The practical privilege in which all scientific activity arises never more subtly governs that activity (insofar as science presupposes not only an epistemological break but also a social separation) than when, unrecognized as privilege, it leads to an implicit theory of practice which is the corollary of neglect of the social conditions in which science is possible.
–PIERRE BOURDIEU, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 1977, 1.
This is a book about how a technologically cutting-edge philanthropic intervention—in this case, the attempt to redesign the American school for the twenty-first century—ended up mostly remaking the status quo, as well as its problems. The book also examines what perennial cycles of techno-philanthropism manage to accomplish—politically and for whom—even as actual interventions routinely fall far short of their stated aims. It is a book about how enduring yearnings for a promised polity and wishful thinking about recent innovations in media technology come to be entwined anew, mostly survive a barrage of unanticipated setbacks, and help produce effects in the world despite decades upon decades of disappointing results.
To help contextualize what follows, readers should know that this is not the book that I set out to write, nor is it based on the study that I originally thought I was conducting, nor am I the same person that I was when I began working on this project. The book and I have changed over the years alongside not only changes in the subject matter, but also changes in the conditions that have allowed me to conduct and write research. Since the book draws special attention to the role of idealism in cutting-edge philanthropic interventions and since it makes the argument that this idealism emerges from and is sustained through situated practices, I also reflect on the role that idealism has played in my own pragmatic work activities, first as a technology designer and now as an academic.
Disruptive Fixation is a revision of The Cutting Edge of Fun (2012), my PhD thesis for the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. I came to this project after having worked for three years on a large-scale collaborative research project that ethnographically examined the role of digital media in the everyday lives of children and young people coming of age in the United States. That project was funded by the same philanthropic foundation that provided substantial support for the reform project that this book takes as its focus. I was able to gain access to this reform project, as well as to many of the people who worked to bring it into being, in large part because I had worked on the earlier research project. I got involved in both projects partly because I wanted to learn how to do the craft of ethnography and partly because I wanted to develop a better understanding of how contemporary social divisions were being experienced, made, and changed among young people growing up in the so-called digital age. But, and to the point of this preface, I also got involved in both projects because I was trying to find a professional career path that felt socially beneficial and personally meaningful. In this regard, I believe I had quite a bit in common with many of the designers and reformers who are featured in this book, as well as with many of the academics with whom I continue to work.
Graduate school in general, and these projects in particular, were in many ways attempts to bring together my hopes for a more fair and egalitarian social order with my (admittedly privileged) desire to find a career path that was personally fulfilling, challenging, creative, and respected. Graduate school was not my first attempt to knit together these disparate yearnings. I entered graduate school in 2005 after having worked for five years in the quickly changing profession that nowadays refers to itself as interaction design, user-experience design, or, even more ambitiously, just experience design. I had found my way into this facet of the new economy as a twenty-one-year-old who was quite unsure about what to do after graduating from college. Mostly I knew what I did not want to do. When I graduated from college, many of my classmates were headed toward what I considered to be well-heeled establishment professions: fields like management consulting, finance, and the law. It was against these grooved pathways into elite factions of adult working life that the emerging world of interaction design appeared to offer a more creative, exciting, and socially beneficial route. What is more, I was able to find a position in a company that worked exclusively for not-for-profit organizations. At the time I thought I had found a way to develop a career that was both socially beneficial and cutting edge, and at first I was quite enchanted with my job.
After several years that enchantment began to fade. At the time I attributed my growing disillusionment to the fact that most of the projects on which I had worked were for marketing purposes. Even though we were working for not-for-profit organizations, we were still in the business of selling and manipulating, and, as such, my career seemed to be headed toward the same sorts of establishment professions that I had been trying to avoid. I did, however, continue to enjoy working on experimental design projects with my colleagues, most of whom were young and tech-savvy graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design. While working on these tech-design projects, we often felt as if we were helping to invent the future, but I worried that we were doing so for the wrong purposes. In an attempt to distance myself from marketing while continuing to develop professional expertise in technology design, I began to think about going to graduate school.
