Digital Learning in Motion

From Book Culture to the Digital Age

David Kergel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781138366749
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429772085
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Semantics
• Index: Computer Science

Digital Learning in Motion provides a theoretical analysis of learning and related learning media in society. The book explores how changing media affects learning environments, which changes the learning itself, showing that learning is always in motion.

This book expounds upon the concept of learning, reconstructing how learning unfolds and analyzing the discourse around pedagogy and Bildung in the age of new digital media. It further discusses in detail the threefold relationship between learning and motion, considering how learning is based on motion, generated by new experiences and changes with the environment and through its own mediatization. The book presents a normative model that outlines how learning can be structured on the basis of society's values and self-understanding discourses in the digital age.

This book will be of great interest for academics, postgraduate students, and researchers in the fields of digital learning and inclusion, education research, educational theory, communication and cultural studies.

Chapter 1

Introduction

At a first glance, learning seems to be an anthropological constant: The human being is a ‘deficient being’; in order to survive the human being needs to acquire knowledge about the world. The process through which the human being acquires knowledge about the world can be termed ‘learning.’ Learning can be defined as a constant and sustainable change in behavior or behavioral potential of an individual (Winkel, Petermann & Petermann, 2006). From this point of view learning can be analyzed without any socio-historical contextualization.

The concept of learning is an open concept. This openness can be considered a strength since a conceptual examination of learning sharpens the analytical perception of the phenomenon ‘learning.’ Despite the different definitional approaches, experience can be identified as the basis of learning.

Experience is a key concept for the discussion about the definition of the notion learning. The term ‘experience’ shows that learning is based on impressions, contents, information, and thus on the environment. Learning is an effect of processing environmental perception and interaction. As a process, learning is bound to experiences. Experiences are made in an active confrontation with the world. Where activity is, movement or motion exists. Learning has a threefold relationship with the term motion. On one hand, learning is based on motion. On the other hand, learning is expansive because new knowledge is generated by new experiences. At the same time, learning changes with the environment and with its own mediatization. The change of media changes the environment which learners deal with and, therefore, changes the learning itself. Learning is, therefore, always in motion. The following considerations expound upon these aspects.

The main thesis assumes that the established discourse about learning and its subtextual understanding of the human being is a discursive effect of civil society. To unfold this thesis, it is important to distinguish between the anthropological constant and the discursive frame in which this anthropological constant is thematized. From a phenomenological point of view, it seems an ineluctable fact that the human being is a learning being. But the way we are aware of learning as a phenomenon depends on the socio-historical context in which we are embedded. For me, as a European researcher, the socio-historical is defined by civil society and its development.

This analysis methodically reconstructs how learning unfolds in civil society. It is based on the thesis that learning is always bound to the mediatization of society: With medial change learning processes also change. Genealogical reconstruction leads from the book culture of the Gutenberg Galaxy to the Electronic Age. Based on this reconstruction, a normative model will be proposed of how learning can be structured on the basis of bourgeois society’s values and self-understanding discourses in the digital age. In order to develop such a proposal and to carry out a genealogical reconstruction of learning, it is necessary to confront concepts of education and upbringing. Bildung and Erziehung can be defined as pedagogical forms of care that have been developed in civil society. Bildung and Erziehung stand for different aspects of bourgeois self-transformation processes and each provides a different lens to interpret learning. Together, Bildung and Erziehung form a basic analytical heuristic for reconstructing the development of learning from book culture to the digital age.

This method of reconstruction is Eurocentric. The analysis focuses on the concept of learning, as it has been developed in civil European society. Bourgeois society is the objectual focus of this investigation, so the limits of this research are explicitly pointed out. Learning in bourgeois society becomes an object of knowledge that can then be compared with learning concepts from other cultures in following intercultural analyses.

1.1 The birth of learning from the spirit of civil society

Civil society can be defined as a secular idea of political and social order based on the rational competence of the citizen: The citizen is defined as an individual which is able to argue, act, and decide in a rational manner (cf. Kergel, 2013; Krämer-Badoni, 1978). The citizen is responsible for his actions himself.

This political idea is linked with a specific economic concept: Liberal market economy. This linkage is different from socialist-oriented concepts of society. Socialist-oriented concepts of society also assume the rational competence of individuals. However, socialist-oriented concepts of society define the question of ownership in contrast with the concept of ownership of civil society.

