The Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime Myth

Back in the Internet's heyday --when e-learning was seen as "the next killer app" (Chambers, 1999), threatening to turn traditional campuses into "relics" (Drucker, 1997)-- educational technologists celebrated the overcoming of space, time and even the body promised by new technologies and forms of learning. Commentators wrote, for example, of the "death of distance" (Cairncross, 2001), and of the promise of disembodied community and learning that would make prejudices like race and gender a thing of the past (Ried, 1998). Cyberspace was seen as clearly different from (and in many ways better than) the "real world" "a sentiment that has been given powerful and economic expression in phrases like "anyplace, anytime" education, or learning for "anyone, anywhere, anytime." However, more recent experience has shown that these worlds are not so different. "[T]he binary opposition between cyberspace and 'the real world,'" scholars have come to learn, "is not nearly as sharp or clean as it's [been] made out to be" (Kolko, Nakamura & Rodman, 2000).

All the same, claims of learning "anywhere anytime," and of being able to be "anyone" online --creating one's own Internet identity—are still commonplace in e-learning today. It is not at all uncommon to read of projects claiming that they are realizing the overall aim of making "learning available to anyone, anywhere, anytime" (e.g. Bourne, Harris & Mayadas, 2005). It is also not surprising to come across descriptions of the educational potential of blogs, e-portfolios, wikis, or other technologies emphasizing how they free the user to "construct" or "develop" their own "online identities" (e.g., Cameron & Anderson, 2006), with no explanation or qualification concerning such freedom.

But the freedoms of placelessness and facelessness available online do not exist independently of the problems and limitations that are more familiar from the "real" or "physical" world. Research has shown that individuals are not free to create new identities online that simply erase the physical markers of race and gender, for example. The research of Susan Herring into chat and discussion forums, for example, has long demonstrated that "gender is often visible on the Internet on the basis of features of a participant’s discourse style, features which the individual may not be consciously aware of or able to change easily" --with female communication manifesting "an aligned orientation towards [its] interlocutors," and its male counterpart an more "adversarial orientation" (Herring, 2000). Lisa Nakamura has done similar research into racial stereotypes online, coining the term "cybertypes:" Tools that would "redress" issues of "age, gender and races," she explains, themselves "produce cybertypes that look remarkably like racial and gender stereotypes. […] The Internet," she concludes "propagates, disseminates, and commodifies images of race and racism." (Nakamura, 2002; pp. 5, 3)

If this shows the literal limits to the myth of being "anybody" online, similarly literal limitations for "anywhere" and "anytime" are clearly evident in literature on the digital divide. This research not only shows how "anywhere" and "anytime" stop rather abruptly at the borders of the 30 OECD nations (e.g. WSIS, 2005), but also emphasizes gaps or divides within these privileged countries that are co-extensive with and mutually reinforce class and other social divisions. For example, one report on e-learning in First Nations communities in Canada points out how gaps in expertise and knowledge "are compounded by digital divides which in turn deepen existing social divides" (C.B.N.C, 2005; p. 7). Widening class divisions --above all the gap between the richest and the poorest—have been earlier identified as an important factor for the myths of the "net gen" and the "knowledge economy," and they play a role here as well. As one statistics Canada report concludes, "the Internet divide is [actually] widening when the lowest income deciles are compared with the highest income decile" (Sciadas, 2002). The World Wide Web is neither world-wide nor a Web indifferent to class and race. Instead, gaps in its availability fall along income and other economic and demographic fault lines.

But the anyone, anywhere, anytime myth is not only misleading when taken literally; its limitations are equally clear when identity, place and time are understood in more abstractedly and figuratively (which is often the case in discussions of the online; e.g., Jacobs, 1999). First, when we are online, we are not simply anybody anywhere. Not only are we in our own generally immobile bodies in front of a screen (which must be given visual and attentional privilege over the surrounding environment; see Manovich, 2001; pp. 103-111), but we are also positioned in terms of identity, place and time by the messages that bombard us from that screen.

