Title: Fire Next Time, Or Revisioning Higher Education in the Context of Digital Social Creativity

Informal Learning and Digital Media: constructions, contexts, consequences, 21-23 September 2006, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

Theme: Informal learning between creativity and competencies

Reijo Kupiainen, PhD

Assistant Professor, Dep. of Journalism and Mass Communication

Postal address: Department of Journalism and Mass Communication,

FI-33014 University of Tampere, Finland

E-mail: Reijo.Kupiainen@uta.fi

Juha Suoranta, PhD

Professor, Dep. of Education, University of Tampere, Finland

Postal address: Department of Education, FI-33014 University of Tampere, Finland

E-mail: Juha.Suoranta@uta.fi

Tere Vadén, PhD

Assistant Professor, Hypermedia Lab, University of Tampere, Finland

Postal address: Hypermedia Lab, FI-33014 University of Tampere, Finland

E-mail: Tere.Vaden@uta.fi

Abstract

In this paper we will start by focusing on the philosophy of sharing, and the ideology of convivial information society by referring to the works of Gillez Deleuze, John Dewey, Ivan Illich, Jean-Francois Lyotard and early Neil Postman among others, and then introducing our own pedagogical practices in the university level by describing and reflecting our course entitled “Digital Media and Changing Literacies.” It seems as if new information technologies were fulfilling some of the early prophesies of democratic techno-utopias. In this respect key concepts and ideas we are referring to are those of Illich’s convivial society and learning webs, Postman’s idea of teaching as subversive activity, Lyotard’s reflection on legitimation crises produced partly by new information technologies, Dewey’s idea of ‘associated life,’ and Deleuze’s rhizome as a root metaphor of our age. Based on these conceptualizations, we argue that it is high time to critically re-evaluate the functions of higher education, and take seriously the idea of collaborative learning and sharing both our technologies and knowledge in reaching for economically and socially just and equal world. The key is to focus on the actual and relevant contents, so that the higher education does not happen for its own sake in an academic vacuum thus promoting alienation. We believe that it is possible to overcome the gap between digital social creativity of diverse net-based communities and institutions of higher education by focusing on their common interests in building convivial information society for all. Institutions of formal education should be the hubs of open collaboration, instead of gated communities of segmentation and protective expertise. The system logic of formal education needs to be nourished by the logic of collaboration and sharing evident in informal peer-to-peer interaction of the digital world.

Has Meaning Been Lost from Higher Education?

We want to defend the following argument: in higher education it is possible to save and renew higher learning's critical and revolutionary function by applying various digital information and communication technologies and use them wisely to create abilities or literacies what we would like to call 'digital social creativities'.

Many 20th century philosophers (i.e. Deleuze, Dewey, Foucault, Illich, Lyotard and late Postman) have produced visions of times to come in which there is a firm place for the idea of a true democracy. John Dewey's elementary pedagogical idea geared around the idea of "associated life", a cover term for all sorts of educational ideas and practices, old and new, in which people depend on one another and learn with one another (Bruffee 1995). Ivan Illich talked about convivial society and free street corner learning clubs and webs in which people can enjoy media and create their own media and messages; Deleuze outlined society based on rhizome-like networks; Foucault dreamt about diverse methods of critical communication and broadcasting; Postman saw teaching as a subversive activity. Likewise, Lyotard (1987/82) believed in the 80's that computer networks and open archives will create a new citizenship based on transparency. It seemed as if new information technologies were fulfilling some of the early prophesies of these and other democratic utopias.

It is relatively easy to see that since these and other discourses all the visions have been reproduced in diverse technoutopias including our own, that of 'digital social creativity'. These utopias are in sharp contrast with the recent university policies and discourses in the western world. We are repeatedly told that higher education is in crisis due to lack of public funding. As Mary Evans has put it in her Killing Thinking – The Death of the Universities, the end of the Millennium “has not been a happy time, since those years have seen the transformation of teaching in universities into the painting-by-numbers exercise of the hand-out culture and of much research into an atavistic battle for funds” (Evans 2004).

