Classroom Exchanges: Big Data and the Commodification of

Educational Communication

Nicholas J. Eastman, Ethan E. Hansen

Education and Culture, Volume 37, Number 1, 2021, pp. 76-93 (Article)

Published by Purdue University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/836234

[ Access provided at 20 Nov 2021 02:32 GMT from CNRS BiblioSHS ]

Article

Classroom Exchanges: Big Data and

the Commodification of Educational
Communication

Nicholas J. Eastman and Ethan E. Hansen

Ripon College

Abstract
We contrast the centrality of free and full communication, especially
as it occurs in classrooms, for John Dewey’s democratic vision of
the Great Community with the technologically mediated classroom
communication characteristic of the COVID-19 pandemic. We focus
on Google’s dominance of educational communication in particular.
Drawing on Shoshana Zuboff’s concept of rendition, we argue that
Google’s interest in and influence over educational communication
is rooted in behavioral data analytics that captures and exploits
classroom language (spoken, written, and bodily) for capitalist
accumulation and social control. We conclude that Dewey’s theories
of language and communication are descriptively powerful regarding
the commodification of communication, but his theory of power itself
fails to provide a politics capable of countering Big Data’s hegemony in
classrooms or the broader society.
Keywords: educational communication, commodification, rendition, behavioral
futures markets

For John Dewey, how to create and maintain a democratic community is at the heart
of political and educational theory, as the relationship of the community to the
individual animates both politics and education. Such a relationship exists in and
through communication. Countering any notion that would place communication as
epiphenomenal to society or serving some sort of ancillary function, Dewey maintains
that “society not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication, but it
may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication.”1 Communication
enables meaning and purpose to flourish within a democratic public. It opens
up the transmission of ideas between individuals within different groups and,
as a result, allows for more communal and collaborative exchanges within the

76 Education and Culture 37 (1) 2021: 76-93

 Classroom Exchanges 77
political sphere. Such possibilities must always develop in the midst of contrary and
antagonistic forces. The industrialization of Dewey’s day produced an abundance
of new communication tools as well as challenges to meaningful communication.
As Dewey puts it, “We have the physical tools of communication as never before.
The thoughts and aspirations congruous with them are not communicated, and
hence are not common. Without such communication the [democratic] public will
remain shadowy and formless, seeking spasmodically for itself, but seizing and
holding its shadow rather than its substance. . . . Communication alone can create
a great community.”2 Dewey’s political aim is inseparable from his educational
aim; thus, the type and quality of communication in educational environments
are paramount political issues for Dewey. In what follows, we examine these
issues in the age of technologically mediated educational communication, nearly
ubiquitous before the COVID-19 pandemic and unavoidable in its midst. Our aim is
to update Dewey’s concerns about the exploitative, anti-democratic, and alienating
characteristics of capitalist industrial society to our present postindustrial society
in which the capitalist extracts value from communicative acts themselves. Dewey
warns against the corruptions of communication emerging within mass society
(e.g., yellow journalism or commercial and political propaganda). However, with
digital data as the coin of the realm in the twenty-first century, the movement
of all education, especially educational communication, onto online platforms
presents an unprecedented opportunity to surveil, capture, manipulate, and exploit
educational data.

Google’s Classroom Capture

Although Big Data’s capture of public education has accelerated rapidly over the past
decade, and the last year in particular, it was part of a longer trend in education rooted
in the pervasive assumption that technological development and social progress
are mutually constitutive phenomena. Neil Postman recognized the material and
ideological threats computers and the internet posed to public schools and other
democratic institutions in the mid-1990s. Postman described the god of technology
reigning sovereign in the hearts and minds of the American public, professional
educators, and educational policymakers. His prophesy that “we will become the
kind of people the technology requires us to be; and, whether we like it or not, we
will remake our institutions to accommodate the technology”3 has been fulfilled.
For Postman, there are two principal explanations for technology’s hegemony in
education, both of which shape present circumstances. The first is the indomitable
faith in progress. In this respect, superficial notions of scientific progress legitimize
technological development, and such “progress” is assumed to yield educational,
social, and political benefits. Can and should become indistinguishable types of
questions, and objections are either dismissed outright or noted and then ignored.
Indeed, such objections are a form of blasphemy, what Postman calls “technological

