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AEQXXX10.1177/0741713618766645Adult Education QuarterlySmythe

Article
Adult Education Quarterly
2018, Vol. 68(3) 197­–214
Adult Learning in the © The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0741713618766645
https://doi.org/10.1177/0741713618766645
Governance, Literacies of journals.sagepub.com/home/aeq

Control, and the Work of

Adult Educators

Suzanne Smythe1

Abstract
This article reports on a study of adult literacy and learning in a public computing center
where people contend with the new literacy demands of online government and other
automated technologies. The study asks, (1) What literacy and learning practices are
associated with digital governance? (2) What pedagogies support people to navigate
digital government and automated technologies? (3) What are the broader implications
of digital government for the work of adult educators? Bringing together sociomaterial
theories of learning and methodologies of ethnographic case study, the study maps the
literacies and pedagogies of digital government in the context of Deleuze’s society of
control, arguing that digital-era governance spurs new forms of cognitive labor, new
digital literacies and new pedagogies that are reshaping adult learning and the work of
adult literacy educators. The article considers potential openings to “more than human”
research and pedagogies that reconfigure adult literacy research and practice as sites of
resistance to the control society.

Keywords
digital literacy, control society, adult learning, digital government, sociomateriality

1Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Corresponding Author:
Suzanne Smythe, Assistant Professor, Adult Literacy and Adult Education, Faculty of Education, Simon
Fraser University, #104, 515 Hastings Street West, Vancouver, BC V6B 5K3, Canada.
Email: sksmythe@sfu.ca
198 Adult Education Quarterly 68(3)

Introduction
You have to apply online, sir.
But I was a carpenter before. I’ve never been anywhere near a computer.
[. . .] I’m going ‘round in circles.

—O’Brien & Loach (2016; I, Daniel Blake)

Disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy. The man of control is undulatory,
in orbit, in a continuous network. Everywhere surfing has replaced the older sports.

—Deleuze (1992, pp. 5-6)

Ken Loach’s critically acclaimed film I, Daniel Blake (O’Brien & Loach, 2016)
introduces audiences to the everyday lives of people caught in the U.K. Government’s
(2010) “digital by default” social services apparatus. It is a dispiriting venture. Mr.
Blake, a carpenter, suffers a heart attack while at work. As he convalesces he is directed
to an automated call center to apply for employment support allowance. His dire medi-
cal condition is disputed over the phone by an anonymous case manager, and he is
referred to the national Department for Work and Pensions office to plead his case.
There he befriends a young mother who is unemployed with two children. Both do
battle to have their applications for income support recognized by human frontline
workers, who defer to automated systems for decisions regarding their files: “Your
benefits were denied, I can’t say why.” Mr. Blake turns to libraries and neighbors for
help to complete countless online forms and appeals, each time encountering new
challenges and obstacles as he runs out of money. As Mr. Blake observes in the epi-
gram opening this article, he was indeed going around in circles, undulating as Deleuze
(1992) imagined, in the United Kingdom’s digital government network.
In this article, I argue that digital government, or what has become known as digi-
tal-era governance (DEG; Margetts & Dunleavy, 2013), is a new form of bureaucracy
that ushers in new literacies, new pedagogies, and new implications for adult educa-
tion research and practice. Adult educators have traditionally played an important role
in supporting citizens to negotiate shifting literacy demands of new economies and
new technologies (Jones, 2000; Taylor, 1996). It seems timely to explore what this
literacy work entails in a new era of digital governance and automation. To this end, I
report on a 2-year ethnographic study of the literacy and learning experiences of adults
who attended a public computing center, in British Columbia, the westernmost prov-
ince of Canada, called the Digital Café. Public computing centers offer just-in-time
help with computer needs and are a growing, if understudied, site of adult education
practice (Irving & English, 2011). Many of the adults who attended the Digital Café
during our study live on the margins of digital access (Smythe & Breshears, 2017) and
attended the Café for support with just the kinds of digital government tasks exposed
in the film I, Daniel Blake. The study asks the following questions:

1. What literacy and learning practices are associated with digital government?
Smythe 199

2. What pedagogies support people to navigate digital government?

3. What are the broader implications of digital government for the work of adult
educators?

I begin with a review of literature that elaborates the concept of DEG as a new form
governance made possible by automated technologies. I consider DEG in the light of
the “control society” that Deleuze (1992) envisioned becoming possible with the new
machines of techno-capitalism. The practices of automation and other new technolo-
gies deeply challenge the primacy accorded human agency in adult learning theories
and pedagogies. I therefore turn to sociomaterial and posthuman theories (Barad,
2007; DeLanda, 2016; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2005; Fenwick & Edwards, 2013) to
capture the entanglement of humans, technologies, literacies, and other materialities in
how learning unfolded in the Digital Café. I present the study findings as a research
story (Comber, 2014), a detailed account of an encounter with DEG that unfolded one
afternoon at the Café. By way of discussion and conclusion, I consider what adult lit-
eracy educators and scholars might learn from this encounter of the new literacies,
pedagogies, and research imperatives of a control society.

