Seventeenth International Conference on Technology, Knowledge, and Society

Abstract

Hamlet, a former student of Whittenburg, returns home to fulfil his destiny to become Prince of Denmark. So begins Shakespeare’s play of a reluctant revenging prince consumed by expectations of a ghostly monitor and constantly observed by Polonius and Claudius’s surveillance apparatus tumbles headlong into a tragic, almost predetermined fate. Foucault’s (1977) ontology of hierarchical observation, normalisation, and examination is analogous to the institutionalised discipline experienced by Hamlet at court. This Foucauldian reading of Hamlet positions Elsinore as a typical Renaissance court, one where princes must assume Machiavellian identities and ruthlessly exact their revenge. Hamlet, it can be argued, has limited agency in the kind of prince he ultimately becomes. The troubling nature of the surveillance brought to bear on Hamlet and the lengths he goes to in order to resist these forces unearths the perverse impacts that surveillance has on behaviour and identity. Thus, Hamlet provides crucial insights into how the spaces we inhabit influence who we might necessarily become. In this study we posit Elsinore as an analog for increasingly deterministic and surveillant online learning environments, one where ghostly algorithms guide with seemingly benevolent hands while learning, thinking and becoming are constantly observed. Like Elsinore, the surveillant learning environment operates as a social laboratory; one where identities are shaped via incomplete understandings of selves and outcomes unpredictably disturbed. Today’s learners, like Hamlet, know what they need to become; through the knowledge and power imbued in the environments in which they dwell.