IT in Education: Sociological Perspective

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IT in Education Sociological Perspective

• The Development of IT Its Social Consequences
• The Constitution of Virtual Community
• and Social Identity

Wing-kwong Tsang Ho Tim Bldg. Room 416 Ext.
6922 wktsang_at_cuhk.edu.hk www.fed.cuhk.edu.hk/wk
tsang
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The Development of IT and Its Impacts on Family

• The brief history of the fundamental unit of
  social integration Family
• Family in agrarian society
• Family as reproduction unit of society
• Family as production unit of economy
• All members held designated role in the
  production process and were interdependent on
  each others
• Family in early industrialized society
• Structural differentiations between reproduction
  and production functions of family
• Man and matured children usually boys worked away
  from home
• Man assumed the breadwinning role and woman
  submitted to the dependent role in the family
  structure

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Impacts on Family

• The brief history Family
• Family in Post-WWII welfare-state
• Welfare-state intervened into family functions
  through social policy measures, such as
  birth-control policy, child labor laws, education
  policy, housing policy, social welfare policy
  etc.
• Family was deprived of most of its functions,
  i.e. reproductive, productive, and socializing
  functions, and left with only emotional and
  spiritual supportive function.
• Nevertheless, family assume a new function in
  mass consumption society, i.e. as consumption and
  even investment unit
• Woman liberation movement spawned structural
  changes in the role/power structure of family.
  Woman would no long assume to dependent or even
  submissive roles in the patriarchal structure of
  family

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Impacts on Family

• The brief history of Family
• Flexible family and flexible work
• The very concept of a job is changing. In the
  years after World War II, industrial societies
  constructed the ideal of a full-time, secure job
  working thirty years for one company with
  ever-rising real wages. Pay in this job would be
  high enough that within American family
  households, only the man had to work. His wife
  could stay at home, raising the children and
  managing the household. The ideal of secure work
  and increasing consumption was matched by
  government policies that constructed social
  security (old-age pension, unemployment
  insurance, and health insurance) largely around
  the ideal of a men and very little paid work for
  women is going by the boards, and the new
  information technology is only one cause of
  change. The simplest description of the nature of
  this transformation is increased flexibility.
  (Carnoy, 2000, p.64-65)

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Impacts on Family

• Flexible family and flexible work
• Flexibility in work implies
• Flexible in work schedule as well as work
  duration
• Flexible in work locations as well as positions
• Flexible in work conditions, flexibility has
  replaced fixed-term contract and long-term
  commitment between employers and employees
• With increased competition in the globalized
  economy and the rapidly rising capacity to use
  world time to enhance productivity, the very
  best workers are now those who never sleep, never
  consume, never have children, and never spend
  time socializing outside of work. (Carnoy, 2000,
  p. 143) )

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Impacts on Family

• Flexible family and flexible work
• In knowledge economy and lifelong learning
  society, family is demanded to assume a new
  function. It is expect to be the basic unit
  supporting the everlasting learning projects
  demand for both working parents and their
  children
• Fundamental contradiction in functions of
  flexible family
• What result is a serious social
  contradiction the new workplace requires even
  more investment in knowledge than in the past,
  and family are crucial to such knowledge
  formation, especially for children but also for
  adults. The new workplace, however, contributes
  to greater instability in the child-centered
  nuclear family, degrading the very institution
  crucial to further economic development. (ibid,
  p.110)

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Impacts on Family

• Changes in family structure in flexible economy
• Less people would enter into marriages. Even if
  they did, they were much more likely to be
  divorced than in the 1960s.
• Marriages were delayed and child rearing were
  also delayed or even more likely forgone.
• A smaller percentage of the population lived in a
  nuclear family household headed by a married
  couple with children.
• More percentage of the population lived in
  nuclear family with no child or even stayed
  single

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The Development of IT and Its Impacts on
Community

• The advent of the virtual community
• Transformation of pattern of communication
• Instantaneous social practices are separated
  from physical contiguity, the traditional
  face-to-face and time-consuming communications,
  which are the cornerstone of primary association,
  have given way to fast, cheap and forgetting
  communications (Benedikt, 1995, quoted from
  Bauman, 1998, p.16).

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Impacts on Community

• The advent of the virtual community
• Dissolve of community of yoke
• The so-called 'closely knit communities' of
  yore were brought into being and kept alive by
  the gap between the nearly instantaneous
  communication inside the small-scale community
  (the size of which was determined by the innate
  qualities of 'wetware', and thus confined to the
  natural limits of human sight, hearing and
  memorizing capacity) and the enormity of time and
  expense needed to pass information between
  locality. On the other hand, the present-day and
  short life-span of communities appears primarily
  to be the result of the gap shrinking or
  altogether disappearing inner-community
  communication has no advantage over
  inter-communal exchange, if both are
  instantaneous. (Bauman, 1998, p.5)

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Impacts on Community

• The advent of the virtual community
• Cultural-spatial based communities are replaced
  by virtual community
• Erosion of spatial based communities scattered
  around factories and industrial compound in
  advanced industrial societies as globalized and
  flexible economy emerged. Class-based and
  ethnic/religious-based communities also
  evaporated with the factory-location based
  communities
• The emergence of the cyberspace The space of
  place and that based on physical contiguity is
  replace by the space of flow and that based on
  informational flow.
• In their replacement advents the virtual
  community.