Literature Review
Digital Era Governance
Margetts and Dunleavy (2013) define DEG as a transformation in the delivery of
government services that has been made possible by the Internet and by automated
technologies. When automated or “zero-touch” technologies such as sensors, cam-
eras, algorithms, “chatbots,” Automated Tracking Systems, scanners, and automated
phone systems/interactive voice response systems (IVRs) are coordinated, they form
an assemblage of machine learning that can replace human intermediaries in key
government services; automated technologies take queries in service call centers,
track the activities of users of government services, and issue fines and pay checks.
DEG leverages these technologies so that “[government] services do not ultimately
require human intervention [italics added]” (p. 6). Ironically, as DEG replaces
human frontline service workers, it also requires that citizens “do more” and “accept
the logics of isocratic administration—or ‘do-it-yourself’ government” (Margetts &
Dunleavy, 2013, p. 6).
Governments and institutions argue that DEG, especially the use of IVRs and algo-
rithms, “modernizes” government to meet the needs of a more complex citizenry with
greater needs for social services, while also facilitating the goals of austerity and fiscal
consolidation in a post–2008 global economic crisis (Government of South Australia,
2016; Organisation for Economic and Co-operative Development (OECD), 2016, p. 9;
U.K. Government, 2010). The Canadian government has described DEG as a social
benefit leading to “greater and easier access to government” and “operational effi-
ciency, flexibility and cost-effectiveness” (Industry Canada, 2015, para. 1).
200 Adult Education Quarterly 68(3)

However, antipoverty groups suggest that the promise of “greater and easier access”
to government services do not accrue to those living on the margins of digital society:
those who rely on government services but who also experience tenuous access to
digital technologies and to the skills and time required to navigate complex systems
(ACORN, 2016; Eubanks, 2018). A submission to the British Columbia ombudsper-
son titled Access Denied: Shut Out of BC’s Welfare System (BC Public Interest
Advocacy Centre, 2015) documented the consequences for low-income citizens of
that province’s shift to digital government. They noted obscure and often contradic-
tory information on government websites, long phone wait times associated with the
IVR system that often ended in disconnection or with a referral back to a website,
frequent server time-outs that resulted in the loss of hours of painstaking form filling,
and rejection of claims for essential income assistance due to small errors in data entry.
There is an incongruence, the authors of the report concluded, “between the changes
to the Ministry’s service delivery and the lives of the people that the system is purport-
edly designed to serve” (BC Public Interest Advocacy Centre, 2015, p. 3). This incon-
gruence is at the nexus of a transformation in citizen and government relations, a
password-enabled techno-state that Deleuze (1992) imagined even before the Internet
became commonplace.

The control society. In Postscript on the Societies of Control, Deleuze (1992) described
the new mutations of capitalism and bureaucracy that become possible with networked
machines. Deleuze observed that Foucault’s disciplinary society is organized around
“spaces of enclosure” (p. 3)—the hospital, the school, the prison, the university, the
workplace. Foucault (1995) argued that people are categorized and indexed to these
spaces as individual subjects and as members of a population. But Deleuze (1992) pre-
dicted the erosion of these spaces of enclosure and the inevitable demise of disciplinary
societies “whatever the length of their expiration periods” (p. 3). He proposed that the
next iteration of power after the disciplinary society would be the “society of control,” a
“networked power” (p. 5) in which “individuals have become dividuals and masses,
samples, data, markets and banks” (Deleuze, 1992, p. 5). Williams (2005) further
described this dividual as “a human agent that is endlessly divisible and reducible to data
representations” (p. 23). Whereas a disciplinary society is concerned with the location
and behavior of a physical body, the control society is concerned with how this body is
materialized as data (Savat, 2013, p. 40). Deleuze imagined passcodes and machines
assembling humans, not as lifelong projects to be molded and worked on as in the disci-
plinary society but as the “constituent parts” of these machines and of capitalism itself
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2005, p. 458). Deleuze writes,

