Abstract
This article reports on a study of adult literacy and learning in a public computing center where people contend with the new literacy demands of online government and other automated technologies. The study asks, (1) What literacy and learning practices are associated with digital governance? (2) What pedagogies support people to navigate digital government and automated technologies? (3) What are the broader implications of digital government for the work of adult educators? Bringing together sociomaterial theories of learning and methodologies of ethnographic case study, the study maps the literacies and pedagogies of digital government in the context of Deleuze’s society of control, arguing that digital-era governance spurs new forms of cognitive labor, new digital literacies and new pedagogies that are reshaping adult learning and the work of adult literacy educators. The article considers potential openings to “more than human” research and pedagogies that reconfigure adult literacy research and practice as sites of resistance to the control society.
Introduction
You have to apply online, sir.
But I was a carpenter before. I’ve never been anywhere near a computer.
[. . .] I’m going ‘round in circles.
Disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy. The man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network. Everywhere surfing has replaced the older sports.
Ken Loach’s critically acclaimed film I, Daniel Blake (O’Brien & Loach, 2016) introduces audiences to the everyday lives of people caught in the U.K. Government’s (2010) “digital by default” social services apparatus. It is a dispiriting venture. Mr. Blake, a carpenter, suffers a heart attack while at work. As he convalesces he is directed to an automated call center to apply for employment support allowance. His dire medical condition is disputed over the phone by an anonymous case manager, and he is referred to the national Department for Work and Pensions office to plead his case. There he befriends a young mother who is unemployed with two children. Both do battle to have their applications for income support recognized by human frontline workers, who defer to automated systems for decisions regarding their files: “Your benefits were denied, I can’t say why.” Mr. Blake turns to libraries and neighbors for help to complete countless online forms and appeals, each time encountering new challenges and obstacles as he runs out of money. As Mr. Blake observes in the epigram opening this article, he was indeed going around in circles, undulating as Deleuze (1992) imagined, in the United Kingdom’s digital government network.
In this article, I argue that digital government, or what has become known as digital-era governance (DEG; Margetts & Dunleavy, 2013), is a new form of bureaucracy that ushers in new literacies, new pedagogies, and new implications for adult education research and practice. Adult educators have traditionally played an important role in supporting citizens to negotiate shifting literacy demands of new economies and new technologies (Jones, 2000; Taylor, 1996). It seems timely to explore what this literacy work entails in a new era of digital governance and automation. To this end, I report on a 2-year ethnographic study of the literacy and learning experiences of adults who attended a public computing center, in British Columbia, the westernmost province of Canada, called the Digital Café. Public computing centers offer just-in-time help with computer needs and are a growing, if understudied, site of adult education practice (Irving & English, 2011). Many of the adults who attended the Digital Café during our study live on the margins of digital access (Smythe & Breshears, 2017) and attended the Café for support with just the kinds of digital government tasks exposed in the film I, Daniel Blake. The study asks the following questions:
What literacy and learning practices are associated with digital government?
What pedagogies support people to navigate digital government?
What are the broader implications of digital government for the work of adult educators?
I begin with a review of literature that elaborates the concept of DEG as a new form governance made possible by automated technologies. I consider DEG in the light of the “control society” that Deleuze (1992) envisioned becoming possible with the new machines of techno-capitalism. The practices of automation and other new technologies deeply challenge the primacy accorded human agency in adult learning theories and pedagogies. I therefore turn to sociomaterial and posthuman theories (Barad, 2007; DeLanda, 2016; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2005; Fenwick & Edwards, 2013) to capture the entanglement of humans, technologies, literacies, and other materialities in how learning unfolded in the Digital Café. I present the study findings as a research story (Comber, 2014), a detailed account of an encounter with DEG that unfolded one afternoon at the Café. By way of discussion and conclusion, I consider what adult literacy educators and scholars might learn from this encounter of the new literacies, pedagogies, and research imperatives of a control society.
