Technology’s Hidden Curriculum and the New Digital Pharmakon

Abstract

In this chapter, I reflect on the Digital, and its manifold implications and significances for us humans, but too, the pedagogical work of tomorrow’s teachers. Here, I reflect on nearness, and on the nearness of predigital things. I examine the “very close coupling” (Licklider, IRE Trans Hum Fact Electron 1:4, 1960) we now share with the Digital and suggest that our relationship with its designer algorithms is more productively understood as pharmacological. By the Digital I mean not only the obvious—mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and other such networked gadgets and devices that we find always at hand today—but also the not-so-obvious—the proliferation of ambient intelligences, autonomous robots, and softwared materialities that are embedded and whispering smart things to us and one another just beneath the surface of our everyday lives.