14 Pedagogy and the Logic of Platforms
Chris Gilliard
In 1974, computers were oppressive devices in far-off air-conditioned places. Now you can be oppressed by computers in your own living room.
—Theodor Holm “Ted” Nelson, Computer Lib: Dream Machines (1987)
In his initial New Horizons column in EDUCAUSE Review, Mike Caulfield asked: “Can Higher Education Save the Web?”1 I was intrigued by this question since I often say to my students that the web is broken and that the ideal thing to do (although quite unrealistic) would be to tear it down and start from scratch.
I call the web “broken” because its primary architecture is based on what Harvard Business School Professor Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism,” a “form of information capitalism [that] aims to predict and modify human behavior as a means to produce revenue and market control.”2 Web2.0—the web of platforms, personalization, clickbait, and filter bubbles—is the only web most students know. That web exists by extracting individuals’ data through persistent surveillance, data mining, tracking, and browser fingerprinting3 and then seeking new and “innovative” ways to monetize that data. As platforms and advertisers seek to perfect these strategies, colleges and universities rush to mimic those strategies in order to improve retention.4
That said, I admit it might be useful to search for a more suitable term than “broken.” The web is not broken in this regard: a web based on surveillance, personalization, and monetization works perfectly well for particular constituencies, but it doesn’t work quite as well for persons of color, lower-income students, and people who have been walled off from information or opportunities because of the ways they are categorized according to opaque algorithms.
My students and I frame the realities of the current web in the context of digital redlining, which provides the basis for understanding how and why the web works the way it does and for whom. The concept of digital redlining springs from an understanding of the historical policy of redlining: “The practice of denying or limiting financial services to certain neighborhoods based on racial or ethnic composition without regard to the residents’ qualifications or creditworthiness. The term ‘redlining’ refers to the practice of using a red line on a map to delineate the area where financial institutions would not invest.”5
In the United States, redlining began informally but was institutionalized in the National Housing Act of 1934. At the behest of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) created maps for America’s largest cities and color-coded the areas where loans would be differentially available. The difference among these areas was race.
Digital redlining is the modern equivalent of this historical form of societal division; it is the creation and maintenance of technological policies, practices, pedagogy, and investment decisions that enforce class boundar