Literature Review
Digital Era Governance
Margetts and Dunleavy (2013) define DEG as a transformation in the delivery of government services that has been made possible by the Internet and by automated technologies. When automated or “zero-touch” technologies such as sensors, cameras, algorithms, “chatbots,” Automated Tracking Systems, scanners, and automated phone systems/interactive voice response systems (IVRs) are coordinated, they form an assemblage of machine learning that can replace human intermediaries in key government services; automated technologies take queries in service call centers, track the activities of users of government services, and issue fines and pay checks. DEG leverages these technologies so that “[government] services do not ultimately require human intervention [italics added]” (p. 6). Ironically, as DEG replaces human frontline service workers, it also requires that citizens “do more” and “accept the logics of isocratic administration—or ‘do-it-yourself’ government” (Margetts & Dunleavy, 2013, p. 6).
Governments and institutions argue that DEG, especially the use of IVRs and algorithms, “modernizes” government to meet the needs of a more complex citizenry with greater needs for social services, while also facilitating the goals of austerity and fiscal consolidation in a post–2008 global economic crisis (Government of South Australia, 2016; Organisation for Economic and Co-operative Development (OECD), 2016, p. 9; U.K. Government, 2010). The Canadian government has described DEG as a social benefit leading to “greater and easier access to government” and “operational efficiency, flexibility and cost-effectiveness” (Industry Canada, 2015, para. 1).
However, antipoverty groups suggest that the promise of “greater and easier access” to government services do not accrue to those living on the margins of digital society: those who rely on government services but who also experience tenuous access to digital technologies and to the skills and time required to navigate complex systems (ACORN, 2016; Eubanks, 2018). A submission to the British Columbia ombudsperson titled Access Denied: Shut Out of BC’s Welfare System (BC Public Interest Advocacy Centre, 2015) documented the consequences for low-income citizens of that province’s shift to digital government. They noted obscure and often contradictory information on government websites, long phone wait times associated with the IVR system that often ended in disconnection or with a referral back to a website, frequent server time-outs that resulted in the loss of hours of painstaking form filling, and rejection of claims for essential income assistance due to small errors in data entry. There is an incongruence, the authors of the report concluded, “between the changes to the Ministry’s service delivery and the lives of the people that the system is purportedly designed to serve” (BC Public Interest Advocacy Centre, 2015, p. 3). This incongruence is at the nexus of a transformation in citizen and government relations, a password-enabled techno-state that Deleuze (1992) imagined even before the Internet became commonplace.
The control society
In Postscript on the Societies of Control, Deleuze (1992) described the new mutations of capitalism and bureaucracy that become possible with networked machines. Deleuze observed that Foucault’s disciplinary society is organized around “spaces of enclosure” (p. 3)—the hospital, the school, the prison, the university, the workplace. Foucault (1995) argued that people are categorized and indexed to these spaces as individual subjects and as members of a population. But Deleuze (1992) predicted the erosion of these spaces of enclosure and the inevitable demise of disciplinary societies “whatever the length of their expiration periods” (p. 3). He proposed that the next iteration of power after the disciplinary society would be the “society of control,” a “networked power” (p. 5) in which “individuals have become dividuals and masses, samples, data, markets and banks” (Deleuze, 1992, p. 5). Williams (2005) further described this dividual as “a human agent that is endlessly divisible and reducible to data representations” (p. 23). Whereas a disciplinary society is concerned with the location and behavior of a physical body, the control society is concerned with how this body is materialized as data (Savat, 2013, p. 40). Deleuze imagined passcodes and machines assembling humans, not as lifelong projects to be molded and worked on as in the disciplinary society but as the “constituent parts” of these machines and of capitalism itself (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2005, p. 458). Deleuze writes,
[I]n the societies of control [. . .] what is important is no longer a signature or a number but a code: that code is a password [. . .] the numerical language of control is made up of codes that mark access to information or reject it. (Deleuze, 1992, p. 5)
Digital sociologists argue that a password-driven control society is well under way (Bogard, 2009; Neuman, 2009; Savat, 2013). In his Deleuzian analysis of password and zero-touch technologies, Bogard (2009) observed,
[W]hat matters most in these assemblages is not that your body is visible [. . .] but that your information is available and matches a certain pattern or profile. Matching information, in fact, becomes a precondition for visibility in control societies. (p. 19)
With this new society of control comes new forms of literacy and learning. The question of how adults who already live on the margins of digital access contend with these new literacies of “matching information” and make themselves “visible” in computer networks merits the attention of scholars and practitioners of adult learning.