This debate has levels within levels, and discourses within discourses. Three major attitudes can be discerned: first those who look at this crisis from the point of the view of educational and economical policy making, second those who see it from the vantage point of structures and administration, and third those who define it as a part of such megatrends as capitalist globalization (i.e. Burbules & Torres 2000; Bok 2003; Noble 2003). As William Tabb has put it:

When people think about globalization, most focus on sweatshop labor and the loss of manufacturing jobs overseas. It is easy to understand the race to the bottom that results as factory workers in one place face more intense competition from lower-cost labor on the other side of the world. College teachers would do well, however, to include their own future prospects as they consider the impact of globalization over the coming years. The university will be a very different place in another decade or two, and what it will look like depends to a large degree on what version of globalization wins out. (Tabb 2001.)

Broadly speaking, higher education seems to be in crisis at least in terms of economics, structural matters, demographics, epistemology, and pedagogy. These crises have different faces in different academic and other contexts, and they vary between countries, but common characteristics have to do with economics and accountability, and also with the idea of knowledge as a commodity. These are variants of recent capitalist tendencies in global economics, in national public sectors, and in universities as “diploma mills.” Corporate capitalism has set itself inside academia in the form of a “neoliberal model of education.”

Critical scholars have feared that traditional values of Western autonomous academia will be replaced by elements of the neoliberal model: “making the provision of education more cost-efficient by commodifying the product; testing performance by standardizing the experience in a way that allows for multiple-choice testing of results; and focusing on marketable skills” (Tabb 2001). As Tabb (ibid.) further notes, at the moment these neoliberal principles are manifested as “cutbacks in the public sector, closing ‘inefficient’ programs that don’t directly meet business needs for a trained workforce,” and in higher education courses and degrees being sold and packaged for delivery over the Internet. As many scholars have suggested, universities have suffered major structural changes in the name of business-like efficiency that has had profound implications for critical inquiry (Huff 2006, 30). Furthermore, the priorities and principles of universities “are being subtly and not so subtly shifted by the exigencies of corporate capitalism” (ibid.). In addition to “diminished funding for higher education, proliferation of programs and new demands for student-oriented consumer services, there is a crisis of legitimacy that goes to the heart of the academic enterprise” (ibid.).

Part of the talk about crisis is nothing but right-wing gimmickry, another attempt to overrule more liberal and critical voices. But an important part of the discussion has to do with a question that we as critical scholars ought to be able to answer: In what sort of a world are we living, and in what kind of a world would we like to be? Or to put it in pedagogical language: What are our goals in teaching and learning? Part of the crisis critical scholars refer to is the fact that a blind drive for measurement, evaluation and accountability in academic work has put these essential questions aside. And, who knows, maybe this has been the very purpose, or at least a hidden agenda, of various U.S.-based conservative think tanks. These along with conservative forces in academia push the standardization of learning and teaching forward, and want to run the university in “having mode” (Fromm 1976).

The Promise of Digital Social Creativity as Collaborative Learning

New digital information and communication technologies (ICTs) are, at least in the affluent West, creating a phenomenon called network sociality. It can be understood in contrast to the idea of community, which involves strong interaction and long-lasting ties as well as rich narratives of the collective. Conversely, network sociality is not based on a common narrative but on various informational acts. In network sociality, the social bond is created on a project-by-project basis. In pessimistic interpretations, this mode of sociality is seen as narrowing down people's possibilities for social and political interaction: sociality maintained via ICTs is about to erode enduring relationships and alienate people from one another.

In more positive interpretations, it is suggested that along the new form of sociality, the learning process has been turned upside down. For the first time in the history of humanity, even children and young people are afforded the opportunity and the responsibility to teach their parents and teachers, to guide their elders. For example, when looking at explanations for Internet use, a person's generation surpasses factors such as income, education, and profession. In other words, cultural and social capital and material resources of the older generation do not mean everything.

Thus, the young are not just experiencing the new era but are also actively shaping the future with their digital practices. In the "prefigurative age" of the information society, it is highly probable that the necessary social and technical skills are best achieved through diverse dialogues and interaction as ways of the multiple socialization: adolescents learn from their peers and teach their teachers and parents. In the following, we are suggesting that the world is turning doubly upside-down: first, the younger generations have an unusually strong role in creating the future and guiding their elders, and, second, informal education in peer-groups, be they virtual or not, is needed to give vital feedback to institutions of formal education.