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78 Eastman and Hansen
innocence, a failure to know the particulars of the beneficent accomplishments of
industrial progress.”4 Postman sees the wedding of the technology and consumerism
as the second principal source of technological capture in schools. The model he
has in view is that of television and advertising, particularly Christopher Whittle’s
Channel 1, which offered schools “free” technology in exchange for the right to
bombard children daily with advertisements disguised as news and educational
programming. The arrangement conformed to the omnipresent narrative around
access: corporate access to students under the guise of granting students access to
information and technology.
When technological solutions fail to deliver on their educational promises,
vestigial optimism persists, due to a paucity of existing alternatives and the
failure to imagine anything else. The quixotic belief that the internet will equalize
educational opportunity by putting an unfathomable wealth of knowledge at the
fingertips of rich and poor alike has transformed from a historical inevitability
to a political palliative taken seriously only by TED Talk enthusiasts. The present
discourse of proposed solutions to intractable educational issues still brims with
words like collaboration, innovation, communication, access, and resources, all of
which connote technology as both ends and means. Such discourse differs from
the utopian prophesies regarding educational technology in the early 1990s in that
it no longer matters if people believe it. Institutions and educators will adopt and
even promote technological solutions regardless of unreflective support or critical
skepticism. We are stuck, as Christopher Lasch puts it, in “a baffled sense of drift.”5
We propose a neologism to describe this state of fatigued, disingenuous optimism
without alternatives: quixhaustion. For an illustration of this principle, we need only
to consider the widespread visceral hatred of online learning educators, parents,
and students have felt during the COVID-19 pandemic. The fact that all parties
are demoralized and exhausted by day after day of screen learning will not derail
the twin narratives that the solutions to educational problems and even the very
essence of education in the twenty-first century simply are technological.
The EdTech industry has surged over the last several decades but has achieved
a previously unfathomable growth rate during the pandemic. Digital flashcard
company Quizlet’s funding has quintupled in the last two years, pushing the
company’s valuation above $1 billion. Quizlet joins eighteen other EdTech unicorns
valued collectively at over $64 billion at the start of 2021.6 Zoom’s third quarter
revenue for fiscal year 2021 was $777 million, a 367 percent increase from the
previous year’s third quarter.7 The tech giants Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and
Google have made themselves indispensable for educational institutions during the
pandemic. For our purposes, it is not necessary to detail the various tactics these
corporations have employed during the past year. The larger point is that all share in
the responsibility for creating the very conditions of dependency and total control
over education and various other social, political, and cultural institutions. In this

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 Classroom Exchanges 79
sense, it is sufficient for us to focus on Google as the pioneer of the datafication of
everything and the dominant technology company in education, a position that
the pandemic has solidified.
Given the omnipresence of Google in ordinary life, it is easy to forget that
Google’s dominance of educational institutions is relatively recent. Not long
after its IPO in 2004, Google began expanding dramatically from its eponymous
search to include products like Gmail and Google Scholar. The company would
acquire YouTube and launch Google Calendar, Documents, and Spreadsheets (later
shortened to Docs and Sheets) in 2006. Some of the educational implications of
the acquisitions and products might seem clearer now, but they remained, at most,
educationally adjacent, at least from an institutional perspective until the 2010s.
Microsoft Office dominated educational institutions, but the cloud storage and
synchonization opportunities of Google Docs began to gain attention and traction
among educators and institutions.
Google’s encroachment into Microsoft’s territory signals the emergence of
a new business model within EdTech and indeed, as we will elaborate later, a new
form of capitalism. Microsoft’s immense profitability and market dominance within
education as well as other sectors came from licensing its Windows and Microsoft
Office products to individuals and institutions.8 Google’s business model was, and
to some extent remains, focused on advertising revenue. Google’s profits derive
from its ability to collect massive amounts of data and organize that data in such a
way that it can be monetized through advertising and other means. In other words,
Google was not selling software like Microsoft; it was using software to gather and
monetize data.
Product launches and partnerships in 2011 and 2012 dramatically increased
Google’s presence in educational institutions. Google Drive consolidated the
company’s various Microsoft Office rivals, G Suite, in one spot that offered file
synchronization across multiple devices, free storage, and real-time collaboration.
Google was also in a position to compete not just with Office but with Windows
as the company developed its Chrome browser into a full operating system and
partnered with Acer and other hardware manufacturers to launch Chromebooks
in 2011. Still reeling from austerity and the economic fallout of the Great Recession,
schools were looking to save money anywhere and everywhere while continuing to
worship at the altar of technological progress. Chromebooks made it possible to get
a laptop in the hand of every student while also saving money on more expensive
hardware and licensing purchases.
When Chromebooks debuted in schools around 2012, Apple and Microsoft
were locked in a heated battle over the computer market in U.S. schools, both
shipping between 2.5 and 3 million devices to schools annually. By 2016, U.S.
schools were purchasing around 8 million Chromebooks annually, while Apple
and Microsoft’s numbers remained at their 2012 levels.9 By 2019, on the eve of the

