Tools for conviviality? Illich and social media

He was known as an anarchist philosopher and an intellectual maverick. A former Roman Catholic priest, he was arguably one of the most outspoken and prescient of all the 20th century's critical theorists, and his work is increasingly influential and relevant in an age where technology has pervaded every aspect of our lives. Ivan Illich hoped for a time when the transmission model of education, or 'funnels', would be replaced by 'educational webs' - his notion of what we now recognise as social networks. I wrote a post about the contrast between educational funnels and webs in 2011. At the start of the 1970s Illich wrote:

The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring. (from Deschooling Society, 1971)

In the context of the technology of his day, he saw networked computers and telephone systems being used to encourage and promote exchanges of ideas, knowledge and expertise. Illich was not a big fan of traditional education, at least not in the form he observed. He advocated a form of participatory education that democratised knowledge and privileged learning over teaching. He saw technology as one means of transformation for education.

What would Illich have made of the social web? It is unclear, because he died in 2002, just as Web 2.0 was emerging. Yet reading his work, one gets the impression that he would have welcomed it heartily and would have been one of its strongest advocates for education.

Ivan Illich envisioned a community (or network) of learners that was self-sufficient. Here is his vision for how it might be achieved:

"The operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer. A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same description. It is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity." 

Well now it has, and we are seeing this vision realised by millions every day. In so many ways, the social web mirrors Illich's ideas for 'information exchanges', and 'peer matching' services, especially where facilitated through mobile, internet enabled personal devices. Never before has so much knowledge been generated and shared globally on such a scale as we see today on the Web. Video, audio, text and status updates are being uploaded to the web every second of every day, by hundreds of thousands of users.

Illich saw people as naturally itinerant in their learning, roaming where they wished, encountering knowledge serendipitously and interacting with each other in an informal manner to learn reciprocally. This was a long way away from the oppressive state controlled education systems he railed so strongly against.  Deschooling society, in Illich's own terms, was not about doing away with education, but of discarding the moribund rituals and restrictive practices that epitomised formalised schooling. These ideals were captured in quite pragmatic architectural and city planning terms by Alexander et al (1977) when they conceived of a society where community leaders could...

"...work in piecemeal ways to decentralize the process of learning and enrich it through contact with many places and people all over the city: workshops, teachers at home or walking through the city, professionals willing to take on the young as helpers, older children teaching younger children, museums, youth groups travelling, scholarly seminars, industrial workshops, old people, and so on. Conceive of all these situations as forming the backbone of the learning process; survey all these situations, describe them, and publish them as the city's "curriculum"; then let students, children, their families and neighborhoods weave together for themselves the situations that comprise their "school" paying as they go with standard vouchers, raised by community tax. Build new educational facilities in a way which extends and enriches this network."

Such a society would of course be a radical departure from the centralised services with which we are familiar in today's inner cities. However, informal learning does exist in the form of collectives, adult education classes, informal exchanges, and even the emerging fixer and maker cultures. Illich saw informal learning, especially that which was situated and authentic, as being more meaningful that education that was being imposed upon learners from above:

"Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting."

In his later work entitled Tools for Conviviality (1973) Illich began to expose some of the societal trends and excavated the role technology played in shaping work. He saw the people as being inherently creative, but like so many other neo-marxist philosophers (see for example the work of Harry Braverman on deskilling the workforce, 1974), he was also aware of the dangers of automation and blind obedience to technology. The role of the artisan has greater significance than that of the unthinking operator:

"People need new tools to work with, rather than tools that work for them." (p. 10)

Social media, especially those that enable users to create and share content, fall into the category of tools that are worked by us. They tap into the essence of our individual creativity, providing us with blank canvases upon which we can express our ideas and share our thoughts. It is likely that Illich would have welcomed the notion of user generated content, and would have applauded the role of social media in challenging and undermining the megalithic capitalist industries of our time. He would no doubt also have warned us about the danger of enslaving ourselves to social networking tools, and would have expressed cynicism over the blatent advertising cultures that surround them. In the final analysis, however, many of Illich's visions are materialising in the digital age, and I believe he would have been gratified to see them come to fruition.

Endnote: This short essay is of course mostly speculative, but an appreciation of the finer nuances of Illich's writings indicate to us that he would certainly not have rejected the role social media can play in advancing and enriching education. To what extent social media and other technologies might be able to play a role in the transformation of the centralised, state funded education system remains to be seen.

References
Alexander, C., Ishikawa, S. and Silverstein, M. (1977) A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Braverman, H. (1974) Labor and Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review.
Illich, I. (1971) Deschooling Society. Penguin: Harmondsworth.
Illich, I. (1973) Tools for Conviviality. New York: Harper and Row.

Photo by Ian Britton on Freefoto


Tools for conviviality? Illich and social media by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.