Media and educational researchers Colin Lankshear and Michelle Knobel (2006) have characterized the new digital age in various dimensions in two different mindsets, or attitudes. In mindset 1 emphases is on business-as-usual way of looking at the world, whereas mindset 2 tries to find new concepts, vocabularies, and practices in capturing the reality of social digital creativity.

Table 1: Some Dimensions of Variation between the Mindsets (Lankshear & Knobel 2006)

The qualitatively new features of this upside-down world of learning are digital tools used for open collaboration. It is important to note that these tools are an amalgam of social and technological innovation. For instance, something like the free encyclopedia, Wikipedia, needs both technological innovation (wiki-software, the Internet, a server park, etc.) and new socio-cultural practices (a certain "hacker" relation to information, an attitude of anti-vandalism, informal hierarchies and division of labour, etc.) in order to function. This emerging and rapidly expanding amalgam is the petri-dish for open collaboration and so-called social media, be it in the form of the various types of wikis (Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikimedia, etc.), open content production and distribution, social bookmarking, folksonomy, free/open source software, the blogosphere and so on.

Open collaboration with digital tools is potentially global, transgressing national, racial and economical boundaries. This in itself is already a big challenge for systems of formal education. While the rhetoric of equality, interaction and active citizenship typically dominate the official educational agenda, open collaboration with digital tools is most often part of children's and adolescents' informal education, and, more often than not, also something that seems alien if not threatening from the institutional point of view. Consequently, a growing gap of credibility is created between the world-view and sociality experienced through peer-induced informal learning and the world-view offered through institutional formal education.

From the point of view of open digital social creativity it would be desirable to see these two realms - formal and informal learning - in tight interaction with each other in terms of teaching and assessment. One way to make this to happen would be to open up more possibilities to collaborative methods of teaching and learning. This is essential for students of the day are no longer passive recipients, “empty vessels into which we pour our pearls of sociological wisdom, but as active citizens, capable of absorbing a rich lived experience, participants of in public debates they carry beyond the classroom” (Burawoy 2006). In changing our pedagogical habits we need to learn collaborative teaching methods, and in the process learn to “share our toys” (Bruffee 1995). Using John Dewey’s terminology, we should substitute individualistic life for “associated life.” This might gradually change the way we think, and eventually change the world. The question is, of course, are we ready to change, and further, why bother? Kenneth Bruffee has summed up more reasons from the academic point of view:

"Interest in collaborative learning is motivated also by recent challenges to our understanding of what knowledge is. This challenge is being felt throughout the academic disciplines. That is, collaborative learning is related to the social constructionist views promulgated by, among others, the philosopher Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature) and the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. These writers say (as Geertz puts it in his recent book, Local Knowledge) that ‘the way we think now’ differs in essential ways from the way we thought in the past. Social constructionists tend to assume that knowledge is a social construct and that, as the historian of science Thomas Kuhn has put it, all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, ‘is intrinsically the common property of a group or else nothing at all.’" (Bruffee 1987.)

Consider, for instance, the epistemology of the Wikipedia. Though some recent comparisons suggest that Wikipedia articles in English in general are comparable to those of the Encyclopedia Britannica (Giles 2005), the really revolutionary part of Wikipedia is not connected to reliability. Rather, first and foremost the fact that articles can be written on almost any topic provide a wide folk-o-pedia with a scope far outstripping that of traditional encyclopedias. And, in addition, the wikipedia article always comes with its history and the connected discussions. This "genealogical" statum that is always connected to a Wikipedia article gives it an epistemologically different status from a Britannica article. And, as Bruffee (1987) maintains, collaborative learning “is related to these conceptual changes by virtue of the fact that it assumes learning occurs among persons rather than between a person and things”.

In reflecting on these questions, we should focus on the structures and processes of teaching and learning in the university classroom and ask, are students’ superficial attitudes deriving from the teaching methods, and how they are treated in the classroom? Are they kept as objects of teaching, or as co-thinkers and agents who are able to create their own world with their teachers and peers? In answering these questions honestly we have had to admit that our teaching has often been based on what Paulo Freire has referred to as the “banking method” (Freire 2005). In the banking method, students become alienated and lose their interest in learning, for as Freire put it in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, it is the omnipotent teacher who knows and students who digest by listening.