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80 Eastman and Hansen
pandemic, Google controlled 60 percent of the U.S. computer market in education,
making the company ideally positioned for creating total dependency once schools
across the country and around the globe went partially or fully remote.10 From
January 2020 to April 2020 Google Meet, the company’s videoconferencing product,
saw a 25-fold increase in use.11 Use of Google Classroom more than doubled. G Suite
for Education went from 90 million users the previous year to 120 million users
in 2020. It now stands above 140 million users. As Javier Soltero, the Google vice
present responsible for G Suite remarked, his division’s incredible growth “actually
mirrors, unfortunately, the spread of the disease.”12
At first glance, Google’s strategy appears to be a return to Chris Whittle’s
vision of EdTech: give financially struggling schools free (or cheap) technology
as a means of generating advertising revenues that fetch a high price due to their
precisely targeted market.13 However, the key difference lies in the revenue-
generating mechanism. Whereas Channel One provided obligatory infotainment
brimming with teen-targeting ads tacked on to the end of a given class period,
Google’s educational approach was fully integrated into the processes of learning
themselves: reading, writing, collaborating, communicating, delivering lessons, and
doing practice exercises. While Google denies that it uses G Suite for Education to
collect student data for the purposes of targeting advertising, a dubious claim we
will return to, the fact remains that Google has derived tremendous profits from the
datafication of all classroom activity, and it owes its power to remake educational
practices in its image to its business model of providing free services and cheap
hardware in exchange for the data it commodifies.14
Google’s marketing strategy with schools also differed from that of Channel
One. Instead of committing itself to a top-down approach, Google understood
teachers themselves as its on-the-ground evangelists. Alongside the rollout of Drive
and Chromebooks, Google had begun its tiered Certified Innovator program, which
trained teachers to integrate Google products and services into their classrooms and
facilitated their mission to spread the word as Google Certified Trainers and Coaches,
often as paid speakers. As enthusiasm for Google spread among teachers, school
districts had to scramble to adapt to what was already happening in classrooms.
Chicago Public Schools was an important test case in 2012. The district was looking
to save $2 million a year that was going to Microsoft Exchange and another company
to run its email. The switch to Google, which many of their teachers has already made,
allowed the district to save around $1.6 million annually while also providing the
full array of G Suite products. Once district officials saw the economic advantages
of adopting something many teachers were already doing, they “were always
enthusiastic to tell the Google story,” and even began a free annual professional
development event called Googlepalooza, co-sponsored by the company.15 Such
enthusiasm is a testament to the degree to which the ideology of innovation and an
entrepreneurial ethos has grown among educators over the last few decades.

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 Classroom Exchanges 81
Student privacy concerns initially were a major obstacle to Google’s access to
classrooms. The very services that gave the company its advantage over Microsoft,
web-based products and collaborative cloud storage, brought with them substantial
privacy concerns, as did Google’s business model of profiting from user data through
targeted advertising. Google has agreed to comply with the Family Educational
Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and other privacy laws and commits to the Student
Privacy Pledge, an industry-drafted agreement regarding K–12 schools.16 Such
commitments are dubious at best.
While compliance with state and federal privacy protections are important,
Google’s sincerity on such matters is risible. Over the last decade, Google spent $150
million lobbying, more than its tech industry peers. The most prominent issue Google
sought to influence was “privacy and competition issues in online advertising.”17
The company settled with the Federal Trade Commission in 2019 for violating the
Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by improperly collecting data
of children using YouTube.18 Google has proved willing and able to wrest control
over what it does with its users’ data by justifying such collection on the grounds
of product or service improvements or simply coercing authorization for such uses
from customers, institutions, and even lawmakers. Further, we contend that Google’s
commitment to not use G Suite for Education to collect student data for the purpose
of targeted advertising is a hollow gesture. Google understands that advertising is
only one of many possible ways raw data is the source of profits and power.

Surrendering the Classroom

That Google’s immense wealth and power would have come through targeted
advertising is actually somewhat surprising given its co-founders’ initial aversion to
advertising-focused search engines. Writing in 1998, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page
claim, “advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search
results. . . In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the
better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer
to find what they want.”19 Brin and Page conclude, “We believe the issue of advertising
causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine
that is transparent and in the academic realm.”20 Google was to be that transparent
and purely academic indexer and organizer of the web. Rivals like Microsoft and
Yahoo! were generating revenues from companies whose pages they indexed, and
AOL’s search engine Overture profited by allowing companies to pay premiums
for higher ranks. For Brin and Page, such practices suggested a mercenary lack of
imagination, the subordination of technological commitments to the profit motive.21
Google’s primary search algorithm, PageRank, gave the company its
technological and ultimately its commercial advantage over its rivals due to its
intuitive understanding of the power of behaviorism. Brin and Page explain,