[I]n the societies of control [. . .] what is important is no longer a signature or a number

but a code: that code is a password [. . .] the numerical language of control is made up of
codes that mark access to information or reject it. (Deleuze, 1992, p. 5)

Digital sociologists argue that a password-driven control society is well under way
(Bogard, 2009; Neuman, 2009; Savat, 2013). In his Deleuzian analysis of password
and zero-touch technologies, Bogard (2009) observed,
Smythe 201

[W]hat matters most in these assemblages is not that your body is visible [. . .] but that
your information is available and matches a certain pattern or profile. Matching
information, in fact, becomes a precondition for visibility in control societies. (p. 19)

With this new society of control comes new forms of literacy and learning. The ques-
tion of how adults who already live on the margins of digital access contend with these
new literacies of “matching information” and make themselves “visible” in computer
networks merits the attention of scholars and practitioners of adult learning.

Sociomateriality and adult digital literacies.  When it comes to using computers, things do
not go as planned; machines (and people) do unexpected things and our status as
“users,” “subscribers,” “codes,” or “data” is always precarious, requiring continuous
status retrieval, renewal, and updates. The outcomes of these interactions are often
indeterminate and arbitrary, as when Daniel Blake is informed, “Your application was
denied, I can’t say why.” However, current policies and frameworks designed to
enhance digital literacy skills for adults insist on a rational world in which the technolo-
gies of digital government, and of computers in general, are predictable and transpar-
ent. Struggles with technology are frequently attributed to individual skill deficits.
Bélanger and Carter (2009), proposing a framework to measure digital skills among
Canadian adults, demonstrated this perspectives in observing, “A substantial percent-
age of the population lacks the skills necessary to effectively interact with the govern-
ment online” (p. 133). The OECD’s (2012) Survey of Adult Skills: Problem-Solving in
Technology-Rich Environments similarly proposed a measurement framework for adult
digital skills in OECD member states, where the “demands of the digital environment”
(p. 11) are presented as neutral “stimuli” (p. 11). In such iterations, there is little sign of
software pop-ups, website time-outs, tricky questions, or multistep verification proto-
cols that can discourage and even actively work against digital competency. These con-
figurations of digital skill enact what the physicist and feminist philosopher Karen
Barad (2003) has called “Cartesian thinking” (p. 812), which positions humans in peda-
gogical discourse as “pure cause or pure effect” (p. 812). Individuals are either held
responsible and accountable for processes that are often out of their control (Braidotti,
2013) or, in the vein of techno-determinism, considered powerless in the face of supe-
rior machine intelligence (Johri, 2011).
Fenwick and Edwards (2013) propose a sociomaterial approach to adult education
research that counters this Cartesian thinking and captures the complexity and indeter-
minacy of learning processes. They argue that the agencies of adult learners should be
studied within the flow of the material world, where matter is not merely a background
to human actions, or a barrier to overcome, but is constitutive to how learning unfolds.
This is particularly relevant for the study of learning with digital technologies. Hayles
(2012) has observed that it is common practice to think of digital technologies and
their effects as immaterial, because virtual worlds and flows of data cannot be seen or
touched. Yet she and other scholars of digital literacies (e.g., Bhatt & de Roock, 2013;
Edwards, 2010; Fenwick & Edwards, 2013; Gourlay, 2015; Gourlay, Hamilton, &
Lea, 2013; Hamilton, 2016) observe that these technologies are grounded in material
processes that order people’s lives and transform bodies. Whereas sociocultural
202 Adult Education Quarterly 68(3)

approaches to digital literacy research might attend to “the human, with intention,
doing something with materials” (Kuby, 2017, p. 883), sociomaterial theories of learn-
ing attend to how “materials transform meaning rather than convey it” (Gourlay, 2015,
p. 489). This posthuman, or more-than-human ontology, de-centers the “agency of the
user” (Gourlay, 2015) and attends to “the entanglement of the fleshy and the technical
and the materiality of things” (Edwards, 2010, p. 7).
Entanglement is mobilized in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987/2005) concept of
assemblages, defined in the original French term as agencements, the coming together
(or apart) of “components of things” (DeLanda, 2016, p. 5). For example, rather than
study the agencies or capacities of a “low-skilled adult” to complete an online form on
a government website, the sociomaterial study of digital literacy assemblages that I
present below attends to how agencies are distributed (de Freitas & Sinclair, 2014, p.
38) across a digital government assemblage that entails hand-fingers-mouse-key-
board-government website-skills discourses-pedagogy-research methods-affective
flows-gestures. As Barad, Dolphijn, and Van der Tuin (2012) remind us, this is not to
suggest a “democratic” distribution of these agencies. Educators and researchers want
to be alert to the “particularities of power imbalances” (para. 13) in learning assem-
blages, particularly, I would add, in assemblages of human-machine learning.