"In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry. The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence. The students, alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic, accept their ignorance as justifying the teacher’s existence—but, unlike the slave, they never discover that they educate the teacher." (Freire 2005, Ch. 2)

And, as Freire continues: “The raison d'etre of libertarian education, on the other hand, lies in its drive towards reconciliation. Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.” (Ibid.) Alternatives for the banking method are diverse student-student and student–teacher collaborations and encounters.

In collaborative learning, students learn by working with each other on focused, open-ended tasks, discussing issues face to face in small groups. Collaborative learning taps higher education's most powerful, yet repeatedly underdeveloped resource: peer group influence. According to Bruffee (1981, 745) the “primary aim of collaborative learning is to help students test the quality and value of what they know by trying to make sense of it to other people like themselves – their peers.”

In addition, collaborative learning is a viable way to get to know each other in a face-to-face setting, study some of the basic theories, methods, concepts and contents of a given field, learn how to do things together (“share our toys”), develop trust in an open atmosphere, build “transgressive,” multidisciplinary competencies (Nowotny 2000) needed in various professional practices, learn how to learn professional interdependence when the stakes are low, and create a democratic idea of knowledge and research work. By using collaboration, students are introduced to methods of learning, problem-solving, and task efficiency that they can later employ in the workplace. Here we are inclined to think like Lyotard:

"If education must not only provide for the reproduction of skills, but also for their progress, then it follows that the transformission of knowledge should not be limited to the transmission of information, but should include training in all of the procedures that can increase one's ability to connect the fields of jealously guarded from one another by the traditional organization of knowledge" (Lyotard 1984, 52).

Let us again think of wikipedia as an example of this sort of mixing professions and often tightly gated areas of professional knowledge. In writing wikipedia text one can contribute and collaborative anonymously without anticipation of academic or other merits or glory.

In this sense digital social creativity as collaborative learning is an argument against capitalist higher education that trains students to individual obediance and reproduction of an organized stock of established knowledge in order to succeed. It is also a statement against the system’s continuous emphasis on individualism, relentless competition, and accountability creating an ethos of hatred, envy and suspiciousness. The collective history of a Wikipedia article and the social interaction on which it is based show quite clearly how individualism and malevolent suspicion can be overcome with openness and collective responsibility. This does not mean, however, that criticism is to be precluded: the easy modification of a Wikipedia article promotes a critical and necessary distance fro the 'extended' creation of new information and reproduction of an old.

The problem is, of course, that usually teaching is not seen as an important or rewarding part of academic life, but is rather considered a fairly unfulfilling and laborious task to be executed – a task far less important than research and writing. This is unfortunate, for “faculty members may play the single-most important role in student learning” (Umbach & Wawrzynski 2005, 176). Along with personal supervision and mentoring, teaching is the only official way to interact with the younger generation within the university. Maybe for that reason alone we should take the words of Henry Giroux to heart:

"I believe that intellectuals who inhabit our nation’s universities should represent the conscience of a society not only because they shape the conditions under which future generations learn about themselves and their relations to others and the outside world, but also because they engage pedagogical practices that are by their very nature moral and political, rather than simply technical. And at its best, such pedagogy bears witness to the ethical and political dilemmas that animate the broader social landscape. Such pedagogical approaches are important because they provide spaces that are both comforting and unsettling, spaces that both disturb and enlighten. Pedagogy in this instance not only works to shift how students think about the issues affecting their lives and the world at large, but also potentially energizes them to seize such moments as possibilities for acting on the world, engaging it as a matter of politics, power, and social justice." (Giroux 2003, 194-195.)

Uneasy Relationship between Formal Education and Collaborative Learning

In our view, there are two major roots for the uneasy relationship between institutions of formal education and the digital environments of open collaboration. First, open collaboration creates a seismic epistemological and ontological shift in the production and legitimation of knowledge. The claim to truth, knowledge and enlightenment that content produced in open collaboration makes, is not created through authority, certainty and legitimacy, but through dialogue, perspectivity and pragmatic value in 'imaginative' groups and minds whether in the universities or elsewhere. For example, the trustworthiness of an entry in the Wikipedia is best evaluated by analyzing its history, the amount of criticism and alternative viewpoints that it has endured and incorporated, and the benefits for the reader.

