| Proceeding from an analysis of contemporary practices of online education courses taught in virtual environments, I seek to recuperate a notion of social identity in Hannah Arendt's vision of a political stage; social identity as a mask that actors wear when acting politically. I avoid the language of mediation, instead seeing the 'Mask' as ever present. I offer this mode of inscription as being central to our understanding of medium specificity, and apply it in particular to my analysis of the use of Second Life (SL) in online learning environments. I take the use of SL in university courses as an example to think through what happens when education- which I understand as being essential to citizenship, a practice that depends on appearing in public- shifts to a space of virtual publicity. I examine the history of the modern university and the role that technologies have played in the growing corporate reorganization of the university. I defend the university as, ideally, an autonomous site from which, in Nietzsche's words, the "untimely" can emerge. I look to the political thought of Hannah Arendt as a theoretical ground for understanding avatars and virtual community, following Norma Claire Moruzzi in reading the mask of social identity as a site of political engagement. I explore the appositeness of Hannah Arendt's articulation of public, political personae or masks in On Revolution, as well as her critique of Plato's metaphysical bifurcation of Being and appearance, and her understanding of (Jewish) identity as non-territorial- and therefore virtual- to contemporary debates concerning cybersociality and online community. I read her against common reception to argue that the conception of political actors animating her texts is best illuminated when read heuristically through contemporary discourses of technology. In so doing I develop an Arendtian view of politics and social identity that is amenable to and invests itself in modes of resistance enabled by cybersociality. From the perspective of critical pedagogy, I aim to think through ways of utilizing technologies as potentially repoliticizing, and I identify the properties online learning must demonstrate in order to create new sites of resistance. |