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Impacts on Community

• The advent of the virtual community
• Howard Rheingold in The virtual community
  Homesteading on the electrical frontier (1989)
  specifies that
• Virtual communities are social aggregations
  that emerge from the Net when enough people carry
  on those public discussions long enough, with
  sufficient human feeling, to form webs of
  personal relationship in cyberspace. (p.3)

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Impacts on Community

• New notions of community in knowledge society
  (Carnoy, 2000)
• In flexible economy new communities will have to
  incorporate workers who are more educated, more
  choice-oriented, more flexible, more
  time-conscious, and more eager to influence their
  environment. The new bond that holds these
  individuals together in the global information
  age is the search for knowledge. (Carnoy, 2000,
  p. 171)

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Impacts on Community

• New notions of community in knowledge society
  (Carnoy, 2000)
• Accordingly, Martin Carnoy categorizes these
  knowledge-searching communities into
• The self-knowledge community Ethnicity, gender
  and cultural identity. For examples, black Muslim
  communities in the US constituted in the 1960s,
  feminist communities emerged in the 1980s,
  fundamentalist Muslim in global context since the
  late 1990s.
• The knowledge-use community Professional
  identification and work networks
• Informal work-information network
• Temporary agencies as knowledge-use networks
• Computer networks as knowledge-use communities

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Impacts on Community

• New notions of community in knowledge society
  (Carnoy, 2000)
• Categorization of knowledge-searching communities
• The knowledge-production community Schools as
  community centers
• Knowledge-production centers themselves can
  be the organizing space for new communities.
  Individuals and families may no longer be linked
  socially to a particular neighborhood, but those
  with children are increasingly linked to
  child-care centers, preschools, and elementary
  schools. Children and parents build friendships
  and social and civic activities around their
  childrens care and learning, wherever it takes
  place. Thus, their community space is defined
  by their childrens day care and schooling rather
  by where they live. (Carnoy, 2000, p. 183)

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Individualization and Social Identity in Virtual
Community

• Social identity and theory of categorization
• Henri Tajfel and his followers most notably John
  C. Turner analyze the formation of group identity
  as a social process of categorization.
• They define categorization as the cognitive
  process that allow human to streamline perception
  by separately grouping like and unlike stimuli.
  Tajfel demonstrated that people categorize social
  as well as nonsocial stimuli and that people use
  social categories to identify themselves and
  others. (Thoits and Virshup, 1997 p. 114)
  Tajfel illustrate the concept with research
  focusing on race, ethnicity, class, and
  nationality and empirical examples of back and
  white, Jews, Pakistanis, and French- and English
  speaking Canadian.

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Individualization and Social Identity in Virtual
Community

• Social identity and theory of categorization
• Accordingly, Tajfel defines social identity as
  that part of an individuals self which derives
  from his knowledge of his members of a group (or
  groups) together with the value and emotional
  significance attached to that membership.
  (Tajfel, 1981, quoted in Thoits and Virshup,
  1997 p. 116)

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Individualization and Social Identity in Virtual
Community

• Social identity and theory of categorization
• Turner also defines social identity as
  self-categories that define the individual in
  terms of his or her shared similarities with
  members of certain social categories in contrast
  to other social categories. (Turner et al, 1987,
  quoted in Thoits and Virshup, 1997 p. 117)
• For Turner, social identities are in-group versus
  out-group categorizations. It spawns out of the
  distinction between the we-group and the
  they-group. Hence, social identity can be
  construed as a sense of belonging emerged out of
  the processes of we-group and they-group
  categorization.

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Individualization and Social Identity in Virtual
Community

• The conception of Individualization of modern
  society
• Individualization consists of transforming
  human identity from a given into a task and
  changing the actors with the responsibility for
  performing that task and for the consequences
  (also the side-effects) of their performance.
  .Human beings are no more born into their
  identities. Needing to become what one is the
  feature of modern living - and of this living
  alone. Modernity replaces the heteronomic
  determination of social standing with compulsive
  and obligatory self-determination. (Bauman,
  2000, p. 32)

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Individualization and Social Identity

• The conception of Individualization of modern
  society
• individualization means, first, the
  disembedding and, second, the re-embedding of
  industrial society ways of life by new ones, in
  which the individuals must produce, stage and
  cobble together their biographies themselves.
  Thus the name individualization, disembedding
  and re-embedding do not occur by chance, nor
  individually, nor voluntarily, nor through
  diverse types of historical conditions, but
  rather all at once and under the general
  conditions of the welfare in developed industrial
  labour society, as they have developed since the
  1960s in many Western industrial countries.
  (Beck, 1994, p.13)

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Individualization and Social Identity

• The conception of Individualization of modern
  society
• Institutionalized beds - identity bases - for
  the re-embedment of modern individuals
• Beds in capital market, e.g. occupations,
  professions, social-class positions, etc.
• Beds in institution of marriage and family,
  husband, wife, father, mother, etc.
• Beds in modern political arenas, e.g. citizens,
  members of new social movements, such as
  environmentalists, feminist, anti-gloabizationists
  , etc.

