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Article source: Innovación para el Desarrollo Sostenible. © Gobierno del Estado de Guanajuato 2018. ISBN: 978-607-8164-04-2. © UNESCO 2018. Este documento está disponible en acceso abierto bajo la licencia Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 IGO (CC-BY-SA 3.0 IGO). (p. 479-489)
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Electronic-computer capitalism: Economy, Academia and Politics.
Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana – Lerma / Universidade de Brasília.
[Part 2: Academia]
Academia5
My arguments are based on an increasingly common understanding that neoliberalism and the digital era are causing another round of deep changes in the spheres of production, circulation, and consumption of academic work. The very notion of a “knowledge society” is a reflection of the desire of governmental, industrial, and financial elites to capture all information and knowledge production and to reduce it to the instrumental goals of the administration of ECC’s accumulation needs. Not surprisingly, Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” I will subdivide what follows in this section in terms of the Internet’s impacts on academic production, circulation and of consumption, spheres that, as we know, often overlap and are interconnected.
The digital era has different effects on academic production. It impacts the classroom, the modes of bringing, delivering and sharing information with students. Now there are wired and unwired classrooms. Texts can be available online, students can take quizzes and hand in assignments, teachers can review them online too. All this accelerates a process that used to take days. Teachers can have direct access to different media such as pictures, videos and online encyclopedias and other texts to support their expositions. Overhead projectors were rapidly substituted by laptops linked by wireless connections to the web. PowerPoint presentations became omnipresent. Although the wired classroom and digital technologies are supposed to be more efficient and attractive to students they have also been criticized. Blackboards and books published in paper have been rescued as tools of knowledge transmission (see below) to the detriment of screens.
To some extent, we are facing the dilemma Plato and Socrates faced when the alphabet was introduced as a technology that created two distinct realms: oral and literate cultures. To simplify a complex argument (Goody and Watt, 1963), these Greek philosophers thought orality was more complex than literacy and that the latter would destroy a most sophisticated form of knowledge production. For Plato and Socrates, writing was prone to impact the use of memory, it was shallow in its effects because knowledge “can only be attained by oral question and answer”; they saw the “dialect method” as “an essential social process, in which the initiates pass on their knowledge directly to the young; a process … in which only a long personal relationship can transcend the inherent incapacity of mere words to convey ultimate truths” (Goody and Watt, 1963, p. 327). They also thought the advantages of “living speech” over the written word came from its “more immediate connections with the act of communication itself”, i.e. “possible confusions and misunderstandings can always be cleared up by question and answer” and the speaker can adjust his “type of speech” to listeners’ capacity of understanding (idem, p. 328). I’d like to call this conundrum the Plato/Socrates’ dilemma, meaning situations in which a new system of (re)production of knowledge emerges and raises valid doubts about what is lost and gained in the transition from the old to the new one.
The increase in plagiarism is another important impact of the hegemony of electronic-computer capitalism in academic production. It made copying much easier, more perfect and ubiquitous. Plagiarism thus became an even greater problem in the academic milieu, a milieu highly marked by the notion of authorship, a notion that is changing before our eyes without us seeing it because of the old normative and working patterns we use to think of it. As I wrote before (Lins Ribeiro, 2013, pp. 25-26), the global cooperation that currently exists within the virtual public space (Lins Ribeiro, 2003) and is practiced by political collectives such as the free software movement provides an interesting example of global creativity enacted by a great number or persons that are not interested in individual authorship and copyright but in the collective perfection of a freely available common good. Such collective online creation may in effect challenge the notion that the relationship between creativity and commerce is always mediated by individual authorship and copyrights. This does not amount to saying that we are on the verge of discovering an alternative to capitalist appropriation of creative work, as some activists of the open source and free software movements would like to believe (Evangelista, 2010)6.