Sociomateriality and adult digital literacies
When it comes to using computers, things do not go as planned; machines (and people) do unexpected things and our status as “users,” “subscribers,” “codes,” or “data” is always precarious, requiring continuous status retrieval, renewal, and updates. The outcomes of these interactions are often indeterminate and arbitrary, as when Daniel Blake is informed, “Your application was denied, I can’t say why.” However, current policies and frameworks designed to enhance digital literacy skills for adults insist on a rational world in which the technologies of digital government, and of computers in general, are predictable and transparent. Struggles with technology are frequently attributed to individual skill deficits. Bélanger and Carter (2009), proposing a framework to measure digital skills among Canadian adults, demonstrated this perspectives in observing, “A substantial percentage of the population lacks the skills necessary to effectively interact with the government online” (p. 133). The OECD’s (2012) Survey of Adult Skills: Problem-Solving in Technology-Rich Environments similarly proposed a measurement framework for adult digital skills in OECD member states, where the “demands of the digital environment” (p. 11) are presented as neutral “stimuli” (p. 11). In such iterations, there is little sign of software pop-ups, website time-outs, tricky questions, or multistep verification protocols that can discourage and even actively work against digital competency. These configurations of digital skill enact what the physicist and feminist philosopher Karen Barad (2003) has called “Cartesian thinking” (p. 812), which positions humans in pedagogical discourse as “pure cause or pure effect” (p. 812). Individuals are either held responsible and accountable for processes that are often out of their control (Braidotti, 2013) or, in the vein of techno-determinism, considered powerless in the face of superior machine intelligence (Johri, 2011).
Fenwick and Edwards (2013) propose a sociomaterial approach to adult education research that counters this Cartesian thinking and captures the complexity and indeterminacy of learning processes. They argue that the agencies of adult learners should be studied within the flow of the material world, where matter is not merely a background to human actions, or a barrier to overcome, but is constitutive to how learning unfolds. This is particularly relevant for the study of learning with digital technologies. Hayles (2012) has observed that it is common practice to think of digital technologies and their effects as immaterial, because virtual worlds and flows of data cannot be seen or touched. Yet she and other scholars of digital literacies (e.g., Bhatt & de Roock, 2013; Edwards, 2010; Fenwick & Edwards, 2013; Gourlay, 2015; Gourlay, Hamilton, & Lea, 2013; Hamilton, 2016) observe that these technologies are grounded in material processes that order people’s lives and transform bodies. Whereas sociocultural approaches to digital literacy research might attend to “the human, with intention, doing something with materials” (Kuby, 2017, p. 883), sociomaterial theories of learning attend to how “materials transform meaning rather than convey it” (Gourlay, 2015, p. 489). This posthuman, or more-than-human ontology, de-centers the “agency of the user” (Gourlay, 2015) and attends to “the entanglement of the fleshy and the technical and the materiality of things” (Edwards, 2010, p. 7).
Entanglement is mobilized in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987/2005) concept of assemblages, defined in the original French term as agencements, the coming together (or apart) of “components of things” (DeLanda, 2016, p. 5). For example, rather than study the agencies or capacities of a “low-skilled adult” to complete an online form on a government website, the sociomaterial study of digital literacy assemblages that I present below attends to how agencies are distributed (de Freitas & Sinclair, 2014, p. 38) across a digital government assemblage that entails hand-fingers-mouse-keyboard-government website-skills discourses-pedagogy-research methods-affective flows-gestures. As Barad, Dolphijn, and Van der Tuin (2012) remind us, this is not to suggest a “democratic” distribution of these agencies. Educators and researchers want to be alert to the “particularities of power imbalances” (para. 13) in learning assemblages, particularly, I would add, in assemblages of human-machine learning.
