Page 15 - Education in a Digital World

2 Developing a Global Perspective

describe digital technologies over the past thirty years, many of which imply an
overcoming of global distance and space (e.g. the ‘information superhighway’, the
‘worldwide web’ and even the international network). Other descriptions suggest
a transcendence of the material world altogether (e.g. ‘virtual reality’ and ‘cyber-
space’). Recent discussions of the computing ‘cloud’ extend this logic further –
evoking otherworldly visions of a ubiquitous source of computer power that exists
around us regardless of our geographical location.
Of course, the on-going development of digital technology is associated with a
number of more specific societal, economic and cultural changes. For example, the
supposed ability of digital technologies to ‘flatten out’ hierarchies and introduce a
‘hyper-connected’ logic to the organisation of social relations has been welcomed by
some commentators as supporting the (re)configuration of society along more dispersed
and individualised lines (e.g. Friedman 2007). Even if we discount the more
fanciful and idealistic aspects of some of these accounts, a large number of popular
and academic commentators agree that the ever expanding ‘connectivity’ of digital
technology is recasting social arrangements and relations in a more open, democratic
and ultimately empowering manner. As Charles Leadbeater (2008, p.3) concluded:

the web’s extreme openness, its capacity to allow anyone to connect to
virtually anyone else, generates untold possibilities for collaboration … the
more connected we are, the richer we should be, because we should
be able to connect with other people far and wide, to combine their ideas,
talents and resources in ways that should expand everyone’s property.

Claims such as these lie at the heart of how many people perceive the ‘digital
world’ alluded to in the title of this book. This is the prevailing sense that we are
now living in a technologically re-ordered world – a world that is structured and
arranged along significantly different lines than was the case even a few years before.
There are clear articulations here with concepts such as the ‘information age’, the
‘information society’ and the ‘post-industrial’ era – ideas that all point towards
the growing importance of the production and consumption of information and
knowledge as key sources of power and competitiveness in the ‘global economy’.
Indeed, all of these concepts convey the common view that recent economic,
social and cultural changes have been driven by – or at least shaped around – the
on-going development of new computerised and telecommunications technologies
(see Webster 2006). As Daniel Bell (1980) outlined in his description of post-
industrial society, digital technologies are now “decisive for the way economic and
social exchanges are conducted, the way knowledge is created and retrieved,
and the character of work and organisations in which men [sic] are engaged”. The
focus of the present book, then, on Education in a Digital World corresponds clearly
with these wider accounts of societal (re)organisation over the past fifty years – in
particular the idea of there now being an intensified universal connectivity of
information, as well as an apparently increased significance of knowledge.