The Need for “Connectedness in Growth.”. Experience and Education and the New Technological Culture

The paper takes its cue from contemporary debates about the role of the new media in education in order to highlight that, while the educational import of technology cannot be gainsaid, the risk of its uncritical deployment looms large. The argumentative trajectory unfolds from a specific and original perspective: indeed, a dialogue is established between some Deweyan motifs and some tenets of the French thinker Bernard Stiegler, who has vigorously argued against what he has called the “mislearning” produced by the new technological “hypomnemata,” claiming that minds risk being put at the service of technological devices and human subjects risk being turned into mere consumers of knowledge instead of its producers. In this horizon, in particular, attention is drawn to the danger that the new media promote the predominance of a continuous present, which is poles apart from the Deweyan notion of continuity. Accordingly, the idea of a Deweyan kind of ‘convergence culture’ (in which different media are arranged together according to an educational design) is advanced and the notion of re-collection (understood as the Deweyan inventive redescription of Bildung as Er-innerung) is introduced to counter “new cultures of learning” in the acceptation of Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown.