The Machine Stops

In the 1909 novella, The Machine Stops, EM Forster imagines a dystopian future of humans living underground, where their lives are governed by a giant machine. It is a world thought to be based on reason and science, but the human inhabitants are subordinate to the functioning of the machine. They have complete faith in its omnipotence until one day, it stops working and civilisation begins to collapse. Only then do they realise that it is their connection to nature and to each other that is what really matters.

Forster's novella foreshadowed the Internet and social media almost a century before it came into being. The moral of the story is that technology cannot deliver what it is we desire, and by surrendering ourselves to the machine, we become alienated from the world around us. The story serves as a warning for learning technology today, which, in the absence of evidence, relies on techno-optimist discourses that are often intellectually indefensible. There is a danger that learning becomes subordinate to the technology, where long rejected methodologies, such as behaviourism, are reintroduced through learning platforms, such as ClassDojo or Duolingo.

By privileging the power of technology, we elide the human and there is a need to think about how learners can become self-determining in light of how autonomy is increasingly entangled and interdependent with technology. I argue that social theory can play a part in offering a better understanding of technology and learning. The aim of this blog is for me to post some thoughts on the relationships between technology and learning and what it is to be a learner in a highly technicalised world.

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