Study Context, Methodology, Method
Study Context
The Digital Café is located in a bustling community center in a midsize city in British Columbia. Learners, tutors, desktop computers, laptops, power cords, tables, and chairs are crammed into a little room near the Center’s reception area, and two afternoons a week the Café buzzes with activity. Like many community-based adult literacy programs in Canada and elsewhere, the Café’s education activities rely on volunteer tutors who receive a brief orientation and then learn the practices of one-to-one tutoring “on the job” (Belzer, 2006).
There were 234 unique visitors to the Café during our 2-year study. Many were job seekers between the ages of 45 and 70, new immigrants to Canada, with formal education levels ranging from Grade 8 to graduate degrees that are not recognized by local employers or higher education institutions. Most did not receive digital education in school and/or did not have sufficient income to participate in more formal digital education, to afford home Internet, or to purchase their own devices. A core group attended regularly during the study and beyond, but most came to the Café for help with pressing matters, attending for a few weeks or months, usually until they moved away or found a job. A few months into the study, we noticed that more people began to arrive at the Café who were referred by government agencies for help with online tasks including making online job applications and applying for subsidized housing, social assistance, or disability benefits. Just as they were for Daniel Blake, these encounters with digital government in the Digital Café were time-consuming and tedious and came to dominate our field notes because they implied new literacies, new pedagogies, and new challenges for research that we wanted to understand.
Study Methodology
The study follows an ethnographic methodology (Toohey, 2018) enfolding participation observation, digital documentation (audio and video recording and screen capture), informal conservations with learners and tutors, and documentation of these activities in field notes, vignettes, and stories. Ethnographic methods are well suited to the study of sociomaterial assemblages. As Youdell and McGimpsey (2014) observe, what matters in assemblages is just what ethnographies strive to generate, in “fine-grained detail of the components [. . .] the nuances of the productive relations between these components” (p. 121). When they attend to the material and the social together ethnographic stories can open new meanings that are at once “in-the-moment” and “far reaching” (Youdell & McGimpsey, 2014, p. 121).
The research team included two doctoral student research assistants and me.
As often as possible, two of us were present when the Café was open so that together we documented over 90 hours of human–computer activity. Our recruitment approach in this public setting was to inform newcomers to the Café that a study about how people learn with computers was under way. If these people returned to the Café, we invited them into the study through written consent and then included them in our field notes, conversations, and storied accounts.
Study Methods and Modes of Analysis
Observant participation
When we first began our study, we adopted a conventional “participant observer” approach (deWalt & deWalt, 2002) to ethnographic data generation, sitting away or to the side and writing furiously our observations of what we could see and hear. This challenged our ethical sensibilities as researchers and as educators. We found we could not sit apart and observe as people struggled to enter their email password, or to navigate verification protocols, knowing that a mistake could result in exclusion from accounts that are gateways to vital resources such as their income support benefits. So, when asked for help, or when we saw things going awry and no other tutor was available, we worked with people side by side to accomplish the task at hand. We learned about the workings of DEG sitting with people and computers, holding in-the-moment conversations about what they were seeing and doing (Attar, 2005) and, when possible, making field notes and audio and/or video recordings of these encounters.
Ingold (2011) captures the sensibility of this side-by-side colearning as “joining with learners in the same currents of practical activity, and by learning to attend to things—as would any novice practitioner—in terms of what they afford in the contexts of what has to be done” (p. 314). Ingold (2013) rejects the concept of bias in anthropological research because he believes that it is the work of researchers to learn with people, rather than about people (pp. 3-8). Following Barad (2007), Ingold (2013) argues that the very concept of participant-observation is an artifact of a Cartesian sensibility that presumes researchers, along with our methodological apparatus, stand apart from world to document its truths. As Barad (2007, p. 185) writes, “[w]e do not obtain knowledge by standing outside the world, ‘we’ know because we are already of the world, we are part of the world in its differential becoming.” “Participant”’ and “observer” are not separate subjectivities; rather, “one depends on the other” (Ingold, 2013, p. 5). Ingold (2013) calls this stance observant participation, which eschews the pretensions of ethnography as expert-driven “description of the people” and recommits to the anthropological goal of learning and doing with people and folding the stories of this learning back into the flow of practice where they matter most.