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82 Eastman and Hansen
“PageRank can be thought of as a model of user behavior. We assume there is a
‘random surfer’ who is given a Web page at random and keeps clicking on links,
never hitting ‘back’ but eventually gets bored and starts on another random
page. The probability that a random surfer visits a page is its PageRank.”22 What
determines that probability is a matter not just of modeling individual user behavior
but of constructing entire behavioral ecosystems. For this latter component, Google
modeled PageRank on the norms of academic citation practices, wherein one
article’s prominence is a function of how many other articles cite it and whether
those article citing it are in high-ranking journals.
Google was able to continually improve its search results by feeding its
behavioral data back into its own algorithm, what Shoshana Zuboff dubs “behavioral
surplus.”23 The more people searched, the better Google could predict what satisfied
their search query. When the dotcom bubble burst in 2001, Google’s investors
pressured the company to begin generating revenues by matching its industry-
leading search function with targeted advertising. Google’s superior behavioral
analytical model of search made it better at targeted marketing than its competitors,
who had tried to match ads with keyword searches and content. Google, on the
other hand, was able to aggregate its massive amount of behavioral data into highly
accurate predictive capabilities. While competitors tried to monetize ads by having
the right people view them at the right time, Google was able to charge a higher price
for its targeted advertising because it could reliably predict who was most likely to
click the ad, the so-called “click-through” rate, and in the world of advertising, an
active click is worth far more than a passive view.24
Accuracy in predicting behavior through the analysis of the behavioral surplus
has proved incredibly lucrative in advertising, but that is hardly the full scope of
its usefulness. If analysis of behavioral surplus accurately predicts who will click,
then analysis of that same data can yield what would likely make the person click.
In other words, data analytics is not just useful for predicting behavioral outcomes;
it is useful for creating them. Zuboff calls this analytical process rendition, “the
concrete operational practices through which dispossession is accomplished, as
human experience is claimed as raw material for datafication and all that follows,
from manufacturing to sales.”25 The verb form, render, captures the different facets
of this process. To render is to create or form something out of something else,
which includes processes as diverse as rendering a text into a different language,
an artist’s rendering in a portrait, and extracting oil from fat. In another sense, the
term means to offer or yield, to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. Zuboff
draws together these various meanings to capture Google’s behavioral surplus
analytics and our relationship to those processes. Google collects, organizes, and
processes data derived from its users’ experiences to produce a new substance as
one would render oil from fat. In doing so, it constructs a profile of that user as an
artist would render a likeness of the model. From the user’s perspective, the data

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 Classroom Exchanges 83
offered to Google, whether consciously or not, is payment for the company’s services
rendered. Yet when the user is forced to do so because there is no other alternative,
then he has yielded something contested, offered something dear from a position
of inferiority. He has sur-rendered.26
Zuboff argues that, though targeted advertising has been and remains the
dominant source of Google’s profits, future power and profitability will come as
behavioral surplus analytics directed not just toward behavior prediction but toward
behavior modification will be commodified and sold within industries far beyond
the advertising world. What Google has created was not a new mode of advertising
but a new mode of capitalist production that will revolutionize all industries as
happened with earlier revolutionary production processes. The importance of
Henry Ford’s assembly lines is not that they revolutionized the auto industry. It is
that they revolutionized all industries. The movement from behavioral prediction
to modification creates what Zuboff calls “behavioral futures markets,” wherein
“any actor with an interest in purchasing probabilistic information about our
behavior and/or influencing future behavior can pay to play in markets where the
behavioral fortunes of individuals, groups, bodies, and things are told and sold.”27
We can already see the emergence of nonadvertising interest in behavioral futures
markets. One of the earliest adopters has been an industry that has always tried
to profit from prediction: insurance. Employers and health insurance companies
are incentivizing or requiring those they insure to wear Fitbits or provide other
sources of biometric data in exchange for enhanced coverage benefits. Auto insurers
collect tremendous amounts of data on driving habits through their smartphone
apps. The auto industry itself has sought to monetize its customers’ driving habits
by collecting such data through OnStar and other onboard computer systems that
now come standard with all vehicles. As our lives fill with “smart” devices from
cars, to refrigerators, to mattresses, even to thermostats like the Google-owned
Nest, our offline lives are rendered as well, making resistance illusory and futile.
Twentieth-century notions of privacy rooted in the integrity and autonomy
of one’s identity, body, and personal space no longer hold in the era of technological
surveillance. For these reasons, we find no assurance in Google’s commitment
to honor student privacy as laid out in the Student Privacy Pledge. The pledge
commits Google to “not collect, maintain, use or share Student PII [personally
identifiable information] beyond that needed for authorized educational/school
purposes, or as authorized by the parent/student.” Another commitment is to
“not use or disclose student information collected through an educational/school
service (whether personal information or otherwise) for behavioral targeting of
advertisement to students.”28 Three points regarding rendition are salient here. The
first is that, by the pledge’s own definition, Student PII does not include de-identified
information. The predictive power of machine learning has progressed so far—and
certainly stands to progress significantly further as Google renders the data from