Wikipedia is a paradigmatic example of the epistemological challenge, because it explicitly deals with knowledge and information, but the same effect is felt in various degrees throughout the field of content distributed and produced through open collaboration. The world-view and "hidden" messages contained in collaboratively created audio or video content raises the same epistemological questions. A bricolage created by "rippin' and mixin'" existing content often self-consciously challenges the presuppositions of classical epistemologies, such as finality, authorship, and assent. Teamwork and craftsmanship gain new importance as works of open collaboration resemble the works of Renaissance painters: the whole shop of disciples of various levels of talent and areas of expertise is involved in the production, more or less closely overseen by a "master". Despite their rhetorical commitment to collaborative and interactive learning, institutions of formal education are having a hard time dealing with this epistemological shift.

Second, and not unrelated to the first point, open collaboration and social media emphasises the non-informational uses of the ICTs. Think about a teenager creating fan fiction: most likely, she will be multitasking with instant messaging, Internet relay chat, blogs related to the theme and other possible tasks (such as SMS-messaging with friends, listening to music, doing homework) all the time. Most of these activities are more readily categorized as social and communicative - having to do with identity, pleasure, entertainment - than as informative or educational. However, the experienced and convivially constructed world in which our fictive author of fan fiction operates, is most intimately also the world in which she needs the skills and possibilities of literacy, criticism and autonomous creation.

Together these two features, the dialogical nature of knowledge and the emphasis on social interaction, create a tremendous opportunity for education. The platforms of open collaboration are fulfilling several goals of the convivial information society, like those of community and cooperation as key elements of democracy, freedom, openness and transparency, and active participation. However, we need a framework for bridging the gap between informal collaborative learning and formal education, so that they do not, in the worst case, work against each other.

By envisioning a world in which the Wikipedia and various forks of it - for instance, Wikipedias with different partisan points of view - have existed for decades, we can gain an insight into the shape and function that formal education should be molding itself. All experts can be challenged in the blink of an eye by access to the wikipedias. Expertise will transform into the skills of grasping wholes and seeing connections, and, most importantly, being able to participate in meaningful and rewarding collaborative work. This transformation, the beginnings of which we are already feeling when constructing curricula and choosing lecture material, is not well served by the tendency of restricting access to information and collaboration, be it in the name of safety, control or protecting intellectual property.

The problem of the credibility gap translates into a concrete question: how to secure the freedom of knowledge creation and learning also in the institutions of formal education? But the answer is simple: practise what you preach. Many teachers and educators use open content, such as Wikipedia, regularly, and participate in open collaboration through the Internet. The next step is to get involved in the collaborative projects and forms of social media that the students are already immersed in. This could mean getting involved in the world of digital games, manga, fan fiction or something similar, or it could mean producing a neighborhood wikipedia or a local podcast.

The key is to focus on the content that is actual and relevant, so that the institutional involvement does not happen for its own sake in an academic vacuum thus promoting alienation. Institutional involvement can overcome the credibility gap and become a partner in the dialogical epistemology, if and when it has a grounded point of view and a real stake in building convivial information society for all. Institutions of formal education should be the hubs of open collaboration, instead of turning into gated communities of further segmentation and deepening digital divides. The system logic of formal education needs to be nourished by the logic of collaboration and sharing evident in informal peer-to-peer interaction of the digital world.

Whose voice is heard?

What has been said above about the epistemological shift clearly has an analogue in how art is often described as a non-final creative and collective process with a genealogy of its own. However, amidst current descriptions of Western society with terms such as the experience society, the image society and the dream society, the meaning of art is by no means clear. Instead, as pointed out by social scientists with Richard Sennet foremost in this respect, it appears as if meaning in general has disappeared from the lives of vast numbers of people, or is in the process of doing so because of the heightened requirements, flexibility or random nature of working life. New values encouraging a non-committal attitude towards working-life and its project nature have overrun other human values, while also marking human relations as superficial and expendable. Meaningfulness traditionally involves permanence, seeing life as a whole and in relation to its setting. Art has traditionally played an important role in linking people to the world and their environment and in bringing forth the core issues of life. This has been an exercise in life management, now replaced by the project economy’s methods of trying to manage from one day to the next.