Study Context, Methodology, Method

Study Context
The Digital Café is located in a bustling community center in a midsize city in British
Columbia. Learners, tutors, desktop computers, laptops, power cords, tables, and
chairs are crammed into a little room near the Center’s reception area, and two after-
noons a week the Café buzzes with activity. Like many community-based adult liter-
acy programs in Canada and elsewhere, the Café’s education activities rely on
volunteer tutors who receive a brief orientation and then learn the practices of one-to-
one tutoring “on the job” (Belzer, 2006).
There were 234 unique visitors to the Café during our 2-year study. Many were job
seekers between the ages of 45 and 70, new immigrants to Canada, with formal educa-
tion levels ranging from Grade 8 to graduate degrees that are not recognized by local
employers or higher education institutions. Most did not receive digital education in
school and/or did not have sufficient income to participate in more formal digital edu-
cation, to afford home Internet, or to purchase their own devices. A core group attended
regularly during the study and beyond, but most came to the Café for help with press-
ing matters, attending for a few weeks or months, usually until they moved away or
found a job. A few months into the study, we noticed that more people began to arrive
at the Café who were referred by government agencies for help with online tasks
including making online job applications and applying for subsidized housing, social
assistance, or disability benefits. Just as they were for Daniel Blake, these encounters
with digital government in the Digital Café were time-consuming and tedious and
came to dominate our field notes because they implied new literacies, new pedagogies,
and new challenges for research that we wanted to understand.
Smythe 203

Study Methodology
The study follows an ethnographic methodology (Toohey, 2018) enfolding participa-
tion observation, digital documentation (audio and video recording and screen cap-
ture), informal conservations with learners and tutors, and documentation of these
activities in field notes, vignettes, and stories. Ethnographic methods are well suited to
the study of sociomaterial assemblages. As Youdell and McGimpsey (2014) observe,
what matters in assemblages is just what ethnographies strive to generate, in “fine-
grained detail of the components [. . .] the nuances of the productive relations between
these components” (p. 121). When they attend to the material and the social together
ethnographic stories can open new meanings that are at once “in-the-moment” and
“far reaching” (Youdell & McGimpsey, 2014, p. 121).
The research team included two doctoral student research assistants and me.
As often as possible, two of us were present when the Café was open so that together
we documented over 90 hours of human–computer activity. Our recruitment approach
in this public setting was to inform newcomers to the Café that a study about how
people learn with computers was under way. If these people returned to the Café, we
invited them into the study through written consent and then included them in our field
notes, conversations, and storied accounts.

Study Methods and Modes of Analysis

Observant participation.  When we first began our study, we adopted a conventional
“participant observer” approach (deWalt & deWalt, 2002) to ethnographic data gen-
eration, sitting away or to the side and writing furiously our observations of what we
could see and hear. This challenged our ethical sensibilities as researchers and as edu-
cators. We found we could not sit apart and observe as people struggled to enter their
email password, or to navigate verification protocols, knowing that a mistake could
result in exclusion from accounts that are gateways to vital resources such as their
income support benefits. So, when asked for help, or when we saw things going awry
and no other tutor was available, we worked with people side by side to accomplish
the task at hand. We learned about the workings of DEG sitting with people and com-
puters, holding in-the-moment conversations about what they were seeing and doing
(Attar, 2005) and, when possible, making field notes and audio and/or video record-
ings of these encounters.
Ingold (2011) captures the sensibility of this side-by-side colearning as “joining
with learners in the same currents of practical activity, and by learning to attend to
things—as would any novice practitioner—in terms of what they afford in the contexts
of what has to be done” (p. 314). Ingold (2013) rejects the concept of bias in anthro-
pological research because he believes that it is the work of researchers to learn with
people, rather than about people (pp. 3-8). Following Barad (2007), Ingold (2013)
argues that the very concept of participant-observation is an artifact of a Cartesian
sensibility that presumes researchers, along with our methodological apparatus, stand
apart from world to document its truths. As Barad (2007, p. 185) writes, “[w]e do not
obtain knowledge by standing outside the world, ‘we’ know because we are already of
204 Adult Education Quarterly 68(3)

the world, we are part of the world in its differential becoming.” “Participant”’ and
“observer” are not separate subjectivities; rather, “one depends on the other” (Ingold,
2013, p. 5). Ingold (2013) calls this stance observant participation, which eschews the
pretensions of ethnography as expert-driven “description of the people” and recom-
mits to the anthropological goal of learning and doing with people and folding the
stories of this learning back into the flow of practice where they matter most.