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84 Eastman and Hansen
students around the globe—that data rendering and behavioral futures markets
do not actually need personally identifiable information. Keeping in mind that
PageRank’s algorithmic breakthrough was modeled on a random surfer whose
page preferences became ever more accurate as Google’s algorithm crawled the
behavioral ecosystem of the web, Google could render the continuous data flows of
140 million G Suite for Education users and produce accurate predictive modeling
and behavior modification techniques without ever needing to know a student’s
name. The second is that “beyond what is needed for authorized educational/school
purposes” means whatever Google allows it to mean. The company would never
suffer a parent, school, or even legislative body to dictate to it what data analytics
it can perform in the name of product/service improvements, particularly when
using de-identified student data. The third is that behavior futures markets, as we
have already stated, are not dependent on the advertising industry. Further, the
language of this commitment to abstain from targeted advertising to students
actually undermines the integrity of the others’ assurances on personally identifiable
information. By including the proviso “whether personal information or otherwise,”
the pledge’s authors tacitly admit that nonpersonal or de-identified information
could be used for targeted advertising. In other words, targeted can be both accurate
and anonymous, and if it is still accurate, what is gained by making it anonymous?
What Google will ultimately do with the massive amount of student data it is
rendering in the midst of the pandemic is a matter of speculation. The most obvious
value derives from a rather traditional approach to targeting children as customers.
Making students into frequent Google users habituates them to the company’s
services, habits they will retain when they become nonstudent users whose behavior
is opened to all facets of rendition, including targeted advertising. Nonadvertising
value could also come through gamification and AI. The Department of Defense
has long seen the importance of games for behavior modification both in training
soldiers and in tacitly marketing warfare and the armed forces to young people.29
Any number of industries might be interested in increasing the productivity of
current workers and marketing to future workers through gaming and simulation
data rendered from students and teachers, what has been referred to as “Netflixing
human capital development.”30 Alexander Means warns of what he calls “platform
learning,” which utilizes AI and data analytics “as an efficient means of creating
synergies between on-demand labor and on-demand learning.” 31 “Learning” so
conceived is a process of digital productivity training resulting in micro-creden-
tialing that expands the gig economy to include postindustrial knowledge workers.
“Education” functions as a kind of currency, one even traceable through blockchain
technology, that calculates a laborer’s productivity potential by linking behavioral
markers, user reputation, past performance, and specific skill sets. That learning
currency is then traded on a labor market. Employers pay premiums to get pro-
ductive and hyperspecialized laborers, and laborers can tailor their “learning”

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according to what fetches the highest price on the market, an arrangement not
unlike Google’s targeted marketing strategy that matched advertisers with the
targeted audience most likely to click the ad.32
Similarly, Kenneth Saltman offers a critique of the confluence of Big Pharma
and Big Data, as ADHD medications and biometric data merge with machine learn-
ing and AI to analyze and alter the body as a means of control over productivi-
ty.33 More recently, Saltman warns that AI and adaptive learning “tends to delink
learning from student and teacher subjectivities and particular contexts, as well as
from the broader social context. In their stead, adaptive learning builds standard-
ization, homogenization and constant testing into the curriculum and pedagogy,”
which results in “a kind of techno-tracking” that determines educational success
and failures while masking the values and ideologies of the curriculum itself.34
Again, we find no assurance from Google’s commitment to anonymize student
data. AI pedagogy and personalized learning is actually highly depersonalized in
its erasure of the subjectivity of both teacher and student and defines successful
educational outcomes divorced from purposes other than skill-based training,
entertainment, and increasing productivity. We are again reminded of Postman’s
prescient warnings against the educational idolatry of economic utility, technol-
ogy, and consumerism.35
Behaviorism and antidemocratic impulses are certainly not new to class-
rooms. Rather, classrooms are places where power is regularly exercised and con-
tested. Indeed, what makes more traditional, nontechnological modes of classroom
power contestable is that they typically are openly displayed. Technology can
exercise tremendous power without showing how or even that it does so. The user
interface masks the underlying architecture, obscuring its power and giving the
user the false impression of control. Behavioral economists refer to this as “choice
architectures,” which enable computer programs to shape outcomes impercepti-
bly by “nudging” users toward predictable outcomes by limiting, incentivizing,
obscuring, and manipulating the choices available or by directing attention toward
or away from certain possibilities.36 Here we see the sharpened contradictions of
surrendering the classroom: the depersonalizing personalization, instrumentaliz-
ing learners through learning instruments, “democratizing” access to information
and monopolizing power over data, self-directed learning within highly structured
choice architectures, student exposure and corporate privacy.

Words as Coins and Money

In closing, we return to Dewey’s search for the Great Community and the critical
importance he places on communication, especially as it occurs in classrooms.
Surrendering classrooms to Big Data transforms educational exchanges—pedagog-
ical communicative acts through vocal as well as written and body language—into

