Democracy, Governance, and the Digital Network

As a demonstration of the Panopticon and related to the Smart Mobs assignment for next week, consider the following: A professor at Pitzer now teaches a class on and thru YouTube. In other words all of the assignments, class meetings, etc are posted for all to see. The class page can be found here on YouTube.

On the one hand I am drawn to this idea, make the classroom space totally public and open to all who have a high speed internet connection and want to participate. This corrects one of the significant problems of academia: The way that it has been used to close or gate off knowledge, allowing only a few access. Indeed one of my complaints about academia, America is particular, is the term “public intellectual” as if an intellectual being public is something extra. Here the professor, Alex Juhasz, forgoes this tradition and opens up the space of her classroom, calling pedagogy itself into question.

But on the other hand, this opens the whole class up to critique and discipline. Watch the video from the first class where the professor explains to the students that they are being filmed. Now this is one level of control, but the second more insidious level is that in posting to the net, students subject themselves to critique from a range of sources, including rather harsh critique by YouTube commenters.

You can also read some of my longer comments on this over at the EMAC blog.