Affective intensities
There were moments of observant participation in the Digital Café when I was propelled along in the flow of digital learning with excitement, frustration, curiosity. My stomach sometimes tightened with anxiety or worry, often when one of the Café participants became frustrated or anxious. Our field notes, memos, and recordings are laced with such moments when affective flows called us to attention, when we wondered, “What is going on here?” Leander and Boldt (2013) call such moments “affective intensities,” when components in assemblages come together or split apart, when boundaries or things-as-usual are disrupted, and when we are affected and perhaps also affect others (Davies & Gannon, 2009, p. 12). MacLure (2013) similarly describes these as moments when our data “glows” (p. 661) or calls out to us. Ehret, Hohlett, and Jocius (2016) call these “felt focal moments” (p. 355) in which they felt in their study how “matter comes to matter” (p. 358) in an echoing voice, in a classroom seating arrangement that produced exclusions, social orderings, and new potential for action. Attending to affective intensities as a mode of analysis alerted us to the trouble spots of digital government, to places of “incongruence” and power imbalances (Barad et al., 2012), and also to new possibilities.
Experiments in documentation
Each member of the research team “wrote up” field notes, using word processing programs and OneNote to embed comments, audio and video clips, questions, images, and sometimes references to other field notes or vignettes that the research team members had created. We experimented in the writing of descriptive vignettes, and research stories (Comber, 2014) that we shared with learners and tutors when we visited the Café, inviting their comment: Why do you think passwords give people so much trouble? What would make it easier to apply for jobs online? In response, many learners named arbitrary occurrences as those that gave them the most trouble: an outdated browser that made Web pages look odd, an online form that crashed at the last minute. Others observed that digital environments changed often—just when they thought they had learned to use a particular site, the design or requirements changed. Many also expressed joy and a sense of accomplishment when they learned a new skill.
Working with these insights-in-practice and following Davies’s (2014) “experiments in documentation,” I experimented in writing research stories that attended to not only what people said and did, as is the custom in conventional ethnographies (Smythe et al., 2017), but also to nonhuman and preintentional phenomena: gestures, silences, the doings of the computer, screen and mouse, affective flows (shrugs, laughter, frowns). We documented over 40 encounters with DEG at the Café that included recovering lost passcodes, completing online forms for housing, child care and disability benefits, and making job applications. I have selected to re-present the story of one such encounter, involving a participant of the Café, Sharon; her tutor Malcolm; and a job application, where many of these troublesome phenomena and more unfolded. As Bhatt and De Roock (2013, p. 27) remind us, in assemblage thinking, these methods of selection, observation, documentation, and my own researcher body are “always and already entangled” in the phenomena we pursue, re-presenting, but also reconfiguring worlds. In re-presenting this encounter, I write as an “observant participant” pausing in the moments of affective intensities to consider the new literacies and pedagogies of digital government.
Findings
Sharon was a regularly participant in the Digital Café for several months in the Fall and Winter of 2015-2016. She had recently become unemployed, and to maintain her eligibility for income support from the Ministry of Social Services, she was required to make as many online employment applications as possible each day and to provide evidence of this activity in weekly online reports that were tracked by the Ministry. The Ministry contracts out training in how to apply for these online jobs to a local employment agency (heretofore referred to as LEA), but Sharon needed more help with email and writing than LEA was able to offer, so they referred Sharon to the Digital Café. Sharon often worked with Malcolm, a volunteer who is also a university student. I found them together when I arrived one Wednesday afternoon.