If meaningfulness of life has disappeared, a replacement is found in dreams. And there is no lack of those who offer them. A multitude of industries rake their profits from this, with art also trying to get its share more and more often. The dream society tells of minds yearning to be elsewhere. Meaninglessness must be compensated with maximal experience of dreams of a better, meaningful life. The Hollywood dream factory has always known how to utilize this human desire for what does not exist in every day life, the yearning for a rich, exciting and meaningful life. But as Richard Dyer, a scholar of popular culture, has observed, Hollywood provides a feeling of what utopia might be like, but it does not realize that utopia. The dream will remain unfulfilled, but you can always buy a new one.

Contemporary culture is often described as visual culture, implying the visibility of cultural signs and messages and the emergence of visual forms of narrative in all areas of communication. Messages guiding people towards consumption in particular, i.e. marketing and other communications attracting our attention have inundated our everyday lives with garish colors and temptations steering our behavior. Our visual environment is filled with messages in which a strange voice is speaking. Is this the kind of environment that we want? What if we ourselves would like to say something, tell about our own experiences in our own voice and with our own visual messages?

The visual environment in which we live should be everyone’s shared area of residence and life, a comfortable home. It is, however, often the case that the townscape, for example, is influenced most by other actors, ones for whom the city is primarily a domain for business, and not the living environment of living human beings. The city, however, marks the individual and is located in him or her, as part of personal identity, the live world and meaningfulness. The notorious makers of graffiti have often tried to make the townscape present alternative messages, albeit with poor results. They are regarded as visual troublemakers and terrorists, while a beer ad on fence is part of the normal townscape. Something is also reflected by the fact that we are prepared to pay for things such as advertising text printed on t-shirts and to serve as walking advertisements. But what if the T-shirt is a means of personal expression, for stating one’s own ideas?

Identity has become a central quest in the dream society. We no longer necessarily know who we are, for we seek meaning in our lives by looking for a new script, and perhaps changing roles and sequels. The pedagogue Thomas Ziehe has noted that in contemporary society it is easy to hope that one is someone else and to expect and imagine more of oneself. One can always want more, and consider how things could be. Unlike in traditional rural societies, where the path of one’s ancestor had to be followed, life is not preordained. But the above-mentioned ‘more’ also generates conflict: “How one could be while not being: what one expected but did not receive, what one wants yet does not want; what one does and therefore cannot do otherwise.” We can always make comparisons, dream, want more or desire something else. Identities are at stake, changing and moving.

Already in the 1920s, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote perceptively about the fundamental form of human existence that he described as the life of das Man or ‘the one’. It is a life not quite one’s own, but instead one of drifting with a crowd – a crowd that is now being increasingly steered by the media and entertainment industry: life depends on the thickness of the wallet. Heidegger writes of actors living just like anyone else, seeing the same art exhibitions as anyone else and even standing out from the crowd just like anyone else. Das Man is not quite himself, not finding his own direction in life nor choosing it. Instead, he constructs his identity through forms of existence externally defined, from other people and the models of the media industry. Heidegger’s message, however, can only be grasped through personal experience – when one has sunk so deep into the mundane law-like regularities of everyday life that one wakes to the uncomfortable feeling of not being quite present in one’s own life, not living one’s own unique and ultimately brief life, but seeing instead how one is pulled by the current and wondering for whose benefit one is actually acting and what sense there is to any of this. For Heidegger, this experience and this awakening are the voice of conscience, a voice not accusing or blaming, but instead seeking a meaning for life, wishing to find something of permanence and value.

The political nature of art

The conscience as presented by Heidegger has only one voice; it asks one to be alert, wachsam sein. The life of das Man follows its own course, and before one notices it is too late. This is typical of human existence; it is difficult to remain alert and seize the moment, even it would almost be one’s duty. Art plays an important role in this awakening, for it reveals the world, presents perspectives and meanings that are not seen in everyday life. Art looks at things with different eyes, recombines, produces insight and above all meaningfulness. In this sense, art is often politics, in one way or another. This does not imply politics in the sense of political parties or ideology in the traditional manner, but above all in terms of responsibility, independence and thought. Political art is revolutionary through overturning the power of das Man, by evaluating the various forms of power and by proposing new perspectives.

