![]() The current expansion of online education intersects with the tension between the societal benefit of improved access to higher education as opposed to the dangerous precariousness of instructional labor and the privatization of what has commonly been seen as a public sphere. ![]() 5 Large-scale, radical digital restructuring is frequently justified by rhetoric that reveals a widespread need for more complex and reflexive understanding of the historical trajectories of technological development, the enlightenment humanist tradition, and socioeconomic inequality. In addition, interaction in virtual classrooms is typically supported by the use of corporate, rather than non-profit, browsers and interactive media, thereby producing easy and ubiquitous targets for direct and indirect monetization schemes. ![]() Costly consumer electronics and home Internet service provide the bulk of the necessary infrastructure and, to a significant extent, can even replace classrooms and facilitate the obsolescence of embodied instructors. In the process of virtualization, the formerly public responsibility of ensuring access to education is easily belayed from public institutions to private individuals and their families while corporate entities profit by mediating the process. ![]() While it is frequently assumed that the quality of online education compares poorly with conventional schooling, the broadest and most troubling potential consequences are often overlooked. For institutions, it may reduce costs to a significant degree. 4 For students, it poses a viable alternative to - and is often perceived as an improvement over - prohibitively expensive tuitions and campus living. Since many of the beliefs and practices associated with online education are modeled directly upon those observed in “new” media usage during leisure time, the culture industry problematic has become newly and somewhat differently relevant: for instance, not only are many forms of online education broadcast on a massive scale that attracts and depends upon corporate interests, but they also reflect arguably popular design principles, and the content is often generated by users themselves.įormal online education, with its ambiguously material apparatuses based on social media designs (and the often-overlooked fine print bundled into their usage), seems to offer solutions to fiscal and social challenges. 3 The argument partakes of a dialectic in which the democratization of culture through technological mediation is harnessed ideologically to capitalist processes of producer and consumer exploitation. 2 Today, the continuing development of socio-technological systems involving the broadcasting of automations, such as online pedagogical environments, ought to stimulate a revival of the culture industry polemic, beginning where Adorno and Benjamin left off. Adorno argued that popular entertainments are more regressive than progressive, because they obscure the cause underlying the need for distraction: worker exploitation. 1 Responding to the contrary during their extended written correspondence, Theodor W. In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin celebrated the mass culture made possible by technological reproducibility - cinema in particular - on the grounds that lay expertise and distraction empower and liberate proletarian spectators.
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