The peak of techno-utopian optimism regarding such liberation in cyberspace is represented in Barlow’s ‘Declaration of the independence of cyberspace’ – a declaration that likewise calls for ‘liberation’, largely in the form of escape from ‘meatspace’ (Barlow 1996). The 1990s rhetoric of ‘revolution’ via ICTs was further fuelled by a prominent theory of communication – one affiliated with the work of Innis (1951), McLuhan (1962, 1964), Ong (1982) and Eisenstein (1983) and for discussion, see Chesebro and Bertelsen 1996).
Taking diverse forms of communication as (at least necessary) conditions of culture, this framework argued that modern institutions (e.g. democratic polity, natural science, the liberal state, etc.) were closely wedded to the communication technologies of print and literacy. As we have seen, Ong famously argued that an emerging cyberspace would be marked by a ‘secondary orality’. While for Ong, secondary orality of necessity rested on and incorporated both literacy and print, for postmodern enthusiasts caught in the spell of simple dualisms between modernity (as affiliated with literacy and print) and postmodernity (affiliated with secondary orality), Ong’s contrast, when (mis)understood dualistically, nicely supported the larger vision of an imminent and revolutionary overturning of modern institutions.
It is also the case (at least in the West) that ‘revolution’ sells, and so it is not an accident that more or less every new technology and technological development, ranging from personal computers to blogs, is introduced into the marketplace with breathless claims that technology X is ‘revolutionary’ (‘Join the blog revolution!’ etc.). Given this matrix of economic, political and theoretical factors, it is not surprising that higher education likewise jumped on the ostensibly revolutionary bandwagon inaugurated by networked ICTs and prevailing conceptions of ‘cyberspace’.
At least within the US context, proponents of distance education – now migrating from its primarily paper-based correspondence models and early efforts to exploit radio and TV into the online world – hailed the imminent end of the book, and with it, ‘bricks-and-mortar’ schools and their ‘seated’ classrooms (both pejorative terms defining traditional higher education from the standpoint of the purely ‘virtual’).
But as symbolized by the (in)famous dot.com collapse at the beginning of the twenty-first century, 1990s ‘proponents’ visions and claims of imminent revolution, whether in the political or educational orders, soon ran aground on several stubborn realities. In addition to emerging insights regarding the essential role of embodiment for the learning, knowing and enacting self, additional empirical research began to demonstrate that Cartesian assumptions regarding a radical mind-body split fail to materialize, so to speak, in a ‘cyberspace’ radically distinct from an ostensible ‘meatspace’ (cf. chap. 9: 120–131).
So, for example, while ‘virtual communities’ certainly offer unique facilities and advantages, in large measure, such communities remain closely connected with their participants’ real-world bodies, and thereby their real-world histories, values, traditions, etc. (e.g. Baym 2002; Slater 2002; Cavanagh 2007, ch. 8: 102–119). Similarly, what we may call the postmodernist (mis)reading of the Innis-Ong schema began to fray in the face of several challenges, beginning with a criticism of its tendency towards an overly simple technological determinism that is likewise no longer supported by empirical evidence (Ess 1999; Slater 2002: 534).
Perhaps most persuasively, emerging economic realities likewise confounded 1990s enthusiasms. In particular, contrary to hopes that distance education would serve as a lucrative cash cow for universities facing continuously increasing costs (Carr 2001), experience and a number of hard-nosed analyses demonstrated that the costs of designing, producing and implementing computer-mediated distance education far exceeded original assumptions and estimates (e.g. Rumble 2001; Trucano 2005; cf. Ess 2006). Finally, as institutions understandably sought to profit from a burgeoning global demand for online courses, two sorts of additional obstacles emerged, beginning with the manifold problems created by the diverse, and oftentimes conflicting, cultures of online participants.
As educators attempted to come to grips with the role of culture in shaping online interaction and communication by taking up a number of frameworks for cultural analysis primarily, those developed by Hall (1976) and Hofstede (1980, 1983, 1984, 1991) – a second difficulty emerged: namely, that of the individual learner who, for a variety of important reasons, confounded the cultural analyses initially sought by online educators as ways of resolving the problems and conflicts, ostensibly rooted in culture, which appeared in the online classroom.
Read More : Revolution versus reality: The 1990s’ promises and the twenty-first century realities of online education