5 This section is heavily based on Lins Ribeiro (2014).
6 See my comments on crowdsourcing in the previous section of this article.
(…) Authorship may also radically change in the face of other types of online cooperation, and here the main example is Wikipedia. Although Wikipedia is no panacea (in the end there is always an editor who controls what is publishable or not), it allows us to speculate about the possibility of a radical wiki-anthropology, for instance. Such on-line text construction would go beyond the traditional journals with their referee system, which, in the core of the world system of anthropological production, more often than not replicate the styles and agendas of the Anglo-American academic milieu (Kuwayama, 2004). The possibility of writing with a myriad of other known or anonymous cyber-colleagues may also lead to the emergence of post-authorial academic texts. Are we ready to make global wiki experiments in academic writing and theoretical production? Are we ready to go beyond the notion of authorship in academia, another of the basis of inequality reproduction in a world full of individualism and individual power seekers?
Currently, copying is a political matter as the expression “copyleft” makes clear. Who controls the copy and access to it is a point of contention that has affected how we think of the access to research results and articles, particularly those supported by public funds. Publishers, especially the largest oligopolies, and scholars often found themselves in opposite sides in the ensuing debates. German universities, for instance, have been in a conflict with Elsevier, the world’s biggest scientific publisher, since 2015: “they want a deal that would give most scientists in Germany full online access to 2,500 or so Elsevier journals, at about half the price that individual libraries have paid in the past. Open-access is proving to be the sticking point in the talks: under the deal sought, all corresponding authors affiliated with German institutions would be allowed to make their papers free to read and shared by anyone in the world at no extra cost” (Schiermeier, 2017). The global academic community is paying attention to the outcomes of the German negotiations that may become an international landmark in favor of open-access.
Indeed, in the sphere of circulation of scholarly works there seems to be more ambiguity and space for immediate agency. In order to call our attention to the impact of social media on how knowledge is currently produced and circulated, geographer David Beer (2013) has coined the expression “the politics of circulation.” In spite of the “impression of democratization and decentralization” social media may give, they actually work “to obscure and silence some important visions of the social world.” Irrespective of the value of ideas, the infrastructures and data circulations of which the works are a part of will define whether they will be seen or not. Beer also calls the attention to the gatekeeping function of algorithms that filter knowledge and direct it to audiences as well as to the power of research tagging: “Metadata classifications inevitably shape the way that material is found, they shape search outcomes and the associations between different types of content. Tagging is already coming to order and organize academic knowledge”.
In this context, international academic organizations need to have policies directed towards pluralizing the visibility of global academic production. This is what moved the World Council of Anthropological Associations (WCAA) to create déjà lu (already read), an initiative aimed at pluralizing the dissemination of anthropological knowledge on the global level. Déjà lu republishes articles selected by editors of anthropological journals, “gives them global visibility” by means of the World Council’s international networks and grants free access to them. In the 2017 issue, it republished more than 40 articles from journals of all continents.
The politics of circulation is clearly related to intellectual technologies, to the techniques of knowledge reproduction. There are good reasons to believe that when these techniques change, knowledge production, circulation and consumption are highly impacted (see above what I called the Plato/Socrates dilemma). As we saw, open access is a field of debate because it points to a possible democratization of access to knowledge. In spite of the serious threats the politics of circulation may cause, proliferation of authors and platforms of dissemination of scholarly work, such as blogs, websites and Facebook pages, is another source of change. All this is related to writing and publishing as a fundamental mode of sharing knowledge, building prestige and hierarchy, and making money, since many of the most prestigious publishers of books and journals, still the most important academic media, are owned or materially produced by capitalist entrepreneurs.
What will happen with the consumption of academic work? Here dramatic changes are also underway, some of them closely related to issues already mentioned when the impacts of ECC on the circulation of knowledge were considered. If in the past, to get a copy of an author’s work, a reader would have to find the book or journal in a library or bookshop; today you can quickly find pdf files on the Internet. Being a worldwide famous author is now a possibility open to everyone, or at least this is what academia.edu seems to promise. Of course, this promise hides the linguistic problems ingrained in international academic communication dominated by the English language and the screening and hierarchizing roles search engines have. The hegemony of English as the standard language of global communication is erasing not only the presence of other languages from the international scene but also of other styles of writing, topics of debates and theoretical contributions.