From an epistemological point of view, civil society is based on a voluntaristic-rational concept of the subject. Via voluntaristic-rational reflection strategies, the bourgeois subject constitutes herself independently of otherworldly instances. Because of this, the concept of reason implies also the concept of freedom. To reflect rationally about the world, the subject needs to be free to act according to his insight and to judge what exists on a rational basis. Thus, the epistemology of civil society is based on the premise that reason unfolds from the rational subjectivity of the human being: the individual must examine and judge everything by the force and power of her cognition. The concept of the self-determined individual as citizen of a civil society is a bourgeois concept that is delimited by the culture and the self-understanding discourses of feudalism. In the increasing establishment of bourgeois culture and civil society such delimitation concepts emerged in different societal fields. The constituting processes of civil society can be traced beyond the 19th century to the emancipation of the bourgeoisie. The rise of the bourgeoisie to the dominating class in Europe was accompanied by the cultural and political collapse of feudalism. To analyze the dominant culture’s social transformation from feudalism to civil society and bourgeois culture, one can refer to the concept of symbolic order.

1.2 Symbolic order of civil society

Symbolic order is an analytical category which describes the symbolic dimension of power structures. The symbolic order is the structure of meaning of hierarchies and relations of dependence. It provides reasons and an ideology for the hierarchical structures of social spaces. The truth claims and codes of a symbolic order provide rules of conduct and therewith certainty through points of orientation – you know to behave. If you need to go to a restroom, you orientate yourself by the iconic representations on the restroom doors. As a man, you ‘normally’ choose the restroom at which door a male icon is affixed. You know where to go! As a woman you ‘normally’ choose the restroom at which door a female icon is affixed. You know where to go! At the same time you choose the appropriate door, you also acknowledge the binary gender structure which is part of most symbolic orders. The symbolic order constructs a meaningful space in which hierarchies and power structures are discursively legitimized and performatively reproduced. But the symbolic order also constitutes a space of resistance where meaning can be questioned. For example, a person who wants to protest against the binary gender structure can choose the ‘inappropriate’ restroom door or deface the doors’ iconic gender representations as a form of resistance. Despite such acts of resistance and questioning of the symbolic order, the symbolic order represents the symbolic dimension of power structures.

With new power structures new symbolic orders are constructed. For example, coffee became the ideological beverage of civil society. In the era of absolutism, the French nobility drank hot chocolate. The sweet beverage represented pleasure. Coffee, with its activating effect, represents the activity of the citizen in a civil society. As the power of the citizen and civil society increased and the power of the nobility decreased, coffee achieved popularity (cf. Schivelbusch, 1990). With the civil society a new symbolic order emerged, which can be reconstructed through an analysis of the symbolical meaning of beverage (coffee instead of hot chocolate). On a cultural level, the process which led from feudalism to civil society and bourgeois culture is called the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment accompanied the rise of the bourgeoisie as a cultural transformation process. In other words, the Enlightenment can be interpreted as the cultural manifestation of the bourgeoisie and civil society. Throughout the course of the Enlightenment, critical arguments were placed against ‘irrational’ divine hierarchies and ‘irrational’ dependency relationships. Via rational thinking, the bourgeois subject differentiates itself from irrational hierarchies and dependencies of feudalism. Consequently, the bourgeois subject is rational based and therefore emancipative, since it differentiates himself critically and reflexively from irrational claims to power.

In the sense of a semiotic ‘search for traces,’ the erosion of the symbolic order of feudalism can be traced through the shift of cultural practices. For example, the erosion of feudalism manifests itself metonymically in the guillotining of Louis XVI (cf. Kergel, 2013). Blessed with the king’s salvation, the French king symbolized the divine order of the sacred and absolutist royalty. In his speech “On the King`s Fate” (27 December 1792), St Just urged to detach from the concept of nobility:

Citizens, when first you deliberated the question of this trial, I told you that a king was outside the state, and by nature above the law. This is why whatever covenant may have been agreed upon between the People and the King (in this case an illegitimate covenant), it did not bind him.¹

(St Just, 1792, para. 2)

In the course of the French Revolution, Louis XVI also became the legal figure “Citizen Capet.” Between absolutist royalty and bourgeois individual, Louis XVI/Citizen Capet represents two legal individuals in one person. With the execution of the person Louis XVI/Citizen Capet on January 21, 1793, two societal individuals were executed at the same time. The bourgeois rational-based secularization of society is semiotically underlined by the practice of guillotining; as an execution practice, guillotining is discursively thematized as a rational method of killing. During the French Revolution, all those who were sentenced to death were subjected to the guillotine. The guillotine rationalized the practice of state-sanctioned killing. Thus, the guillotine was distinct from execution practices that were part of semiotic penal culture of the Middle Ages. Before the introduction of the guillotine, the execution procedure represented the significance of crime and the status of the delinquent. Beheading, for example, was an honorable form of killing and was reserved for nobles. Hanging, in turn, had humiliating connotations.