Affective intensities.  There were moments of observant participation in the Digital Café
when I was propelled along in the flow of digital learning with excitement, frustration,
curiosity. My stomach sometimes tightened with anxiety or worry, often when one of
the Café participants became frustrated or anxious. Our field notes, memos, and
recordings are laced with such moments when affective flows called us to attention,
when we wondered, “What is going on here?” Leander and Boldt (2013) call such
moments “affective intensities,” when components in assemblages come together or
split apart, when boundaries or things-as-usual are disrupted, and when we are affected
and perhaps also affect others (Davies & Gannon, 2009, p. 12). MacLure (2013) simi-
larly describes these as moments when our data “glows” (p. 661) or calls out to us.
Ehret, Hohlett, and Jocius (2016) call these “felt focal moments” (p. 355) in which
they felt in their study how “matter comes to matter” (p. 358) in an echoing voice, in a
classroom seating arrangement that produced exclusions, social orderings, and new
potential for action. Attending to affective intensities as a mode of analysis alerted us
to the trouble spots of digital government, to places of “incongruence” and power
imbalances (Barad et al., 2012), and also to new possibilities.

Experiments in documentation.  Each member of the research team “wrote up” field
notes, using word processing programs and OneNote to embed comments, audio and
video clips, questions, images, and sometimes references to other field notes or
vignettes that the research team members had created. We experimented in the writing
of descriptive vignettes, and research stories (Comber, 2014) that we shared with
learners and tutors when we visited the Café, inviting their comment: Why do you
think passwords give people so much trouble? What would make it easier to apply for
jobs online? In response, many learners named arbitrary occurrences as those that
gave them the most trouble: an outdated browser that made Web pages look odd, an
online form that crashed at the last minute. Others observed that digital environments
changed often—just when they thought they had learned to use a particular site, the
design or requirements changed. Many also expressed joy and a sense of accomplish-
ment when they learned a new skill.
Working with these insights-in-practice and following Davies’s (2014) “experi-
ments in documentation,” I experimented in writing research stories that attended to
not only what people said and did, as is the custom in conventional ethnographies
(Smythe et al., 2017), but also to nonhuman and preintentional phenomena: gestures,
silences, the doings of the computer, screen and mouse, affective flows (shrugs, laugh-
ter, frowns). We documented over 40 encounters with DEG at the Café that included
recovering lost passcodes, completing online forms for housing, child care and
Smythe 205

disability benefits, and making job applications. I have selected to re-present the story
of one such encounter, involving a participant of the Café, Sharon; her tutor Malcolm;
and a job application, where many of these troublesome phenomena and more
unfolded. As Bhatt and De Roock (2013, p. 27) remind us, in assemblage thinking,
these methods of selection, observation, documentation, and my own researcher body
are “always and already entangled” in the phenomena we pursue, re-presenting, but
also reconfiguring worlds. In re-presenting this encounter, I write as an “observant
participant” pausing in the moments of affective intensities to consider the new litera-
cies and pedagogies of digital government.

Findings
Sharon was a regularly participant in the Digital Café for several months in the Fall
and Winter of 2015-2016. She had recently become unemployed, and to maintain her
eligibility for income support from the Ministry of Social Services, she was required
to make as many online employment applications as possible each day and to provide
evidence of this activity in weekly online reports that were tracked by the Ministry.
The Ministry contracts out training in how to apply for these online jobs to a local
employment agency (heretofore referred to as LEA), but Sharon needed more help
with email and writing than LEA was able to offer, so they referred Sharon to the
Digital Café. Sharon often worked with Malcolm, a volunteer who is also a university
student. I found them together when I arrived one Wednesday afternoon.

Malcolm and Sharon were sitting sit side-by-side at a table looking into the screen of
Sharon’s laptop computer. As I entered, Sharon waved a paper at me, laughing, “I work
in a casino!”

I am surprised: “What?”

