Q&A with Rogers Brubaker, author of HyperConnectivity and its Discontents

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NOTE: This Q&A post with the author is a follow-up to last week’s review of HyperConnectivity and its Discontents by Rogers Brubaker.

by Jacob Pleasants

Jacob: In the preface, you give a bit of the backstory of this book, that it grew out of an honors seminar you taught. I am interested to know more about what drew you to the issue of digital technology. The book has plenty of connections to your previous work, but the technological focus seems new, and I’d love to know what prompted that shift.

Rogers: I was initially drawn to the subject towards the beginning of the previous decade by an inchoate sense that we were in the midst of a profound but ill-understood social transformation affecting every aspect of our lives -- and by a rather naïve desire to try to understand what was going on.  In retrospect, I think a talk I heard by Sherry Turkle in 2010 – her book Alone Together was then just about to come out -- planted a seed.  Turkle’s pioneering 1995 Life on the Screen had been an appreciative (though not uncritical) account of the new possibilities opened up for exploring identities in online spaces.  Fifteen years later, Turkle’s analysis – focusing on “why we expect more from technology and less from each other,” as the subtitle of Alone Together put it -- was much more sombre. On the economic and political side, Evgeny Morozov’s wide-ranging, acerbic critique of “technological solutionism” in To Save Everything, Click Here made a big impression.  

Still, when I first proposed my course on hyperconnectivity, in 2013, I had no intention of writing anything on the subject.  It was only during the fourth offering of the course, in 2019, that I quite suddenly, out of the blue, thought of writing a book on the subject.  So the book was in no way pre-meditated and did not grow organically out of earlier work.  In a curious way, it circles back, in a sense, to my first book, written four decades earlier, on the idea of rationality and rationalization – technical, economic, legal, scientific, even religious – as a master theme in the work of Max Weber.  Digital hyperconnectivity, like rationalization, seemed to be a key to analyzing social transformations in the most varied domains of life, from the precincts of the self to the large-scale structure and functioning of culture, economy, and polity. And it seems to me (though this is not a theme I take up in the book) that many aspects of digital hyperconnectivity – universal quantification, datafication, machine learning, and platformization, for example – could be interpreted as part of a broader ongoing process of rationalization and as illustrating the poignant Weberian theme of the substantive irrationality of processes of formal rationalization.

Jacob: Education is not one of the domains that you address in the book, though it comes up from time to time and you touch on it in the conclusion. I know it’s a big topic, but I would be interested to know what you think are some of the most consequential transformations that hyperconnectivity has brought to our educational spaces, beyond the disruptions associated with the pandemic. And, how might we prepare teachers for this new environment?

Rogers: I am particularly concerned about the “platformization” of education -- a process through which all aspects of the educational enterprise are brought within the controlling architecture and surveillant gaze of digital platforms.  The process is already well advanced, and it took a great leap forward during the pandemic.  The promotion of platformization by philanthropic and governmental as well as corporate interests is a classic instance of the “solutionist” thinking skewered by Morozov, which recasts social and political problems as technical problems, assimilates politics to engineering, and emplaces private digital infrastructures and “learning management systems” at the heart of public education.  

Platformization – along with allied developments such as “learnification,” which focuses on learning of measurable outcomes rather than on teaching – threatens the autonomy of teachers.   In addition to seeking to prepare teachers for new and increasingly digitally mediated teaching/learning environments, I think we need to urge educators, philanthropists, and government officials to think critically about the social costs of the profit-driven platformization of education.  

Jacob: You sequenced your analysis of the five domains so that they begin with what you call the “experience near” and then move outward. From a pedagogical perspective (formal teaching settings and, more broadly, situations where you have helped others learn about technological mediation), has this “inside out” sequencing proved to be useful? Have you observed any of the domains to be easier to teach/learn than others?

