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June 18 - July 4, 2023
Charismatic leaders confirm and amplify their audiences’ existing ideologies to cultivate their appeal, even as they may paint visions of a better world.
The incongruities between the reality of a school system that is constantly “tinkering” with reforms and the imaginary of an unchanged and mechanical factory invite the question: why has the social imaginary of the factory model persisted?
What seem like purely technical resources—such as access to a specifically designed computer—are in fact social and political in nature, embedded in histories of learning and childhood that constitute much of how we envision technological development today.
When it came up against the messiness of day-to-day life, OLPC’s charisma thus became brittle.
The cultural change that One Laptop per Child and Paraguay Educa sought was neither effortless nor inevitable; it was instead prone to breakdown and in constant need of repair.
What we find when we examine why these children did not engage with computers is not an uninteresting mass of automaton “schoolers” but a set of diverse children with their own opinions, motivations, and lives—ones that may not include an often frustrating-to-use laptop.
The rejection of the XO laptop by half of the program’s child-beneficiaries challenges the notion that computers—and especially these specific computers, designed as they were to elicit programming from children—are somehow radically different, and far more compelling, than previous technological innovations, making it safe to ignore the tepid (generally incremental at best) results of the introduction of previous technologies touted as solutions or replacements for traditional classroom education.
In this way, the machine itself was “unruly”: its breakage destabilized the meanings that OLPC and Paraguay Educa hoped to attach to it, as well as some of the meanings that some children themselves had started to develop.
Rather than transforming their social worlds, these youth remained embedded in them, still beholden to the structural limitations of gender, place, and social class.
this suggests that their interests were not innate but were influenced by their social worlds.
In short, laptop uses and meanings were socially created and socially mediated—and, at times, operated under different cultural logics in Caacupé, where the imaginary of the technically precocious boy did not seem to be legible.
The trouble comes when these charismatic performances become too removed from the messiness of daily life and arc of history.
This is the paradox of charismatic technologies. Their charisma involves, by definition, utopian promises for what cultural changes the technology will easily bring about. When even small steps toward these cultural
Yet participants risk getting caught in these charismatic visions, fixated on a future that may well be unattainable in lieu of a present that might be messy and difficult but is real and here.
Educational reform efforts have often been techno-utopian, and charismatic technologies from radio to the internet have been hailed as saviors for an educational system that appears perpetually on the brink of failure.