When I enrolled at The School of Information at UC Berkeley, I hoped that graduate school would allow me to learn how to do research, and particularly ethnographic research, for technology design projects that helped people. My experience in the world of tech design had introduced me to the term ethnography, and I thought graduate school was a place where I could begin to learn that craft. Within the worlds of professional technology designers, ethnography was often idealized as a way to help correct for the shortcomings of many social engineering and design interventions. From this human-centered design perspective, designer-ethnographers were positioned on the side of users in a collective struggle against the seemingly alienating forces of poorly designed technologies and institutions. Designer-ethnographers, from this perspective, were in the business of helping technology designers, engineers, aid workers, educators, government bureaucrats, health care practitioners, managers, and other knowledge workers develop a better understanding of their users, customers, citizens, students, patients, and so forth. Ethnographically informed design, from this perspective, would help organizations and technologists design products, services, and experiences that were more attuned to their users everyday needs and circumstances. It was this idealization of design-ethnography that largely reenchanted my otherwise pragmatic decision to go to graduate school.
Not long after entering graduate school, I got involved in the first of the two research projects mentioned earlier. I was a master’s student at the time and I joined the project still thinking I might return to the world of tech design when I graduated. Initially I did not think much about the philanthropic foundation that sponsored our work nor about what they might be trying to do. As with my earlier forays into technology design, being involved in this project seemed like an opportunity to develop a career that was cutting edge and socially beneficial. The philanthropic foundation that supported the project had a long history of trying to promote social justice agendas, and their new interest in ethnography and technology resonated with the sort of expertise that I was hoping to develop. Equally important, working on the project was a way to get through graduate school without taking on a lot of debt. As with before, my idealism about the philanthropic character of my work was intimately entwined with practical concerns.
As I transitioned into the PhD program, I learned more about the larger philanthropic initiative that was funding our work. For example, I learned that the foundation had grown disillusioned with its previous years of educational grant making and had abruptly redirected its entire educational grant making toward investigating the seemingly unprecedented opportunities for learning that the rise of digital media was making possible. The research project on which I was working was in the vanguard of this new philanthropic direction, and over approximately the next ten years the foundation would spend more than $200 million on various research projects and design interventions focused on digital media and learning. I was employed on various research projects sponsored by this initiative for about eight of those years, and throughout this time I often shared, and helped construct, idealizations like the ones that this book problematizes.
As I increasingly came to see myself as an academic, I assumed that my contribution to this broader initiative was to help to produce academic knowledge that designers and practitioners would then apply in real-world situations and interventions. Such a view was reinforced by the way the foundation organized its grant making, which was split into two main streams, one for research and the other for design. I was funded on the research side, and in several cases designers did try to translate our research into seemingly cutting-edge interventions. But what I did not yet fully understand was that in many ways the relationship between research and design was reversed. Particular commitments about how to make social change had already enframed the sorts of problems and questions that those of us on the research side would pose and seek to answer. In particular, it was always already assumed that some sort of designed educational intervention involving new media technologies would be the way to make beneficial social change. What we could not as easily consider was that perhaps cutting-edge educational interventions, in whatever configuration, were not capable of, and perhaps even detrimental to, realizing the philanthropic goals that the foundation had set for itself.
I came to realize the degree to which my research and I were caught up with these commitments rather slowly. When I first began designing the research project that has grown into this book, I imagined that I would conduct an academic study that contributed to debates about the roles of technological change in processes of social reproduction and change. I had been inspired by classic ethnographic studies of young people’s cultural contributions to these processes, and especially Paul Willis’ (1977) Learning to Labor and Penelope Eckert’s (1989) Jocks and Burnouts, both of which stressed how the cultural practices of student peer cultures mediated processes of cultural and social reproduction. Impressed by these works, I wanted to see if and how these dynamics might be different in new times and at a school that had been imagined as a replacement for conventional schooling.
With these works in mind, I began fieldwork, diligently trying to build relationships with the students who attended the innovative new school (see appendix). I wanted to understand these young people’s cultural worlds on their own terms, figuring that doing so would let me say something about how their cultural practices mediated broader social and historical processes. During this period of my research, my observations of and interactions with the other people and things that also passed through the new school—technology designers, school reformers, teachers, parents, journalists, media artifacts, and so on—felt like interludes from my real focus. I was, if you will, fixated on getting to know the students and their school-based cultural worlds.
But I also kept track of these other actors in my field notes, and as I did I eventually started to ask myself what was bringing them, as well as myself, into and through the experimental reform project. I began to write about this shift when, several months after the school opened, a television crew visited the school. As the crew constructed a shot of students using the school’s most awe-inspiring new technology, another visitor to the school, a scholar and designer from South Korea, remarked to me, “This is surreal. The kids aren’t just studying the media, they’re in the media.” When I wrote my field notes that evening I also wrote a memo about the incident. At first I was curious how the students might have felt being “in the media” and, particularly, whether it contributed to a sense that they and the school were unique and special. But then I started writing about what was left out of the TV crew’s frame but included within my own. I compared the representations that the TV crew produced to the ones that I was producing in my field notes, the latter of which also included the TV crew. At first I felt rather self-satisfied in having a more expansive perspective than the journalists, but then I had the eerie feeling that someone could just as easily make a representation of the scene that included me representing the television crew representing the students with the technology. It was then that I started to consider that I too might be “in the media,” that is, caught in the phenomenon that I thought I was studying.