I ask this because I have often found that technology’s mediating effects on the “experience near” are quite challenging for newcomers (e.g., students) to grasp. As an access point to the idea of mediation, I have often found examinations of digital technologies’ economic and political ramifications to be somewhat easier for learners (I have some hunches for why this might be the case, but they are just hunches). Admittedly, though, my experiences are not all that extensive. While I’ve been having some success with an “outside in” sequence, I’m very interested to know how your “inside out” approach has landed.

Rogers: It's interesting that you have found it easier for students to grasp the economic and political ramifications of digital technologies.  I’ve indeed found it easier to start with topics that are closer to home. I’ve found that it’s fairly easy to draw students in to analyzing the complexities and subtleties of digitally mediated interactions and how they differ from face to face interactions. Students are happy to reflect, for example, about why they would sometimes rather text than talk face to face, or about when texting feels inappropriate, and why.  Or one can take a particular practice like location sharing, or more concretely the Find my Friends app, which opens up a whole range of issues about intimacy, privacy, sharing, surveillance, reciprocity, and so on.  It’s also pretty easy to design writing exercises around experience-near aspects of hyperconnectivity.  Asking students to disconnect from all devices as fully as possible for 24 hours and write about the experience, for example, reveals to them just how dependent they are on their devices and just how hard it is to disconnect – not just because of their own dependency or “addiction,” but also because of others’ expectations about their reachability and responsiveness.  And asking students to write about transformations of friendship, family relationships, or romantic and sexual relationships has also led to great discussions. Addressing larger-scale cultural, economic, and political transformations, on the other hand, or meso-level processes like platformization or “infrastructuralization" – the very terms are a bit forbidding and off-putting -- tends to feel more abstract.  

Jacob: You brought together a great deal of research for this book (the notes and references are a gold mine!) and I imagine that you learned much from the writing process itself. What do you think are the most significant insights that you had about digital technologies as a result of this book project?

Rogers: I’m glad you found the notes and references helpful! I have something of an obsession with notes, as both reader and writer. As a reader, I’m always grateful for notes that offer a counterpoint to the main text, amplifying and qualifying certain points without over-encumbering the main text or interrupting the flow of the argument.  As a writer, I try to make the notes as rich and helpful as possible, for example by including specific bibliographic pointers, with specific page references where appropriate.  (As a reader, I much prefer footnotes to endnotes. But as I was hoping to reach a broad audience with this book, I didn’t want the text to be visually encumbered with a formidable scholarly apparatus, so I opted, with some reluctance, for endnotes.)

As for what I have learned, it’s hard to know what to highlight, but I think I would mention two things.  I came away, first, with a keen awareness of the complexity of all the issues I address in the book.  I had embarked on the project with a kind of hubris, thinking that, after teaching on the subject for a few years, I could easily -- and relatively quickly -- write a short book on the subject. I was very wrong: the book was quite hard to write, it took a lot longer than I expected, and, while it’s not a long book, it’s not the slim book I had initially envisioned. Before I started, I had no idea of the breadth, depth, and sophistication of the many pertinent literatures I would have to work my way through and no real sense of the challenges of writing about a phenomenon that is so vast, so multidimensional, and so rapidly changing.  So writing the book has been a lesson in humility. 

I also came away, I’m sorry to report, with a deeper pessimism about the sociotechnical environment we inhabit. I tried to keep that pessimism in check while writing; since I am pessimistic by temperament, I tried not to let that temperament dictate the tone. And I think I managed to strike a reasonable balance – to write about the “discontents” occasioned or intensified by hyperconnectivity without slipping into a jeremiad. But in every domain I examined – the self, social interaction, culture, and especially economics and politics – I do find myself increasingly concerned about threats to human freedom, flourishing, and dignity. 

Jacob: Can we expect more from you on the topic of digital technology?

Rogers: It’s too soon to tell!  During what has become a longish career, I’ve enjoyed exercising the freedom to learn new languages (analytical languages as well as natural languages), explore new literatures, and write on a wide variety of subjects.  One thing I’ve learned is that I’m not the kind of person who can plan out a series of projects well in advance; I have to wait for a project to summon me. 

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Book Review: Hyperconnectivity and Its Discontents