economic system that is happy to make use of the individualism championed in the Enlightenment.

Digital technologies latch on to our already amplified sense of self, multiplying it and allowing us to exist beyond the constraints of the real world (at least until there is an internet or power failure).  As long as that comforting digital blanket is wrapped around our minds we are free to believe whatever we want (the internet will provide proof).

If you feel like there is something wrong with how we're doing things, Crawford's challenging book will give you the philosophical latitude to do an end-run around this mental trap that's been centuries in the making.

How We've Situated Ourselves

I'm wrapping up Matt Crawford's The World Beyond Your Head, and it's leaving a lot of questions around education.


Throughout the book Crawford questions the hyper-individualized nature of our post-enlightenment selves.  He does it in the context of skilled manual labour, which does a lot to refute the ideal 'generic/flexible intelligence' we all value nowadays.  Skills situated in real-world demands are immune to academic flights of fantasy.

Below are some quotes I'm ruminating on:


"...manufactured experiences promise to save us from confrontations with a world that resists our will."

Anyone teaching modern teens feels the strain of trying to haul them out of the digital trance they prefer.  I teach computers and this is acute, like trying to teach pyromaniacs how to be firemen.  Many of my students are incapable of seeing the machines they are supposed to be learning about as anything other than entertainment.  Computers are a digital window into a world where you can always be capable and rewards are continuous and timely.

The proliferation of fairly terrible flash games on the internet indicates that many students would rather exist in digital Pavlovian response environments than deal with the pesky real world.  The game play is so bad that I'm astonished anyone plays them, but play them they do, for hours at a time.  Crawford has a section on machine gambling that strikes startling (and terrifying) similarities with how I see students playing these digital games (most of which are thinly veiled advertisements).

Between an isolated and hyper-intensified (almost sacred) sense of self, and the nature of digital economics, people are immersed in a society that has quantified and actively seeks their attention for monetary gain.  Crawford describes this as the enlightenment ideal of a free self taken to bizarre extremes - but these extremes feed nicely into the neo-liberal/globalized digital economy we've created for ourselves.

Distraction is seen as a problem of technology, but it is actually one of political economy: "in a culture saturated with technologies for appropriating our attention, our interior mental lives are laid bare as a resource to be harvested by others."

Hack the future - or be used by it. Digital technology has
evolved into the shiny gateway to an attention economy
that is as relentless as a casino in catching eyeballs..

Worries about digital-distraction have long been tied to education and technology, but Crawford does a good job of uncovering the economic foundations of that problem.  My concern has always been that poor implementation of educational technology simply feeds students into this harvester.

If we're delivering a single branded approach to educational technology, we aren't teaching fluency so much as dependence.  This is why technology multi-nationals are so willing to 'work with education'.  With students already walking into class having been digitally branded on a personal level, education has jumped on the bandwagon by following student trends (kid's love ipads!) rather than pedagogical imperative.  If we're going to recover students' ability to navigate (rather be navigated by) the digital economy they are immersed in, we can't be driven by the same processes.

If the only point of education is to put more bricks in the wall, then we should just keep on doing what we're doing.  If we want to teach students to survive in a voracious economy that sees their attention as a commodity then we need to teach them what the technology is and how it works.  Open source software and un-locked, non-brand specific hardware would be a good place to start, but you're not going to see lots of ads for it.


"the advent of hyperpalatable mental stimuli... raises the question of whether the ascetic spirit required for education has a chance.  The content of our education forms us, through the application of cultivated powers of concentration to studies that aren't immediately gratifying.  We therefore had to wonder whether the diversity of human possibilities was being collapsed into a mental monoculture - one that can more easily be harvested by mechanized means."

Student directed learning: the kind of thinking
being embraced by Ontario's education leaders
at this summer's conference.  This kind of nonsense
ignores how education has worked for millennia.

The "ascetic spirit" of education is long dead.  If it isn't fun and engaging, it isn't a correct lesson plan according to modern educational thinking.  Students treat marks as a score, demanding them immediately and ignoring feed-back.  There is no delayed gratification in modern education.  Teachers have to justify (up front) any teaching - it can never lead toward a goal that is out of sight.  Where ever possible we are asked to be as transparent and immediately gratifying as possible.  The more forward-thinking, extreme view is that teachers are no longer needed at all.  In an information rich world (conveniently delivered on closed platforms by multi-nationals), students can learn on their own with no direction.  All you need is an I.T. guy to keep everyone connected.

If we're producing generic-intelligence graduates that are able to work anywhere for minimum wage with no real expertise other than a can-do attitude, then we're doing a great job.  Crawford's focus on skilled labour neatly sidesteps the ideal of the liberally educated university student who can't do anything but is ready for everything (as long as it doesn't involve reality).  Reality makes demands on skilled trades that most academics find beneath them.

The danger in digital technology exists in its ability to latch onto and modify our very plastic thinking processes.  A skilled-trades approach to understanding digital technology can elevate us from being users to being architects.  Nick Carr does a good job of criticizing this in The Shallows.  Crawford goes further by explaining that technology isn't the issue, it's the cannibalistic economics that drive it that we should be protecting students from.

By pulling back the curtain and revealing the machinery that feeds this relentless economy we enable students to dictate the terms of their digital experience.  What happens instead is that we present digital technology as if it's just another educational tool, which allows the underlying economy to seep into education unseen, feeding students into a mechanism that wants to commodify their very thoughts.