‘Revolutionary’ should be understood in Eric Fromm’s sense when he wrote of the revolutionary psychological character. A revolutionary character is not someone who participates in revolutions, a fanatic or rebel, in so far as rebellion stems from hatred and aggravation. Instead, the revolutionary character is free and independent, what Immanuel Kant called mature as opposed to the immaturity that takes recourse to authority. The mature individual relies on his own reason, and thinks, feels and decides for himself. At issue here is the realization of individuality, liberation from the power of das Man:

“The revolutionary character is the one who is identified with humanity and therefore transcends the narrow limits of his own society, and who is able, because of this, to criticize his or any other society from the standpoint of reason and humanity. He is not caught in the parochial worship of that culture which he happens to be born in, which is nothing but an accident of time and geography. He is able to look at his environment with the open eyes of a man who is awake and who finds his criteria of judging the accidental in that which is not accidental (reason), in the norms which exist in and for human race.”

The revolutionary character is alert, also with regard to the numerous “truths” that we are fed on a daily basis by political and economic systems. In his famous Nobel-prize acceptance speed in 2005, the playwright Harold Pinter (2005) noted that art does not speak the language of “truth” that politics tries to speak, which is in fact the language of power, truth being what authority allows to be heard. The language of art, however is something else, of neither power nor truth, and instead ambiguous, “quicksand” and “an icy surface”, always leaving things open, allowing room for thought, experience and emotion, for the independent experiencing individual and the public.

But there are things where we – das Man – need to be shaken and awaked. If we seek meaningfulness, it will not be there like on a shop shelf, but use of the social media and other forms of collaborative learning methods will help us find it. Meaningfulness that is to be sought is not an experience; it does not involve seizing the present moment and the pleasure it produces. Instead, as stated by philosophers throughout history, meaning appears only at the end, when a life that has been lived is summed and weighed as a whole. In the same way the important thing is to see meaning in the totality of academic life and learning, at the same time as historical and rooted in tradition and as lived and renewed in daily teaching and learning practices. Art as a means for taking the immediate environment seriously has had its roots in the quest for the essential, in striving to find the meaningfulness of life and to maintain it, to recognize its experience from under the offerings of the media industry.

German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, among others, has observed that the main task of humanism in antiquity was to find meaningfulness and humanity in the blare of the arena, with philosophy and art made to serve this purpose. Art exists for human beings to become real. Now is it time to wake up, and seek for the same from the academia through new information and communication technologies in order to reach the human potentials for creating new collaboration, solidarity and economic as well as social well-being. For like the visual cityscape, also the academic world is being taken over almost, as it seems, in the speed of light by commercial contents, messages and interests.

Conclusions

In this paper we have maintained that social media of various kind is a two-edged sword. On one hand it allows speeding up time and stealing the breathing room of, authentic thinking. On the other hand it can open up spaces which allow new forms of togetherness and collective creativity.

When Lyotard (1984, 53) claims that "the age of the Professor" is ending he means that academic professionals and other experts (in their often exclusive ivory towers) are no longer "more competent than memory bank networks in transmitting established knowledge, no more competent than interdisciplinary teams in imagining new moves or new games." However, he seems not to acknowledge the possibility that ”memory bank networks” can also be 'live' products of human co-operation as is the case today in various co-operation between students, teachers and citizens in their search for the good and just society, and pursuit of new ideas, information, innovations, social justice, peace, knowledge, love and wisdom.

The university system is regarded as our best resource and potential not only for intellectual vitality and creativity but also more straightforwardly for the national economic competitiveness in the global markets. Yet those potential resources are increasingly marginalized by cultures of assessment and regulation (Evans 2004). The crucial hegemonic struggle concerns the language implicit in the use of the new information and communication technologies. Whose language is it? What language is it: technocrats, students or teachers? Are there many languages, many vocabularies? Who has the power to define the leading vocabulary? There is a threat that the very same forces that are managerializing and thus ruining the critical potential of the universities will set the standards for the language proper. Thus an initial resistance would be urgent; it could start as “a refusal of a language now inflicted upon university staff” (Evans 2004, 74). In this refusal “out would go consumers, missions statements, aims and objectives and all the widely loathed, and derided, vocabulary of the contemporary university. In could come students and reading lists” (ibid. 74). To the 'in-list' we would include the use of social media in its various forms, and enough time for discussion, reflection, and debate.

References

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