Malcolm and Sharon were sitting sit side-by-side at a table looking into the screen of Sharon’s laptop computer. As I entered, Sharon waved a paper at me, laughing, “I work in a casino!” I am surprised: “What?” Malcolm reaches across the table and turns over the paper in Sharon’s hand. His finger slides along the handwritten text of an address for a local casino. I am wondering about the connection between this address and the website of an insurance company on Sharon’s computer screen. I ask, “So when you go to the website you can’t find the casino?” Malcolm and Sharon burst in together: “No, no, no.” Sharon laughs. Malcolm explains to me: “She [Sharon] didn’t know what a casino was, I showed her on google images what it was, she said that’s not the work for her.” I joke with Sharon: “You didn’t want to work in a casino?” Sharon laughs again, “It’s work for young people, not for me.” I ask her, “Does [Local Employment Agency] help you with this job search?” Sharon shrugs, “Yeah I check on the website, they give us a list [of advertised jobs] and we go and apply.” I reply, “But they don’t necessarily . . . what do they do?” Sharon: “They don’t help you.”
It is in LEA’s interest that Sharon apply for as many jobs as possible, even if some are not suitable for her as a single mother of young children who is not able to work at night. The more applications their clients make, the more likely is LEA to win future government contracts. This is a point of tension and contradiction in the work of the Café, as volunteer tutors invest considerable time helping people apply for jobs for which they are not well-suited or qualified.
But Sharon and Malcolm laugh at the prospect of her working in a casino. Sharon “unfolds herself” (Jackson, 2010, p. 580) in this moment, becoming different to the “overcoded, essentialized category” (Jackson, 2010, p. 579) of the “low-skilled worker” that sent Sharon to the LEA in the first place. Sharon strikes out on a different, perhaps more promising and also transgressive tack, disregarding the casino jobs she was asked to apply for and picking up a business card she had been given at a job fair.
“And what about this? What is this?” She holds the card up for Malcolm to see. He explains, “That’s another business, that’s the insurance company.” Sharon points to the screen: “I applied, in the morning, I sent them an email but they refused to receive it.” Malcolm: “Why?” Sharon repeats, “The email went but they refuse to receive it.” Malcolm offers possible explanations: “I think it’s automatic.” We are all studying the screen together looking for the email the insurance company refused to receive. I ask, “Maybe it’s the wrong email address?” Sharon sighs and is talking louder, “No, not the wrong email. Let me show you,” she is checking the email address on the screen, still holding the business card in the air. Malcolm is still not convinced the problem is with the email. He explains, “They filter it in such a way that they will bounce back any resume that’s not related to the job.” We all study the screen again.
“Affective intensities” (Leander & Boldt, 2013), excited voices, frowning into screens, frequently erupted in the Café around this picky matching work (Bogard, 2009) of entering email addresses and passcodes accurately. Sharon is new to keyboarding, and attends carefully to the arbitrary bits of code, searching for the keys that produce that code, tapping slowly, checking and rechecking the inputs on the screen, and sometimes losing her place and pressing the wrong key. It’s so easy to make small mistakes, the consequences of which are amplified by the possibility of a rejected job application or sanction from the Ministry if she cannot show that she has successfully submitted an application. Uncertain, Sharon searches among her papers on the table beside her.
“Let me show you. You see?” Sharon has found the email address from the insurance company. She points to an address in the “recipient” field of the email as all three of us peer into the screen. I read aloud the auto-reply text: “Technical issues of permanent failure [. . .]” “Oh” says Malcolm. He reads the email text in Sharon’s inbox aloud under his breath and interprets the gist of the message: “Google tried to deliver your email but it was user invalid.” I am still thinking about the filter that potential employers use. “Is it a thing the [employers] is doing or is it just an email mistake?” Malcolm and Sharon are studying the screen and don’t answer. Sharon, her voice rising in confusion, asks: “Is it a mistake on my behalf?” Sharon and Malcolm read the email address on the screen again together. Then they look at the business card and compare both texts. They discuss whether the name in the email address is “Marian” or “Marion.” Malcolm: “Oh it should be Marion. That’s why.” Sharon asks, “So what can I do, can I resend it with the correct email? How do I?”
