I'm losing feeling in my campus
A lament for lost discourse spaces in the postdigital university. When the students no longer carry Sharpies to the bathroom, where does the discourse go?
My last post reflected on the feelings I experience in physical spaces at universities, and how these have changed since the first year I attended undergrad (18 years ago — yep, half my life ago. Yikes.) I referred to the universities of today as “postdigital”, but I didn’t really explain what I meant by that, or what its implications are. Universities, like most other places we inhabit now, are places where digital has happened.
Digital was starting to happen at Deakin back in 2006. Its LMS at the time was Blackboard, and all Arts undergraduates were required to complete at least one fully-online elective. According to my academic transcript, I chose a unit called “Great debates: Unfinished business of the past”, which I honestly cannot remember but apparently aced? Given I don’t remember, it seems unfair to claim the credit.
All other units were taught on campus, and assignments were submitted as stapled, coversheeted bundles of Reflex paper to a little ground-floor office that opened at 9.00 am each day. (Since you asked, yes — approximately 100% of assignments got slipped under that door at 8.59 on the morning after their due dates.) Of course, we were already typing up all those assignments on computers and the penmanship on our plagiarism declarations was atrocious.
Today, of course, digital has unequivocally happened at Australian universities. I’m not sure what happened to that submission office at Deakin, but whatever it does these days I’m very sure it hasn’t seen a coversheet in years. (To anyone at Deakin these days — do you know?) That question is a postdigital question.
My previous post about affective and agentic spaces was focused on social spaces rather than academic ones, and it was triggered by my impulsive decision to duck into RMIT Building 80 to use the bathroom on my way to the station one afternoon.
First I noticed this on the back of the toilet door:
This little exchange reminded me of the graffiti and political stickers that used to plaster bathroom walls and stalls at Deakin. These spaces were alive with supporting and conflicting messages rendered in marker and poster paper — about feminism and femininity, about sex, about rage, about friendship. They were discourse spaces. I realised this was the first bathroom graffiti I’d seen at a university in over a decade.
Then, as I was leaving the building, I noticed this digital poster display on the wall in the ground floor study space:
Nothing at all to do with the messaging, of course (though you’re welcome to try the QR code, I’m sure it’s still active), but everything to do with the voice. It’s the institution’s voice, speaking to the students, rather than the students speaking to each other.
So I began to wonder where the discourse had gone.
It is, of course, lovely that student bathrooms are kept clean. There are many open, flexible, inviting spaces for students to meet and study and play and learn and eat on university campuses now. (RMIT Building 80 is one of them — it’s where the Society 5.0 Ethics event was held a few weeks ago, in fact.)
But when the student lounge walls are digitally curated, when the Zoom chat is recorded along with each lecture, when the students no longer carry Sharpies — where does the discourse go?