Socrates in the Digital Age: Marketization Versus Democratization of Learning

The digital age is Janus-faced. On the one side, it appears as the most advanced phase of literacy in which knowledge can be copied and stored, and traced with unparalleled durability and reliability and, therefore, also copyrighted, owned, prized, and entered into the market with more efficiency than ever.  Yet, from the opposite aspect, the digital age looks like the second coming of the culture of orality: knowledge is folklore attributed to anonymous collective authorship. The paradigm of orality, however, - the immediacy, fluidity, anonymity, variability, communality of knowledge – is an illusion in which perfectly still data analytically broken down in a binary code are animated by high-tech tricks of display. The oral-folkloric qualities of digital culture are virtual, not factual. Yet the fact that they are only real by virtue of our imagination or deception does not lessen their power to facilitate the democratization of learning through what initially seems like the unlimited, unbridled, free and liberating dissemination of knowledge.  Indeed, at first it seems that digital-electronic dissemination is the best vehicle to extend universally the Socratic dream of life-long education liberated from political and economic pressures. After all, the Socratic dialogue stood against the Sophists’ professionalization, marketization, and institutionalization of higher learning. No surprise, then, that at the altar of the democratic distribution of ideas, so many who are dedicated to higher learning are ready to forfeit the professional ethics of authorship for the folkloric rules of cultural dissemination (e.g. the editorial rules of Wikipedia) so that their ideas could avoid commodification and instead be absorbed directly in public opinion. Thus, ultimately it is the formal expert learning of the university that provides – largely speaking – all the serious educational content of the worldwide Web, but pretending it is folklore. On second thought, however, should the authors (the university) decide to reclaim the right of ownership for their ideas mascaraeding as communal knowledge, they could do it any time supported by the law that any written expression, any copy of an idea is automatically copyrighted without the explicit request of the author, as well as the factual qualities of the digital culture that ensure that manuscripts do not burn and their provenance can be traced.  What path should the university take on the crossroads of digital marketization and digital democratization of learning when only marketization can guarantee the scholarly integrity of authorship, but only democratization can guarantee the fulfillment of the educational vocation of free dissemination of knowledge?
 

Erika Kiss is an associate research scholar in the University Center for Human Values and the director of its Film Forum, Princeton University. She has studied history and literature in Hungary (B.A., M.A.) and comparative literature at Harvard University (M.A., Ph.D.). She was a member of the Department of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. She is a co-founder of Germany's first English-language liberal arts college, the European College of Liberal Arts (ECLA) in Berlin, and served for a year as its CEO. As ECLA's first dean of academic affairs, she developed a year-long interdisciplinary curriculum in intellectual history and the liberal arts and supervised its implementation. Her research and teaching interests include the connection between the civic and the aesthetic arts of rhetoric, poetics, dramaturgy (literary and cinematic), and the philosophy of education. Currently, she is completing a book that explores the crisis of higher education in the West.