The skills to correct the email address, reattach her resume, and resend the email with the “cover letter” introductory text stretch Sharon’s expertise. Another patron of the Café has called Malcolm over for help, so I respond to Sharon:
“You can copy the message you wrote in the old email and create a new email message with the right address.” Sharon is pointing to the email field on the screen. “Compose?” “Yes.” Sharon reads the email address on the card and says each letter and number in the email address aloud as she keys it into the address field of her email program. It is slow going. I am checking over her shoulder. Sharon tries to highlight and copy the text but it’s not working. Not wanting to take the mouse from her, I put my hand over hers and push her finger down with mine so she has the haptic sensation of the left click and then our hands move together as we drag to highlight the text. But after repeated attempts we still can’t copy the original email into the new field. I start to feel anxious, I can’t see any reason why the cut and paste should not work. I wave to Malcolm to come back over to us: “How can we . . .?” Malcolm walks back and points at the screen where Sharon should put her cursor. His gaze moves from her hand on the mouse and back to the screen as he guides her actions with hand gestures of his own: “Minimize this [pointing to the minus sign on the screen] and then click and select from this window, and then open the other window again and right click.” For this last click, Malcolm briefly takes over the mouse. “Yup. Copy, go back to here . . .” The email message is copied then pasted. Malcolm: “So now you need to attach the resume.”
Cut, copy, and paste is one of the most difficult of digital literacy practices. It involves haptic perception (Mangen, 2008, p. 405), a kinesthetic assemblage of hand-finger-mouse-cursor-screen as when, Mangen (2008) describes, “we click with the computer mouse, we sense the mouse click both through the receptors on the skin on our fingers, as well as through the position and movement of our hand and fingers” (p. 417). We have noticed in our time at the Digital Café that this embodied digital literacy practice is a struggle for new users of computers who need more practice with the mouse. But we’re not done yet. I notice a grammatical error in the body of the email message. Is this the time for a lesson in prepositions?
“I look forward to hearing from you” I read. I point to the bottom of the email and show Sharon. “You have written, ‘I look forward to hearing for you.’ It should be from you.” I am pointing to the word for on the screen and Sharon orients her mouse and deletes it. I reach over and type in the word from. Sharon: “Done?” Suzanne: Yes, done. Now we need to attach the resume.
Amid the pressures and busy-ness of the Café it was a matter of chance that I noticed such a small but consequential error. I made the correction, because once again, in this digital governance assemblage, small mistakes are magnified.
Discussion
What literacy and learning practices are entailed in this digital government assemblage? What are the implications of these literacy and learning practices for the work of adult educators? We might observe that much of the activity in this assemblage was propelled by nonhumans: the government monitoring system, the email that bounced back, the specter of a job application rejected by an algorithm. Affective flows of anxiety, confusion, even laughter, the haptic sensation of the mouse click that is vital to making the cursor move on the screen, are all entangled in digital literacies. Attending to these entanglements of nonhuman and human agencies offers insights into the digital literacy pedagogies of a control society.
Digital Literacy as Cognitive Labor
Sharon came to the Digital Café because, as Bogard (2009) has observed, she needed to make herself visible to the Ministry’s Automated Tracking System. This entailed detail-oriented and time-consuming tasks as indeed citizens are asked to “do more” (Margetts & Dunleavy, 2013) in the era of digital governance. Uploading so many job resumes a week, checking emails, and logging in and out of government portals kept Sharon, Malcolm, and many other participants and tutors in the Digital Café very busy. The “efficiencies” of digital government seem to be generated by replacing the labor, and the responsibility, of human government employees with the cognitive labor of low-income citizens and their volunteer tutors.
For de Freitas and Sinclair (2016) cognitive labor implies the exploitation of labor in the production of “knowledge, information, affect and communication” (p. 222). Many experience cognitive labor as alienating because it is continuous, seemingly without limits. Just as the “dividuated” subject of the control society is “never finished” (Deleuze, 1992), cognitive labor seems never ending, particularly for those who rely on automated government social service apparatus.