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86 Eastman and Hansen
educational exchanges in a commercial sense, encompassing both an exchange
as a rendering (e.g., to exchange currencies) and a site of such transaction (e.g.,
the stock exchange). As with the production and exchange of all commodities,
this process expresses the power dynamics of political economy. To engage with
Dewey on the commodification of classroom language, we must, therefore, account
for two interrelated facets of his thought: the nature of communication and its
relationship to power.
Language, for Dewey, connects the internal and external facets of experience
and is the means by which the mind understands and interacts with environment.37
Language enables connections between mind and external environment “so vastly
superior to those of animals without language that [human learning] appears to be
super-organic.”38 Yet this capacity is not one that lies within the individual alone
but is the outcome and means of associated living. It binds us to one another in
the present, while also allowing for the intelligibility of past events, either expe-
rienced directly or indirectly, and enables us to imagine and inquire into future
possibilities, a power essential for working toward ends in view. Fred Harris holds
that Dewey created a novel theory of language that describes how the emergence of
linguistic symbols as well as tools and machines “enabled human beings to increase
vastly their relations to the world by enabling them to perceive and actualize the
potentialities of things in a social and problematic context.”39 Harris warns of a
“linguistic fetishism” that arises when “substituting linguistic forms for the subject
matter itself without any check on whether there are real connections expressed in
the linguistic forms.”40 Dewey’s theory, he contends, keeps the linguistic fetish in
check by positing that language enables critical inquiry into the social and natural
environment and into the process of inquiry and the medium of language itself,
resulting in a transactional realism.41
Given the centrality of machines in rendering classroom exchanges for behav-
ioral futures markets, Dewey’s instrumental conception of language is of paramount
importance. Dewey famously describes language as the “tool of tools.”42 Indeed,
language itself is a kind of rendering of experience. “Where communication exists,”
writes Dewey, “things in acquiring meaning, thereby acquire representatives, surro-
gates, signs and implications, which are infinitely more amenable to management,
more permanent and more accommodating, than events in their first estate.”43
Through language, he contends, “Learning and teaching come into being, and there
is no event which may not yield information.”44 Here we see a striking resemblance
to Big Data’s rendering of educational communication as interpersonal exchanges
are utilized for predictive modeling for the purpose of yielding not meaning but
value, and there exists no event in teaching and learning that may not yield data.
An even more striking similarity emerges as Dewey elaborates language’s mean-
ing-making function as an economic process, claiming that “words are spoken

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 Classroom Exchanges 87
of as coins and money.” He explains that, prior to becoming currencies, precious
metals and instruments of credit exist physically and have “their own immediate
and final qualities.” He continues:
But as money they are substitutes, representations, and surrogates,
which embody
relationships. As a substitute, money not merely facilitates exchange of
such commodities as existed prior to its use, but it revolutionizes as well
production and consumption of all commodities. . . . Exchange is not an
event that can be isolated. It marks the emergence of production and con-
sumption into a new medium and context wherein they acquire new prop-
erties. Language is similarly not a mere agency for economizing energy in
the interaction of human beings. It is a release and amplification of energies
that enter into it, conferring upon them the added quality of meaning.45

The commodification of classroom language seems embedded in Dewey’s theory

of language itself. Big Data’s rendering of teaching and learning in the decade lead-
ing up to the COVID-19 pandemic, the intensification of these processes during
the pandemic, and their dominance into the foreseeable future demonstrate the
emergence of a new form of capitalist production and consumption made possible
through a medium that collects, modifies, and amplifies verbal and nonverbal
educational behaviors for the purpose of capitalist accumulation and social control
achieved through the wielding of a depoliticized form of power.
Dewey is aware of the potential for abuse and exploitation of the amplifying
and revolutionizing power of language. Indeed, these dangers inhere in language
just as they do in all relationships of commodity production and exchange. Associ-
ated living demands economic relationships, but those economic relationships must
be directed toward and subordinated to democratic ends. Similarly, Dewey argues:
Communication is uniquely instrumental and uniquely final. It is
instrumental as
liberating us from the otherwise overwhelming pressure of events and
enabling us to live in a world of things that have meaning. It is final as a
sharing in the objects and arts precious to a community, a sharing whereby
meanings are enhanced, deepened and solidified in the sense of commu-
nion. Because of its characteristic agency and finality, communication and
its congenial objects are objects ultimately worthy of awe, admiration, and
loyal appreciation. They are worthy as means, because they are the only
means that make life rich and varied in meanings. They are worthy as ends,
because in such ends man is lifted from his immediate isolation and shares
in a communion of meanings. Here, as in so many other things, the great
evil lies in separating instrumental and final functions.46

