The Surplus in Seeing: Networked Learning and Data Doubles in Parasitic Pedagogy

Connectivism and networked learning continue to resonate as important approaches for advancing digital education. What is rarely considered is how parasitism and semiology underwrite these approaches and how their actualization privileges interpersonal or human collaborations while undervaluing nonhuman actants such as data doubles. As our information surrogates, data doubles manifest as byproducts of the surveillance and datafication of our personal information. This reconstitution is made possible by many of the same technology companies that permit networked learning and all digital interactions, thus allowing these establishments to feed on and profit from data extracted from us. This conceptual study reimagines parasitic pedagogy as a form of governance to explicate this process and challenge popular thinking about the relationship among networked learning, surveillance, and datatexts. As the master trope in parasitic pedagogy, the datatext formulates all digital objects, particularly data doubles. Although many educators neglect data doubles because of their opacity and unfamiliarity, technology companies increasingly treat them and their semiology as sources of surplus value, control, and extractive learning. To reveal how we have arrived at this paradoxical impasse, this study explores the philosophical and pedagogical character of parasitism and the Cold War political incentives that inspired the creation of the internet and many of the surveillance practices and data concerns that many educators have today. Parasitic pedagogy integrates these perspectives by illuminating their overlapping imperatives and practices, thus evidencing the ways in which technology companies and government agencies in the West and beyond often use the same fundamental technologies and networks as professional educators to propagate what Basil Bernstein called the totally pedagogised society.