Malcolm reaches across the table and turns over the paper in Sharon’s hand. His finger
slides along the handwritten text of an address for a local casino. I am wondering about
the connection between this address and the website of an insurance company on Sharon’s
computer screen.

I ask, “So when you go to the website you can’t find the casino?”

Malcolm and Sharon burst in together: “No, no, no.” Sharon laughs.

Malcolm explains to me: “She [Sharon] didn’t know what a casino was, I showed her on
google images what it was, she said that’s not the work for her.”

I joke with Sharon: “You didn’t want to work in a casino?”

Sharon laughs again, “It’s work for young people, not for me.”

I ask her, “Does [Local Employment Agency] help you with this job search?”
206 Adult Education Quarterly 68(3)

Sharon shrugs, “Yeah I check on the website, they give us a list [of advertised jobs] and
we go and apply.”

I reply, “But they don’t necessarily . . . what do they do?”

Sharon: “They don’t help you.”

It is in LEA’s interest that Sharon apply for as many jobs as possible, even if some are
not suitable for her as a single mother of young children who is not able to work at
night. The more applications their clients make, the more likely is LEA to win future
government contracts. This is a point of tension and contradiction in the work of the
Café, as volunteer tutors invest considerable time helping people apply for jobs for
which they are not well-suited or qualified.
But Sharon and Malcolm laugh at the prospect of her working in a casino. Sharon
“unfolds herself” (Jackson, 2010, p. 580) in this moment, becoming different to the
“overcoded, essentialized category” (Jackson, 2010, p. 579) of the “low-skilled
worker” that sent Sharon to the LEA in the first place. Sharon strikes out on a differ-
ent, perhaps more promising and also transgressive tack, disregarding the casino
jobs she was asked to apply for and picking up a business card she had been given at
a job fair.

“And what about this? What is this?” She holds the card up for Malcolm to see. He
explains, “That’s another business, that’s the insurance company.”

Sharon points to the screen: “I applied, in the morning, I sent them an email but they
refused to receive it.”

Malcolm: “Why?”

Sharon repeats, “The email went but they refuse to receive it.”

Malcolm offers possible explanations: “I think it’s automatic.”

We are all studying the screen together looking for the email the insurance company
refused to receive.

I ask, “Maybe it’s the wrong email address?”

Sharon sighs and is talking louder, “No, not the wrong email. Let me show you,” she
is checking the email address on the screen, still holding the business card in the air.
Malcolm is still not convinced the problem is with the email. He explains, “They
filter it in such a way that they will bounce back any resume that’s not related to the
job.”

We all study the screen again.

Smythe 207

“Affective intensities” (Leander & Boldt, 2013), excited voices, frowning into screens,
frequently erupted in the Café around this picky matching work (Bogard, 2009) of
entering email addresses and passcodes accurately. Sharon is new to keyboarding, and
attends carefully to the arbitrary bits of code, searching for the keys that produce that
code, tapping slowly, checking and rechecking the inputs on the screen, and sometimes
losing her place and pressing the wrong key. It’s so easy to make small mistakes, the
consequences of which are amplified by the possibility of a rejected job application or
sanction from the Ministry if she cannot show that she has successfully submitted an
application. Uncertain, Sharon searches among her papers on the table beside her.

“Let me show you. You see?” Sharon has found the email address from the insurance
company.

She points to an address in the “recipient” field of the email as all three of us peer into the
screen. I read aloud the auto-reply text: “Technical issues of permanent failure [. . .]”
“Oh” says Malcolm. He reads the email text in Sharon’s inbox aloud under his breath and
interprets the gist of the message: “Google tried to deliver your email but it was user
invalid.”

I am still thinking about the filter that potential employers use. “Is it a thing the
[employers] is doing or is it just an email mistake?” Malcolm and Sharon are studying the
screen and don’t answer.

Sharon, her voice rising in confusion, asks: “Is it a mistake on my behalf?”

Sharon and Malcolm read the email address on the screen again together. Then they look
at the business card and compare both texts. They discuss whether the name in the email
address is “Marian” or “Marion.”

Malcolm: “Oh it should be Marion. That’s why.”

Sharon asks, “So what can I do, can I resend it with the correct email? How do I?”

The skills to correct the email address, reattach her resume, and resend the email with
the “cover letter” introductory text stretch Sharon’s expertise. Another patron of the
Café has called Malcolm over for help, so I respond to Sharon:

“You can copy the message you wrote in the old email and create a new email message
with the right address.”

Sharon is pointing to the email field on the screen. “Compose?”

“Yes.”