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Individualization and Social Identity

• Individualization in Information Age
• What distinguished the individualization of
  yore from the form it has taken in risk society
  . No beds are furnished for re-embedding,
  and such beds as might be postulated and pursued
  prove fragile and often vanish before the work of
  re-embedding is complete. There are rather
  musical chairs of various size and style as
  well as of changing numbers and positions, which
  prompt men and women to be constantly on the move
  and promise no fulfilment, no rest and no
  satisfaction of arriving, of researching the
  final destination, where one can disarm, relax
  and stop worrying. (Bauman, 2000, p. 33-34)

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Individualization and Social Identity

• Individualization in Information Age
• Flexiblization of modern identity
• National-local identity replaced by global-mobile
  identity
• Affect-familial identity replaced by
  flexible-familial identity
• Permanent vocationalism and unionism replaced by
  flexible, self-programmed workers

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Individualization and Social Identity

• Individualization in Information Age
• Baumans cultural identity of postmodernity
• The pilgrim as modern self Pilgrimage of
  entrepreneurs, tenured workers, citizens, civil
  soldiers, husband and wife, etc.

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• Living ones life as pilgrimage is no longer
  the kind of ethical wisdom revealed to, or
  initiated by, the chosen and the righteous.
  Pilgrimage is what one does of necessity, to
  avoid being lost in a desert to invest the
  walking with a purpose while wandering the with
  no destination. Being a pilgrim, one can do more
  than walk - one can walk to. One can look back at
  the footprints left in the sand and see them as a
  road. One can reflect on the road past and see it
  as a progress towards, an advance, a coming
  closer to, one can make a destination between
  behind and ahead, and plot the road ahead
  as a succession of footprints yet to pockmark the
  land without features. Destination, the set
  purpose of lifes pilgrimage, gives form to the
  formless, makes a whole out of the fragmentary,
  lends continuity to the episodic/ (Bauman, 1996,
  p. 22)

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Individualization and Social Identity

• Individualization in Information Age
• Baumans cultural identity of postmodernity
• The pilgrim as modern self Pilgrimage of
  entrepreneurs, tenured workers, citizens, civil
  soldiers, husband and wife, etc.
• Life strategy of postmodern self
• Stroller
• Vagabond
• Tourist
• Player

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• Strollers signifies the life strategy and
  state of mind of strolling in shopping malls,
  finding oneself among strangers and being a
  stranger to them, taking in those strangers as
  surfaces. .Strolling means rehearsing human
  reality as a series of episodes, that is as
  events without past and without consequences. It
  also means rehearsing meeting as mis-meeting, as
  encounters without impacts. The stroller had all
  the pleasures of modern life without torments
  attached. (Bauman, 1996, p. 26-27)

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• Vagabond represents the life strategy and
  attitude of wondering aimlessly and without
  destination. It also signifies life strategy of
  unwilling to settle down, to be the native and
  rooted in the soil. It posts the stance of
  strangers and being out of place to every place
  and everyone.

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• Tourist represents another life strategy of
  movers, who move on purpose. The purposes that
  tourists have in mind are fun, joy, excitement
  and most of all careless. One may say that what
  tourist buys, what he pays for, what he demands
  to be delivered is precisely the right not to
  be bothered, freedom from any but aesthetic
  spacing. (Bauman, 1996, p. 31)

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• The players world is the world of risks, of
  intuition, of precaution-taking. Time in the
  world-as-play divides into a succession of
  games. (p. 31) In other words, players world is
  made up of fragments and episodes of calculated
  risk. Yet more importantly, player must make
  sure that no game leaves lasting consequences,
  the player must remember (and so must his/her
  partners and adversaries), that this is but a
  game. The game allows no room for pity,
  compassion, commiseration or cooperation. (p.32)

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Individualization and Social Identity

• The rise of networked individualism and
  cyber-balkanization
• Networked individualism is a social pattern,
  not a collection of isolated individuals. Rather,
  individuals build their networks, on-line and
  off-line, on the basis of their interests,
  values, affinities, and projects. (Castells,
  2001, p. 131)

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The Development of IT Its Social
ConsequencesThe Constitution of Virtual
Community and Social Identity

• END