“While each of these sources had varying nuances on how and why premarital sex could and should be avoided, one of the central tenets was that men could not be counted on to control themselves. The responsibility to avoid sex would fall squarely on female shoulders. This only worked because, in this belief system, women do not experience sexual desire.”

As a teen girl, grown men would tell me with a chuckle that I simply could not understand “what teenage boys are like.”

Never did these men pause to wonder what it is like to be a teenage girl.

The assumption was that the female virgin simply did not desire sex. If someone did express sexual desire (a very bold thing to admit to) she was told that it was not sex that she desired, but the “emotional closeness.” Men enjoyed sex. Women enjoyed cuddling afterward.

Of course, all of that shame and ignorance about sex is supposed to simply melt away as an Evangelical woman says her wedding vows. Instantly sex goes from forbidden to mandatory. (Is there anything more antithetical to desire than obligation?)

Evangelical Purity Culture is an exercise in controlling female sexual desire.

Source: How Evangelical Purity Culture Sacrifices Female Pleasure — Fundamentally Free

And if surveillance in schools has become a simulation, then so perhaps has teaching itself, moving beyond a preoccupation with an essentialist truth of teaching to the hyperreality of normalised visibility and the simulation of teaching. This article argues that surveillance – including external agencies such as Ofsted – no longer exists to find the truth of teaching, the surveillance of teachers exists only to test the accuracy of the models and codes upon which the simulation is based.

Source: The surveillance of teachers and the simulation of teaching: Journal of Education Policy: Vol 32, No 1

Hat tip:

“Emotional intelligence is important, but the unbridled enthusiasm has obscured a dark side. New evidence shows that when people hone their emotional skills, they become better at manipulating others. When you’re good at controlling your own emotions, you can disguise your true feelings. When you know what others are feeling, you can tug at their heartstrings and motivate them to act against their own best interests.”

Social scientists have begun to document this dark side of emotional intelligence. In emerging research led by University of Cambridge professor Jochen Menges, when a leader gave an inspiring speech filled with emotion, the audience was less likely to scrutinize the message and remembered less of the content. Ironically, audience members were so moved by the speech that they claimed to recall more of it.
The authors call this the awestruck effect, but it might just as easily be described as the dumbstruck effect. One observer reflected that Hitler’s persuasive impact came from his ability to strategically express emotions-he would “tear open his heart”-and these emotions affected his followers to the point that they would “stop thinking critically and just emote.”

 

Source: The Dark Side of Emotional Intelligence – The Atlantic

“The companies which are looking to sell to them should be well aware that the sub-fractionalization of attention isn’t a good thing. In reality, this is a terrible development for advertisers and even for those pinning influencer-marketing channels. The meme fatigue and phone bored might as well turn out to be ticking time-bombs of the attention economy.”

Source: Phone Bored – Om Malik

“The young progressives grew up in a time when platform monopolies like Facebook were so dominant that they seemed inextricably intertwined into the fabric of the internet. To criticize social media, therefore, was to criticize the internet’s general ability to do useful things like connect people, spread information, and support activism and expression.”

The older progressives, however, remember the internet before the platform monopolies. They were concerned to observe a small number of companies attempt to consolidate much of the internet into their for-profit, walled gardens.

To them, social media is not the internet. It was instead a force that was co-opting the internet – including the powerful capabilities listed above – in ways that would almost certainly lead to trouble.

The social internet describes the general ways in which the global communication network and open protocols known as “the internet” enable good things like connecting people, spreading information, and supporting expression and activism.

Social media, by contrast, describes the attempt to privatize these capabilities by large companies within the newly emerged algorithmic attention economy, a particularly virulent strain of the attention sector that leverages personal data and sophisticated algorithms to ruthlessly siphon users’ cognitive capital.

Source: On Social Media and Its Discontents – Study Hacks – Cal Newport

See also,

“In education and in education technology, students are also the subjects of experimentation and conditioning. But in Skinner’s framework, they are not rats; they are pigeons.”

The pigeon. The object of technological experimentation, manipulation, and control, weaponized.
The pigeon. The child. The object of ed-tech.
The pigeon. The history of the future of education technology.

Source: The Pigeons of Ed-Tech

“Education technology is not always loyal to institutions, of course; it’s not always loyal to democracy either; it’s not always loyal to learning or to teaching – to students or to teachers; but it’s always fiercely loyal to itself and its own rationale, to its own existence. If there is an anxiety that education technology readily embraces, it is simply the anxiety that there’s not enough technology in the classroom. That education has not become sufficiently technologized. That education technology is still – somehow, strangely – an upstart, an outsider. That the digital flounders, powerless, against the entrenchment of the analog. That education technology has not been recognized, as some have recently lamented, as a discipline.”

I want to suggest that what we need instead of a discipline called “education technology” is an undisciplining. We need criticism at the center of our work. We need to recognize and sit with complexity; we need to demand and stand – or kneel – for justice. We also need care – desperately – the kind of care that has compassion about anxiety and insecurity and that works to alleviate their causes not just suppress the symptoms. We need speculative fictions and counter-narratives that are not interested in reproducing education technology’s legacies or reifying its futures. We need radical disloyalty, blasphemy.

Source: Re·Con·Figures: The Pigeons of Ed-tech