Nothing behind the mask: an Arenditian approach to virtual worlds and the politics of online education
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Proceeding from an analysis of contemporary practices of online education courses taught in virtual environments, I seek to recuperate a notion of social identity in Hannah Arendt's vision of a political stage; social identity as a mask that actors wear when acting politically. I avoid the language of mediation, instead seeing the 'Mask' as ever present. I offer this mode of inscription as being central to our understanding of medium specificity, and apply it in particular to my analysis of the use of Second Life (SL) in online learning environments. I take the use of SL in university courses as an example to think through what happens when education- which I understand as being essential to citizenship, a practice that depends on appearing in public- shifts to a space of virtual publicity. I examine the history of the modern university and the role that technologies have played in the growing corporate reorganization of the university. I defend the university as, ideally, an autonomous site from which, in Nietzsche's words, the "untimely" can emerge. I look to the political thought of Hannah Arendt as a theoretical ground for understanding avatars and virtual community, following Norma Claire Moruzzi in reading the mask of social identity as a site of political engagement. I explore the appositeness of Hannah Arendt's articulation of public, political personae or masks in On Revolution, as well as her critique of Plato's metaphysical bifurcation of Being and appearance, and her understanding of (Jewish) identity as non-territorial- and therefore virtual- to contemporary debates concerning cybersociality and online community. I read her against common reception to argue that the conception of political actors animating her texts is best illuminated when read heuristically through contemporary discourses of technology. In so doing I develop an Arendtian view of politics and social identity that is amenable to and invests itself in modes of resistance enabled by cybersociality. From the perspective of critical pedagogy, I aim to think through ways of utilizing technologies as potentially repoliticizing, and I identify the properties online learning must demonstrate in order to create new sites of resistance.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it