Internet Pedagogy

Before I get into my questions for this week, I want to revisit a question asked during class last Wednesday about the political subjects formed by TikTok. I believe the question was something along the lines of, “What would Hall think about the example of political subjects moving through TikTok trends, specifically, the damaging of school property and assaulting other students and teachers?” 

I’m not sure I have a full and satisfactory answer, but I know Hall would have a lot to say about the ways in which culture and power are mutating when it comes to social media platforms like TikTok. When young political subjects are moving through a platform that appears to empower them and gives them political autonomy and unity with others in their demographic group, this is obviously going to create political subjects interested in exerting influence and power over cultural formation and political discourse. My concern is that the experimental form of social media represented by TikTok and its algorithm might be a way of creating political subjects artificially or giving the illusion of control to young political subjects who are, in reality, being influenced by those with power. TikTok creates a way in which the ideological apparatuses are more or less hidden from political subjects behind algorithms controlled by corporations. I’d love to hear more of other people’s thoughts, but that’s what I have for now.

It’s hard for me to talk about the other texts from this week aside from Giroux’s “Public Pedagogy as Cultural Politics: Stuart Hall and the Crisis of Culture.” I am interested in this text for its discussion of pedagogy which is something educators think and talk about a lot, and it was good to draw connections between public pedagogy and pedagogy in public education. It’s a conversation that interests me in large part because of the current rhetoric surrounding public education and acceptable pedagogy in schools.

This text is dense! I read it twice (with a plan for a third), and I still feel like I only grasp (maybe) a quarter of what I read. I’ll get right into the questions since I already chewed the proverbial ear by revisiting the question form last week. The first is about political agency, and the second is more about education and cultural pedagogy.

1) 

“When it comes to the internet and new forms of cultural agency and production available to anyone with access--i.e. Self-publishing, indie games, social media, etc.--who has political agency and influence in the 21st century and how are apparatuses and ideologies of hegemony losing and/or gaining influence within new realities of the Information Age?”

2) Giroux references Hall’s theory of articulation in which teaching texts involves linking them with contexts in order to give a more complete analysis of how the ‘cultural’ connects to the political lived realities. Giroux mentions this in response to Bennet’s critique of linking pedagogy to students’ lived experiences. Giroux uses Hall as a way of responding to how politics cannot be taken out of context with culture:

“How is the current resistance to teaching historical, cultural, and political contexts--see: banning the 1619 Project in Iowa, CRT, and LGBTQ+ texts--simply the newest iteration of Bennet’s neoliberal claim that we must teach without context due to adherence with the illusion of cultural competency: that students are best served by learning about “traditional” culture? Furthermore, how is imagining schools as a place to resist dominant authority linked to archaic views of cultural formation, meaning, why are attempts to limit pedagogy in public schools being used in a cultural context of immediate access to information via the internet?"

 Robert Taylor - Apologies for the text wall!