On one level, this realization was a moment of coming to terms with what I had previously only read about, namely, the politics of ethnographic representations, which have rightly received much critical attention among anthropologists since the 1980s (Clifford and Marcus, eds. 1986). My satisfaction in having a wider frame than the television crew was caught up with the modernist dream of producing unsituated scientific knowledge, a dream that Michel de Certeau (1984, 92) famously characterized as the “lust to be viewpoint and nothing more.” But it was also the beginning of my wrestling with what we might call a politics of entanglement. I began to realize that I was not just producing representations of these worlds in the name of ethnography or social science; I was also actively participating in the production and maintenance of the worlds that I was studying, not just by way of my participant-observation research method, but also by way of my being a researcher who had a legitimate place studying a site such as this.
Over time it became increasingly clear to me that my work and I were entangled not only with the philanthropic foundation’s commitments about how to make social change, but also with the processes that construct and sustain techno-philanthropism more generally. Over several years I came to see that it was these broader processes, as well as my entanglements with them, that I was trying to understand and navigate. With time I came to see that all the actors that I had initially placed on the margins of my research frame—the school’s designers, parents, NGOs, philanthropists and philanthropic foundations, academic researchers including myself, journalists and pundits, politicians and government officials, companies developing and selling supposedly beneficent media and technologies, audiences that consumed accounts celebrating innovative philanthropic interventions, and so forth—were taking part in producing, sustaining, and reconfiguring what I describe in this book as disruptive fixation.
As I tried to better understand and navigate these social and political entanglements, I also began to see that some of my peers in graduate school were facing surprisingly similar dilemmas despite studying what appeared to be quite disparate phenomena. In particular, I kept finding myself with much to talk about with peers who were participating in undertakings that seemed equally cutting edge and philanthropic, ones that brought together scholars, ethnographers, technology designers, NGOs, government agencies, large and small companies, on-the-ground practitioners, and so forth: the world of Information and Communication Technologies for Development, or ICTD. The processes and rhetorics that we were documenting and trying to analyze, while importantly different, bore strong family resemblances, and in some cases they even involved the same people, organizations, artifacts, and rhetorics.
I now see that this familial resemblance, as well as our ability to recognize it, was partly a product of the somewhat ambiguous location that Information Schools inhabited within the academy at the time. On the one hand, the distinctive specializations of Information Schools were not yet well defined. Information, we came to realize, was a term that could refer to just about anything, and, as such, the term—as well as those of us who claimed to specialize in it—routinely traveled across numerous disciplinary divisions. While such amblings were naïve and fret with hazards, they did allow some of us to begin to trace connections across realms of specialization that were typically kept apart. On the other hand, our ambiguous, and frankly fantastic, claim to be experts in information or the digital also attracted the interest of powerful groups and funding sources, such as the National Science Foundation, transnational technology corporations, large philanthropic foundations, and so forth. This combination of an ambiguously defined expertise that was nevertheless supported by established networks of power allowed some of us slowly, and with guidance, to develop critical perspectives on these arrangements from the inside.
And yet, and to return to the theme of this preface, our possibilities for developing and voicing these perspectives have also been structured by the different conditions in and through which each of us is trying to make a living since finishing our PhDs, conditions which tend to foster and sustain their own flavors of fixation. Some of us have found jobs in academic departments that are somewhat protected from the pressure to secure large grants, others are working in industry, state institutions, NGOs, or academic departments that are under intense pressures to secure funding from state, corporate, and philanthropic institutions. In any case, the institutional conditions through which each of us is attempting to make a meaningful career are shaping what we can and will say to whom, as well as how we idealize and sanctify our work.
I raise these points in the preface because while the book that follows focuses primarily on technology designers, reformers, and other “applied” professions, the concept of fixation, as this book develops it, is as much a problem for those of us who make our living as academics as it is for anyone else.1 The presumed distinction between academic and applied domains of expertise is one such fixation, and like the idealizations that this book examines, it persists and exerts the forces that it does in part because so many of us who enjoy the practical privilege of calling our work academic repeatedly repair and sustain it.
San Diego, California
April, 2016