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88 Eastman and Hansen
Dewey’s thought clearly offers a robust description of the problem. Big Data exer-
cises what Zuboff calls instrumentarianism, “the instrumentation and instrumen-
talization of behavior for the purpose of modification, prediction, monetization, and
control.”47 Dewey sees communication as necessary for the full flourishing of the
individual in community. To deny the individual the power to communicate freely
and fully is to sever her access to “an intelligence which is the method and reward
of the common life, and a society worthy to command affection, admiration, and
loyalty.”48 The exploitation Big Data has achieved as a consequence of the pandemic
takes the antidemocratic principles of educational rendition to scale eclipsing the
possibility of the Great Community by subverting the very means of its creation.
For Dewey, democracy is, of course, more than a political form; it “is a name for
the life of free and enriching communion,” and the Great Community can only
come into being “when free social inquiry is indissolubly wedded to the art of full
and moving communication.”49 As with relations of commodity production and
consumption, exploitation, alienation, and the concentration of power are the
enemies of full participation and the right to the fruits of exchange.
As useful as Dewey’s thought is for describing the problem of the surrender-
ing of educational communication, it remains hobbled by the problem of power. R.
W. Hildreth’s reconstruction of Dewey’s theory of power takes aim at the common
critique that Dewey elaborated a theory of “power to” at the expense of a theory
of “power over.”50 Hildreth finds a robust theory of power implicit within Dewey’s
understanding of experimental inquiry. “There is, literally, no knowing without
doing,” Hildreth contends, “and no doing without power.” Moreover, power rela-
tionships do not exist in isolation; rather “every experience is itself situated and
structured by a complex transactional field of forces.”51 Dewey’s theory of power
demands not just the reconstruction of power but the reconstruction of politics
through which “change is brought about by diverse combinations of social groups,
organizations, institutions and government.”52 Therein lies the fundamental prob-
lem of the commodification of communication. Rendering communication itself
as social control and capitalist communication corrupts the very means by which
such groups could act in concert politically. Alexander Means captures this sense
of fatalism in adapting the famous phrase about the inability to imagine the end
of capitalism in stating, “It is easier to imagine we live in a hyperreal computer
simulation, where our every movement, thought, feeling, and action becomes an
optimizable data point, than to imagine we can make basic modifications to our
systems of endless accumulation and labor exploitation.”53 We agree with Hildreth
that Dewey’s theory of power can be reconstructed to account for “power over,” but
given his theory of language and the centrality of free and full communication to
his project of political change, he is unable to account for “power to” in this new era
of educational surrender and Big Data’s commodification of classroom exchanges.

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 Classroom Exchanges 89
We return to the central problem Dewey explores in The Public and Its Prob-
lems, namely, the creation of the Great Community through educational communi-
cation. The Great Community is not some “amount of aggregated collective action”
but is instead a “communal life [that] is moral, that is emotionally, intellectually,
consciously sustained.”54 Such a life comes into view and is sustained through
education, which itself is the flourishing of communication through collaborative
inquiry and wide dissemination of its fruits. Dewey recognized that with interde-
pendence comes vulnerability and the possibility that the strong may exploit and
instrumentalize the weak, but he maintains the answer to this fundamental prob-
lem is not a Rousseauian flight from the corrupting forces of civilization but “the
perfecting of the means and ways of communication of meanings.”55 However, the
sort of threats to full and free inquiry Dewey perceived, that of pecuniary research
or propaganda, are fundamentally different from the threats posed by the often
imperceptible and in any case unavoidable influence of Big Data’s behavioral rendi-
tion. Modes of inquiry and dissemination of information today must pass through
Big Data’s power matrix. The mode of mass communication that undermines the
search for the Great Community cannot be the same mode of mass communica-
tion that brings such a community into being. Put differently, the localized forms
of community Dewey’s vision posits need the internet to reach the scale of the
Great Community, yet Big Data would absorb any such attempt and render them
supportive of existing hierarchies, evacuating them of any truly subversive power.
There is neither the possibility of building a different, more democratic internet nor
of democratizing the one we have from within, yet Dewey makes just this sort of
demand in stating that “the highest and most difficult kind of inquiry and a subtle,
delicate, vivid and responsive art of communication must take possession of the
physical machinery of transmission and circulation and breathe life into it. When
the machine age has thus perfected its machinery it will be a means of life and not
its despotic master.”56 Dewey’s thought provides an interesting way to engage with
the issues of the internet, particularly his economic theorizing of language, but his
political theory lacks the power to do more than describe the Great Community.

Notes
1 John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Free Press, 1966), 4.
2 John Dewey, “The Public and Its Problems,” in The Later Works, 1925–1953, ed. Jo Ann
Boydston, vol. 2 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 323–24.
3 Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School (New York: Vintage
Books, 1995), 39.
4 Postman, 34.
5 Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1991), 22.

Volume 37 (1) 2021

90 Eastman and Hansen
6 “Global EdTech Unicorns” (Holon IQ, January 2, 2021), https://www.holoniq.com
/edtech-unicorns/.
7 Felix Richter, “Zoom’s Revenue Skyrockets on Pandemic Boost,” Statista, accessed Feb-
ruary 11, 2021, https://www.statista.com/chart/21906/zoom-revenue/.
8 Natasha Singer, “How Google Took Over the Classroom,” New York Times, May 13,
2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/technology/google-education-chrome
books-schools.html.
9 Ibid.
10 Gerrit De Vynck and Mark Bergen, “Google Classroom Users Doubled as Quaran-
tines Spread,” Bloomberg, April 9, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles
/2020-04-09/google-widens-lead-in-education-market-as-students-rush-online. In fall
2020, Google rebranded G Suite as Google Workspace, but the educational division
retains the name G Suite for Education.
11 Thomas Kurian, “How Google Cloud Is Helping During COVID-19,” Inside Google
Cloud, March 31, 2020, https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/inside-google-cloud/how
-google-cloud-is-helping-during-covid-19.
12 De Vynck and Bergen.
13 For a summary of Whittle’s business strategy as it was emerging in the late 1980s, see
Joel Rudinow, “Channel One Whittles Away at Education,” Educational Leadership 47,
no. 4 (December 1989): 70–73.
14 For how Google presents its approach to student privacy, see https://edu.google.com
/why-google/privacy-security/.
15 Singer, “How Google Took Over the Classroom.”
16 “Student Privacy Pledge,” accessed February 19, 2021, https://studentprivacypledge.org
/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Student-Privacy-Pledge-2-Pager.pdf.
17 Tony Romm, “Tech Giants Led by Amazon, Facebook and Google Spent Nearly Half
a Billion on Lobbying over the Past Decade, New Data Shows,” Washington Post, Jan-
uary 22, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/22/amazon-face
book-google-lobbying-2019/.
18 Tony Romm and Elizabeth Dwoskin, “FTC Approves Settlement with Google over You-
Tube Kids Privacy Violation,” Washington Post, July 19, 2019, https://www.washington
post.com/technology/2019/07/19/ftc-approves-settlement-with-google-over-you
tube-kids-privacy-violations/.
19 See “Appendix A” in Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale
Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” Computer Networks and ISDN Systems 30, no. 1–7
(April 1998): 107–17.
20 Ibid.
21 Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at
the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019), 71.
22 Brin and Page, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” 110.
23 Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 75.