This is process of "positioning" is called interpellation: Think of a policeman who shouts "Hey, you there!" on the street. Someone will generally turn around to "answer" that call. At this moment, this person is positioned, becoming a subject relative to the ideology of law and crime. Something similar happens when we encounter emails, blog entries, and perhaps most powerfully, advertisements on the Internet: We are made subjects of whatever ideologies that are generally taken as "normal" on the Internet. For example, I go to a popular news site (www.cbc.ca), where I am greeted by an animated ad for computers that announces: "Dell: Purely You." I check out "Today’s recommendations for you" at amazon.com, where I am presented with various products that can be "delivered Tuesday, February 20" --if I order them within a given number of hours and minutes. Even when I return to my own desktop, I go to "my computer" and "my documents." By being repeatedly addressed in these ways (about my recommendations, my computer, my dell) I am placed in relationship with what I encounter as a user, a producer and above all, a consumer --and even more specifically as an English speaker with a disposable income (e.g. White, 2006). If one fits at least some of these categories, this "address" of the Web is easy to accept as "normal;" if not, one is generally still identified and positioned in other ways "e.g., as a more-or-less alienated outsider. Identity and place that are constructed offline through magazines, billboards and television are in this way reappear online with a vengeance.

Conclusion: "Anyone, anywhere, anytime" invokes a kind of "default" person, place and time which is generally white and male (Nakamura, 2002), in a position of wealth and in a space and time generally defined in terms of production and consumption. In uncritically invoking categories like anyone, anywhere, anytime, the experience of a single (and relatively small) class of people is privileged and universalized. This occurs much in the same way as was explained in conjunction with tech-savvy kids in the myth of the "net gen" and with "knowledge workers" in the myth of the "knowledge economy." As was also argued earlier, instead of using these kinds of catchphrases that cover up or ignore conspicuous gaps and inequalities, we need instead to qualify our language, mind the gaps, and when possible, take action to bridge or fill them in.

References:

Bourne, J., Harris, D., Mayadas, F. (2005) Online Engineering Education: Learning Anywhere, Anytime. Journal of Asychronous Learning Networks. (9), 1. http://www.aln.org/publications/jaln/v9n1/v9n1_bourne_member.asp

Cameron, D. & Anderson, T. (2006). Comparing Weblogs to Threaded Discussion Tools in Online Educational Contexts (2) 11. http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Nov_06/article01.htm

C.B.N.C (2005). Report for the Aboriginal Voice Ontario E-Learning Forum. Crossing Boundaries National Council. http://www.crossingboundaries.ca/images.av/content/ontario_e-learning_report.pdf

Chambers J., Convergence for Business Education and Entertainment Key Note Address 16th
November 1999 COMDEX 1999 Las Vegas Nevada 15th to 19th November 1999.

Drucker, P. “Seeing Things As They Really Are,” Forbes, March 10, 1997, 127.

Herring, S.C. (2000). Gender Differences in CMC: Findings and Implications. Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility Newsletter, 18(1). http://www.cpsr.org/issues/womenintech/herring

Jacobs, 1999. Cyberspace is a Parallel World: A Metaphor Analysis. http://www.jqjacobs.net/anthro/metaphor.html

Kolko, B. E., Nakamura, L. & Rodman, G. B. (2000). Race in Cyberspace: An Introduction. New York: Routledge.

Manovich, L. (2001). The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Nakamura, L. (2002). Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. New York: Routledge.

Reid, E. (1998). “The Self and the Internet: Variations on the Illusion of One Self.” In Gackenbach, J. (ed). Psychology and the Internet: Intrapersonal, interpersonal, and transpersonal implications. San Diego: Academic Press

Sciadas, G. (2002). The Digital Divide in Canada. Report for Statistics Canada. http://www.statcan.ca/english/research/56F0009XIE/56F0009XIE2002001.pdf

White, M (2006). The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jacobs, 1999. Cyberspace is a Parallel World: A Metaphor Analysis. http://www.jqjacobs.net/anthro/metaphor.html

WSIS 2005. http://www.itu.int/wsis/tunis/newsroom/stats/