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Everything New is Old Again: Technology and the Mistaken Future

National University

The political contours of social actions appear not only in the relationships between cultural actors but in the artifacts that surround them. This is increasingly the case as digital technology becomes the vehicle for education. This article focuses on the rhetoric that accompanies such educational technology. All too often, both the hype and the criticism surrounding technology in education implicitly accept that digital machines and media represent the impending future. However, if technology is understood as the instantiation of enduring social relations, then it must always represent the sociopolitical configurations of the past, however recent that past is. Seen in this light, technology does not drive change so much as it resists it. Technology becomes a tool of maintenance, not innovation. This article spins out how this might be the case and accompanies the arguments with concrete instances of how this is being played out in public schooling.

Key Words: educational technology • distance education • computer-mediated communication • interactive television • social theory • artifacts • Science and Technology Studies • technodeterminism

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