Sharon reads the email address on the card and says each letter and number in the email
address aloud as she keys it into the address field of her email program. It is slow going.
208 Adult Education Quarterly 68(3)

I am checking over her shoulder. Sharon tries to highlight and copy the text but it’s not
working. Not wanting to take the mouse from her, I put my hand over hers and push her
finger down with mine so she has the haptic sensation of the left click and then our hands
move together as we drag to highlight the text.

But after repeated attempts we still can’t copy the original email into the new field. I start
to feel anxious, I can’t see any reason why the cut and paste should not work.

I wave to Malcolm to come back over to us: “How can we . . .?” Malcolm walks back and
points at the screen where Sharon should put her cursor. His gaze moves from her hand
on the mouse and back to the screen as he guides her actions with hand gestures of his
own: “Minimize this [pointing to the minus sign on the screen] and then click and select
from this window, and then open the other window again and right click.” For this last
click, Malcolm briefly takes over the mouse. “Yup. Copy, go back to here . . .”

The email message is copied then pasted.

Malcolm: “So now you need to attach the resume.”

Cut, copy, and paste is one of the most difficult of digital literacy practices. It involves
haptic perception (Mangen, 2008, p. 405), a kinesthetic assemblage of hand-finger-
mouse-cursor-screen as when, Mangen (2008) describes, “we click with the computer
mouse, we sense the mouse click both through the receptors on the skin on our fingers,
as well as through the position and movement of our hand and fingers” (p. 417). We
have noticed in our time at the Digital Café that this embodied digital literacy practice
is a struggle for new users of computers who need more practice with the mouse. But
we’re not done yet. I notice a grammatical error in the body of the email message. Is
this the time for a lesson in prepositions?

“I look forward to hearing from you” I read. I point to the bottom of the email and show
Sharon. “You have written, ‘I look forward to hearing for you.’ It should be from you.” I
am pointing to the word for on the screen and Sharon orients her mouse and deletes it. I
reach over and type in the word from.

Sharon: “Done?”

Suzanne: Yes, done. Now we need to attach the resume.

Amid the pressures and busy-ness of the Café it was a matter of chance that I noticed
such a small but consequential error. I made the correction, because once again, in this
digital governance assemblage, small mistakes are magnified.

Discussion
What literacy and learning practices are entailed in this digital government assem-
blage? What are the implications of these literacy and learning practices for the work
Smythe 209

of adult educators? We might observe that much of the activity in this assemblage was
propelled by nonhumans: the government monitoring system, the email that bounced
back, the specter of a job application rejected by an algorithm. Affective flows of anxi-
ety, confusion, even laughter, the haptic sensation of the mouse click that is vital to
making the cursor move on the screen, are all entangled in digital literacies. Attending
to these entanglements of nonhuman and human agencies offers insights into the digi-
tal literacy pedagogies of a control society.

Digital Literacy as Cognitive Labor

Sharon came to the Digital Café because, as Bogard (2009) has observed, she needed
to make herself visible to the Ministry’s Automated Tracking System. This entailed
detail-oriented and time-consuming tasks as indeed citizens are asked to “do more”
(Margetts & Dunleavy, 2013) in the era of digital governance. Uploading so many job
resumes a week, checking emails, and logging in and out of government portals kept
Sharon, Malcolm, and many other participants and tutors in the Digital Café very busy.
The “efficiencies” of digital government seem to be generated by replacing the labor,
and the responsibility, of human government employees with the cognitive labor of
low-income citizens and their volunteer tutors.
For de Freitas and Sinclair (2016) cognitive labor implies the exploitation of labor
in the production of “knowledge, information, affect and communication” (p. 222).
Many experience cognitive labor as alienating because it is continuous, seemingly
without limits. Just as the “dividuated” subject of the control society is “never fin-
ished” (Deleuze, 1992), cognitive labor seems never ending, particularly for those
who rely on automated government social service apparatus.