I also need to highlight the effects of the Internet and its social media on the attention span of students and readers. In the classroom professors already have to compete with cellphones and notebooks. It is not unlikely that students will increasingly have shorter attention spans with unpredictable results in pedagogy and knowledge transmission. Given the increased presence of digital reading in schools and universities a recent research focused on “the differences between reading print and digital media” (Alexander and Singer, 2017). Among several results, it found that “students were able to better comprehend information in print for texts that were more than a page in length. This appears to be related to the disruptive effect that scrolling has on comprehension.” It also found that students reading digital and printed versions of textbooks equally understood the main contents of the texts “but when it came to specific questions, comprehension was significantly better when participants read printed texts.” One of the conclusions was that “when the reading assignment demands more engagement or deeper comprehension, students may be better off reading print.”
We are witnessing the coming to adult age of the first digital era native generation. The habit of reading is radically changing for readers in general. Even older readers currently confess having problems reading an entire book in the age of twitters. If, in the future, no one or very few people will be able to read books and long articles, there may be two consequences I can think of: those who read books will be an even smaller minority than today and will either be celebrated as the keepers of some kind of sophisticated and complex knowledge or Weltanschauung or, like in the cult book (Ray Bradbury) and movie (François Truffaut) Fahrenheit 451, they will be seen as dangerous subversives that need to be chased down. For those of us who read and write as persons that were born and educated before the digital era, I am not sure whether this is exactly an interesting conundrum. Only strong actions in educational and scientific politics seem to be a possible way out of this conundrum caused by the increased hegemony of electronic-computer capitalism.
Changes in our reading ways and capacities are a cutting edge subject of interest for all of us who work with knowledge production, transmission and dissemination. We are still to reach a consensus on what the consequences may be and positions vary from those that show a diminishment of the capacity of in-depth reading to those who believe in the emergence of a new kind of fragmented reading that is not yet fully understood because researchers continue to have a book-centered vision of the issue (see, for instance, García Canclini et al. 2015).
Finally, I will explore the idea that the current wave of anti-intellectualism is related not only to neoliberalism but also to the pervasiveness of the Internet. This is a major issue because anti-intellectualism has strong impacts on academia, particularly on the humanities and the social sciences. How the neoliberal model is transforming the universities and their roles in society is a well-established field of debates (the relationships between anthropology and neoliberal academia have been explored by Shore and Wright, 1999, and Heatherington and Zerilli, 2016, for instance). Marshal Sahlins (2017) showed the consistent process of elitization of American universities where a great number of students are “majoring in capitalism.” In the 1960’s and 1970’s approximately 25% more students graduated in the social sciences, “the principal recruiting grounds for the protests of that era,” than in the business fields. In 2014, business degrees doubled those in the social sciences. Sahlins concludes that “cultural liberalism is in relative decline” and that the current student body, affected by a huge rise in tuitions, is a “bourgeoisie in training.”7
Concurrently, the Internet represents a great challenge to the social sciences in general. I see Umberto Eco’s (2015) vituperation according to which “social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak” and has generated an “invasion of idiots” as a symptom of a wider phenomenon, of the hyper-democratization of what I called the virtual-public-space (Lins Ribeiro 2003) in which all opinions have the same weight and value independently of whether the utterer knows or ignores a given subject. The Internet generates a panoptic and omniscient illusion in its users who believe they can see and know everything just because they have access to the web. The world seems transparent for the subjects. If I can see and know everything, why would I need anyone to explain me what the world is? What are social scientists good for? This is not a new issue, but is intimately related to the capacity social agents have of interpreting their world, a “naïve experience,” related to the “illusion of transparency,” that Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Chamboredon and Jean-Claude Passeron (1991) called “spontaneous sociology” (pp. 20 and ff). The internet greatly potentiates spontaneous sociology.
7 “In 1971, the average tuition in public four-year colleges was $1,405 (including fees, room, and board); in 2016, it was $20,092; in private colleges, it was $2,979 then and $45,365 now. Measured in 2016 dollars, undergraduate tuition has increased four times faster than the cost of living since the early 1970s, and three to four times faster than the cost of instruction. Some 70 percent of college students now graduate into a condition of debt peonage.” (Sahlins, 2017).
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