The symbolic meaning of a rational killing is part of the bourgeois secularization process. This secularization process can be interpreted as cultural manifestation of the rise of the bourgeoisie and civil society. The penal system symbolically manifested bourgeois value systems: “Social values and retributive intuitions influence the symbolic meaning of punishment and this symbolic meaning in turn influences its social effects” (Hanna, 2008, S. 91). The semiotic change of the death penalty is embedded in discursive shifts and can be understood as part of the secularization process of the Enlightenment.

The establishment of the bourgeois culture affected all areas of society. Its basic dichotomy was the demarcation of the bourgeois from the ‘leading culture’ of the nobility. In its origins, bourgeois culture was narrated as counterculture. The discursive demarcation strategies towards the culture of nobility created a bourgeois space of thought and discourse. Out of this space of thought and discourse bourgeois culture successively emerged as the leading Western culture. As mentioned earlier, bourgeois counterculture and its basic dichotomy of nobility’s irrational/alienated/decadent culture versus the bourgeoisie’s rational culture emerged in almost every societal field.

One example is Empfindsamkeit (sentimentalism) as a concept of bourgeois emotionality. Here one can refer to the research results of Hansen. Hansen (1989) used a genealogically oriented approach to reconstruct the bourgeois discourses of emotion. In his research Hansen examined the difference between bourgeois discourses of self-understanding and a – discursively ascribed – culture of the nobility. The focus of his analysis is the bourgeois programmatics of Empfindsamkeit. Hansen describes the lasting effect of this emotional concept, which according to Hansen also defined our discursive framing of emotions:

The most extensive, most differentiated emotional program that penetrates into all areas of culture, which we know, is the sensitivity of the 18th century. From this, the bourgeois culture of emotion developed, which to this day forms the manners of the middle classes.

(Hansen, 1989, p. 39, translation David Kergel)

Empfindsamkeit represents a bourgeois redefinition of emotionality. The bourgeois topos of critical thinking was flanked by a ‘sentimental’ emotional discourse. Empfindsamkeit has origins in France and England at the beginning of the 1700s and particularly flourished in the pre-revolutionary period from 1740 to 1790. In Germany, the concept of Empfindsamkeit was coined by Lessing. Lessing suggested the adjective empfindsam (Yoricks empfindsame Reise, 1769) for the translation of Stern’s novel A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. Empfindsamkeit refers to the sensitive and authentic experience of emotions and reached its literary climax in Germany with Goethe’s novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sufferings of Young Werthers) written in 1774.

Empfindsamkeit established the concept of the emotionally self-perceived bourgeois individual. In opposition to the predominance of the nobility and the clergy, emotionality was discussed as an immediate and thus authentic expression of individual personality. In this context, the emotional programmatic is “a fully-fledged ideology that emerges as the product and trigger of an upheaval, namely the decisive one of Western history: the replacement of the feudalist corporative state by bourgeois society” (cf. Hansen, 1989, p. 39, translation David Kergel). With Empfindsamkeit, the concept of an emotional self-evidence was established as part of arguments which discursively legitimized the bourgeois claim to cultural power. The requirement of the bourgeois subject’s emotional self-realization was contrasted with the staging of one’s status, which was publicly performed in noble and courtly circles by performative mechanisms of representation (cf. Hansen, 1989). Demarcating these mechanisms of representation, an emotional ethic unfolded that thematized the expression of the self-determined individual on an emotional level. Sensitive emotions elude the normative access of feudal society.

In literature, this process of cultural self-understanding is narratively negotiated. With Goethe’s Die Leiden...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of table
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 From emancipation to Erziehung and Bildung as Bourgeois educational theory and practice
• Chapter 3 Linear learning in the book culture
• Chapter 4 Informal-accidental learning in the electronic age
• Chapter 5 Fluid learning in the digital age
• Chapter 6 Outlook – from Bildung and e-learning to (media) Bildung 2.0
• Bibliography
• Index