Embodied and Automated Digital Literacies

The primacy accorded to accurate keyboarding skills is but one example of the new
matching literacies of DEG (Bogard, 2009). Sharon, like other low-wage workers and
new writers of English, are also likely to encounter Automated Tracking Systems,
robots that reject applications in which spelling, grammar, and “key words” in the
email and cover letter do not match “native speaker” norms (Rieucau, 2015). This
high-stakes emphasis on language accuracy was the impetus for my correction of
Sharon’s for to from in her email introduction.
In her study of automated job application processes in three European countries,
Rieucau (2015) found that online employment application processes privilege digital
literacy and language skills that are unevenly distributed in communities. Otherwise
qualified people compete for low-wage employment on the same plane as those with
greater proficiency with computers, and with greater command of dominant language
norms and conventions, even when these skills are not required for the work for which
they are applying. These are moments when discourses of individual agency collide
with the embodied and cognitive demands of literacy as code matching. Automated
technologies are not neutral backdrops to human activity, they actively produce mate-
rial constraints and possibilities.
210 Adult Education Quarterly 68(3)

New Pedagogies of the Control Society

Sharon’s story also suggests tensions in adult literacy pedagogies in public computing
spaces. Entering data and codes into online domains are high-stakes material practices
that are consequential to lives. These are not moments to engage in “trial-and-error”
learning experimentation (van Dijk, 2006) or to leave people to figure things out by
themselves in a “do-it-yourself” digital pedagogy (Matzat & Sadowsky, 2012). New
users of computers need opportunities for engaged practice with machines that support
haptic perception, typing accuracy, affinities between machines and humans, and criti-
cal awareness of the workings of DEG that might provide some resistance to its alien-
ating effects. The cognitive labor demands of DEG risk overtaking this vital experiential
learning. Knowing when to do for people and when to support this play and experi-
mentation is the dance of adult literacy pedagogy in public computing.
Malcolm’s pedagogical dance is deft and rhythmic. He mentors Sharon, offers
advice, watches and waits, and then moves in when he senses Sharon–the keyboard–
the email software have reached the edge of their capacities. These sociomaterial
bonds of affinity also made it possible for me to place my hand on Sharon’s, creating
together with the mouse the haptic perception of the “click” to cut and paste the email
text and move things along. Affective flows and intensities forge new connections and
intradependencies that counter the hyperindividuality of a passcode-mediated control
society and is making new learning possible (Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, 2010). Deleuze
and Guattari (1987/2005) might call these affective intensities desiring, a line of flight
between “what is and what could be” (Leander & Boldt, 2013, p. 37).

Conclusion and Implications for Literacy Research

and Practice
In The Posthuman, Rosi Braidotti (2013) calls for a more ethical and empowering
relationship between humans and machines. She argues that human–machine collabo-
rations can help us make our way through the many problems of our present and of our
uncertain future. Yet she laments a “cruel political economy” (p. 90) that has harnessed
the potential of new technologies to serve the techno-capital interests of the few. I
presented in this article but one story, a mapping of one assemblage within this much
larger territory, where the pleasures and potential of digital technologies for improved
lives risk being subsumed in the “automation of inequality” (Eubanks, 2018). The
work of adult literacy educators also risks becoming limited to supporting the litera-
cies of code-matching and other modes of digital control.
But when Deleuze (1992) said that the technologies of the control society are inde-
terminate, it is because life is always becoming and cannot be known in advance. If we
are already of the world (Barad, 2007, p. 185), then at every moment, as the story of
Sharon and Malcolm suggests, there is an opportunity to intervene in the world’s
becoming (Barad, 2007). This opens DEG to pedagogic and theoretical disruption. In
this, adult education can become a site of conceptual and theoretical gathering, eschew-
ing traditional epistemic and research boundaries (Gourlay, Hamilton, & Lea, 2013;
Smythe 211

Smythe, et al., 2017) to engage with matters of concern (Latour, 2004) that unfold in
Sharon’s story—those of automated inequalities, hyperindividualization, futures of
work, precarious citizenship, and more—and to imagine and enact new solutions and
new pedagogies out of a society of control.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Acknowledgments
The author thanks Angelpreet Singh and Sherry Breshears doctoral student RAs and insightful
‘observant participants’ in the Digital Café. The author also thanks reviewers of the original
manuscript and editors for their thoughtful comments that improved this work.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article: This research is supported by the Canadian Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Congress Insight Development Grant No. 430-2013-000014.

ORCID iD
Suzanne Smythe https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0543-3879

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Author Biography
Suzanne Smythe is Assistant Professor in adult literacy and adult education in the Faculty of
Education at Simon Fraser University. Her community-based research is concerned with the
literacies of automated technologies, digital equity, and participatory technology design. She is
also interested in the intersections of educational policy and relational ontologies and is a co-
author of the 2018 book Disrupting Boundaries in Education Research and Practice (Cambridge
University Press) with Cher Hill, Margaret MacDonald, Diane Dagenais, Nathalie Sinclair, and
Kelleen Toohey.
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