"Technology as Teacher: Digital Media and the Re-schooling of Everyday Life"

Even before we’ve wiped the sleep from our morning eyes, many of us now find ourselves reaching for our smartphone or tablet to check the shutterless pulse of the tweeting, facebooking, emailing, googling globe, hoping to catch up on what news has transpired in our brief overnight sojourn. Then, throughout the balance of our day, an astonishing but now taken-for-granted host of digital applications and devices serve to enhance, inform, monitor, entertain, customize, regulate and otherwise touch nearly every aspect of our everyday lives: laptops, ATM machines, Google, grocery checkouts, and for teachers and students, Learning Management Systems, SmartBoards, eBooks and clickers. Our being-in-theworld is increasingly enhanced by, enmeshed with, and seamlessly folded into networked machines, smart mobilities, and sophisticated software environments. This new technology infrastructure is mediating our lived experience with a 24/7 immediacy and sometimes 911 urgency. Merleau-Ponty once observed that, “our existence changes with the appropriation of a fresh instrument” (1962/2002, p. 143). As we encounter and interact with an ever-refreshing surround of “fresh” digital technologies, we may begin to wonder: what essential changes are transpiring in the corporeal, relational, temporal, and spatial niches of our pre-reflective experiences and primal practices? I explore this question through examining a few of the pedagogical significances and implications of this ubiquitous technologizing of the lifeworld. I hope to show that digital technologies are complex physiognomies—“gestures”—that mimetically invite, scaffold, and interactively sustain new forms of human being in the world. I will forward the claim that the responsive architectures of digital media are our new hidden curricula, imperceptibly yet nonetheless thoroughly re-mediating our perceptions and gestures—our performativity—and are thereby re-schooling both adults and children in new modalities of knowing, perceiving and acting.