E&C Education and Culture

 Classroom Exchanges 91
24 Ibid., 76–77.
25 Zuboff, 233–34.
26 Zuboff, 234.
27 Ibid., 96.
28 “Student Privacy Pledge.”
29 Nicholas Thompson, “The Pentagon Looks to Videogames for the Future of War,”
WIRED, June 13, 2017, https://www.wired.com/story/will-roper-pentagon-video-games/.
30 Heather Roberts-Mahoney, Alexander J. Means, and Mark Garrison, “Netflixing Human
Capital Development: Personalized Learning Technology and the Corporatization of
K–12 Education,” Journal of Education Policy 31, no. 4 (July 2016): 405–20.
31 Alexander J. Means, “Platform Learning and On-Demand Labor: Sociotechnical Pro-
jections on the Future of Education and Work,” Learning, Media & Technology 43, no. 3
(September 2018): 9.
32 Ibid., 1.
33 Kenneth J. Saltman, Scripted Bodies: Corporate Power, Smart Technologies and the Undo-
ing of Public Education (New York: Routledge, 2017).
34 Kenneth J. Saltman, “Artificial Intelligence and the Technological Turn of Public Edu-
cation Privatization: In Defense of Democratic Education,” London Review of Education
18, no. 2 (2020): 202–3.
35 Postman, The End of Education.
36 Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 294.
37 John Dewey, Experience and Nature, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, The Later Works, 1925–1953,
vol. 1 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981), 212–13.
38 Ibid., 214.
39 Fred Harris, “The Grammar of the Human Life Process: John Dewey’s New Theory of
Language,” Educational Philosophy & Theory 44, no. 1 (2012): 28.
40 Ibid.
41 See also Deron Boyles, “Dewey, Ecology, and Education: Historical and Contemporary
Debates over Dewey’s Naturalism and (Transactional) Realism,” Educational Theory
62, no. 2 (2012): 143–61.
42 Dewey, Experience and Nature, 134.
43 Ibid., 132.
44 Ibid., 133.
45 Ibid., 137.
46 Ibid., 159.
47 Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 352. Italics are the author’s.
48 Dewey, Experience and Nature, 160.
49 Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 350.
50 R. W. Hildreth, “Reconstructing Dewey on Power,” Political Theory 37, no. 6 (2009): 786.
51 Ibid., 789.
52 Hildreth, 798.

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92 Eastman and Hansen
53 Means, “Platform Learning and On-Demand Labor,” 11.
54 Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 330.
55 Ibid, 332.
56 Ibid, 350.

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K–12 Education.” Journal of Education Policy 31, no. 4 (July 2016): 405–20.

E&C Education and Culture

 Classroom Exchanges 93
Romm, Tony. “Tech Giants Led by Amazon, Facebook and Google Spent Nearly Half a
Billion on Lobbying over the Past Decade, New Data Shows.” Washington Post, January
22, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/22/amazon-facebook
-google-lobbying-2019/.
Romm, Tony, and Elizabeth Dwoskin. “FTC Approves Settlement with Google over YouTube
Kids Privacy Violation.” Washington Post, July 19, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost
.com/technology/2019/07/19/ftc-approves-settlement-with-google-over-youtube-kids
-privacy-violations/.
Rudinow, Joel. “Channel One Whittles Away at Education.” Educational Leadership 47, no. 4
(December 1989): 70–73.
Saltman, Kenneth J. “Artificial Intelligence and the Technological Turn of Public Education
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no. 2 (2020): 196–208.
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of Public Education. New York: Routledge, 2017.
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Nicholas J. Eastman is an assistant professor of educational studies at Ripon College

in Ripon, Wisconsin.

Ethan E. Hansen is a student at Ripon College in Ripon, Wisconsin.

Volume 37 (1) 2021