Embodied and Automated Digital Literacies
The primacy accorded to accurate keyboarding skills is but one example of the new matching literacies of DEG (Bogard, 2009). Sharon, like other low-wage workers and new writers of English, are also likely to encounter Automated Tracking Systems, robots that reject applications in which spelling, grammar, and “key words” in the email and cover letter do not match “native speaker” norms (Rieucau, 2015). This high-stakes emphasis on language accuracy was the impetus for my correction of Sharon’s for to from in her email introduction.
In her study of automated job application processes in three European countries, Rieucau (2015) found that online employment application processes privilege digital literacy and language skills that are unevenly distributed in communities. Otherwise qualified people compete for low-wage employment on the same plane as those with greater proficiency with computers, and with greater command of dominant language norms and conventions, even when these skills are not required for the work for which they are applying. These are moments when discourses of individual agency collide with the embodied and cognitive demands of literacy as code matching. Automated technologies are not neutral backdrops to human activity, they actively produce material constraints and possibilities.
New Pedagogies of the Control Society
Sharon’s story also suggests tensions in adult literacy pedagogies in public computing spaces. Entering data and codes into online domains are high-stakes material practices that are consequential to lives. These are not moments to engage in “trial-and-error” learning experimentation (van Dijk, 2006) or to leave people to figure things out by themselves in a “do-it-yourself” digital pedagogy (Matzat & Sadowsky, 2012). New users of computers need opportunities for engaged practice with machines that support haptic perception, typing accuracy, affinities between machines and humans, and critical awareness of the workings of DEG that might provide some resistance to its alienating effects. The cognitive labor demands of DEG risk overtaking this vital experiential learning. Knowing when to do for people and when to support this play and experimentation is the dance of adult literacy pedagogy in public computing.
Malcolm’s pedagogical dance is deft and rhythmic. He mentors Sharon, offers advice, watches and waits, and then moves in when he senses Sharon–the keyboard–the email software have reached the edge of their capacities. These sociomaterial bonds of affinity also made it possible for me to place my hand on Sharon’s, creating together with the mouse the haptic perception of the “click” to cut and paste the email text and move things along. Affective flows and intensities forge new connections and intradependencies that counter the hyperindividuality of a passcode-mediated control society and is making new learning possible (Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, 2010). Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2005) might call these affective intensities desiring, a line of flight between “what is and what could be” (Leander & Boldt, 2013, p. 37).
Conclusion and Implications for Literacy Research and Practice
In The Posthuman, Rosi Braidotti (2013) calls for a more ethical and empowering relationship between humans and machines. She argues that human–machine collaborations can help us make our way through the many problems of our present and of our uncertain future. Yet she laments a “cruel political economy” (p. 90) that has harnessed the potential of new technologies to serve the techno-capital interests of the few. I presented in this article but one story, a mapping of one assemblage within this much larger territory, where the pleasures and potential of digital technologies for improved lives risk being subsumed in the “automation of inequality” (Eubanks, 2018). The work of adult literacy educators also risks becoming limited to supporting the literacies of code-matching and other modes of digital control.
But when Deleuze (1992) said that the technologies of the control society are indeterminate, it is because life is always becoming and cannot be known in advance. If we are already of the world (Barad, 2007, p. 185), then at every moment, as the story of Sharon and Malcolm suggests, there is an opportunity to intervene in the world’s becoming (Barad, 2007). This opens DEG to pedagogic and theoretical disruption. In this, adult education can become a site of conceptual and theoretical gathering, eschewing traditional epistemic and research boundaries (Gourlay, Hamilton, & Lea, 2013; Smythe, et al., 2017) to engage with matters of concern (Latour, 2004) that unfold in Sharon’s story—those of automated inequalities, hyperindividualization, futures of work, precarious citizenship, and more—and to imagine and enact new solutions and new pedagogies out of a society of control.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Angelpreet Singh and Sherry Breshears doctoral student RAs and insightful ‘observant participants’ in the Digital Café. The author also thanks reviewers of the original manuscript and editors for their thoughtful comments that improved this work.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research is supported by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Congress Insight Development Grant No. 430-2013-000014.
