Focal digital devices and meaning in digital education: An ethnographic study of Ghanaian schools

Abstract

Although extant research has addressed the importance of focal things and practices, as well as human values when engaging with digital technologies, a lot remains to be understood about the role of digital focal things in digital education. The paper argues that while Albert Borgmann understood digital devices as objects that render meaningless engagement, based on an ethnographic study of junior high schools in the Central region of Ghana, digital focal things can indeed invite meaningful learning experiences in digital education. However, despite positive gains there are also other aspects to this media ecology that raise tensions such as the trading and selling of student information and students becoming surveillance commodities. This paper begins with an overview of Borgmann’s philosophy, followed by an outline of methods and then moves to an analysis of digital focal things in the context of junior high schools in Ghana. The paper ends with concluding remarks.

In the past and present, people would gather to tell stories around a campfire, a hearth. Fire warming bodies as they recounted tales to each other—face-to-face, making meaning, and deriving values. Before the advent of the internet and communications platforms such as Zoom, Messenger, and Skype, for example, we would not have been able to ‘see’ friends and family from other parts of the world unless we visited them physically. We would not have been able to gather face-to-face to tell each other stories. Like the campfire around which stories were passed from kin to kin, mobile devices, we might say, have now become the technology around and through which we construct meaning from our experiences with each other. These devices have become focal digital things. Instead of remembering each other as mere voices, or letters or pictures in far off places, we can now remember each other in living and moving colour such as Tik Tok clips, Zooms, or YouTube videos.

Upon further consideration one can also begin to notice tensions between an individual’s everyday engagement with technology and meaningfulness. For example, philosopher of technology, Albert Borgmann (2011) wonders if digital devices are simply objects of convenience. He claims it must be so inasmuch as our experiences are mediated by a range of digital devices often designed to provide a product or service in a disengaged manner which relieves us of effort. We become distanced from the process, physically, emotionally, and morally. This practice is described as “device paradigm,” which relates to how devices disburden people by providing goods and services without effort required but which are also distanced from one’s values. Sherry Turkle (2011) makes the same point when she argues the ubiquity of digital devices has changed “everyday engagement by stripping practices as values” (in Chughtai, 2020).

Borgmann’s social critique is based on the concept of the device paradigm as the formative principle of a technological society that aims at efficiency, and one might add with increased surveillance. In line with the device paradigm, “modern technology separates off the good or commodity it delivers from the contexts and means of delivery. The device paradigm offers gains in efficiency, but at the cost of distancing us from reality” (Feenberg, 2000: p. 298). While Borgmann would see the usefulness of many devices, where contexts and commodities are separated life becomes drained of meaning. As Andrew Feenberg reasons “Individual involvement with nature and other human beings is reduced to a bare minimum, and possession and control become the highest values” (p. 299).

Borgmann (1999) argues that new technologies can render us disengaged with our environments or even with each other—they can shape us to behave in a different way to pre-technological discussions. On this view, it is focal things that bring individuals together in an engaging manner not devices—digital devices and focal things are two mutually exclusive categories. Focal things may comprise many purposes, but their main purpose with which they are imbued is that of encouraging involvement, effort and engagement with everyday things (p. 168). As critiqued by Verbeek (2002), Borgmann’s notion of engagement gets lost in a shift of meaning. He argues that the ambiguity between the twofold meaning of the term engagement – exertion and meaningfulness is problematic. What Borgmann does not see is the role information technology plays in culture does not comprise a substitute for reality, but in mediating reality it does not necessarily estrange people from one another; rather it enhances contact (Verbeek, 2002).

Attached to focal things are focal practices. Archetypal examples of focal practices are cooking and gardening as well as running and playing games (Chughtai, 2020). These practices can occur at individual levels such as running and gardening, but also in group scenarios (games) and macro levels such as cultural ceremonies. For instance, football is an exemplar of a focal practice: “It creates a sense of being there to support one’s favorite team and part of the game, along with family and friends, in an immersive experience” (p. 2). Another exemplar is the “culture of the table,” which implies complex symbolic involvement with focal things such as food or a dinner table. These focal things also involve people and places in a holistic that is meaningful. There is effort being undertaken to attend to these things and events. It is not a passive act.

These focal things serve two primary purposes: as mentioned previously, they offer a centre to individual and group practices, which is typically found in the home; this might be symbolic but also a source of familial values. They also invite involvement within this centre with practices such as storytelling and, thus, meaning making. Focal things are the artefacts that allow us to engage with the world; they determine way of life. As well as providing a centre to our lives, focal things and practices disclose the world: time, place, heritage (Borgmann, 2000). Like Heidegger, when Borgmann discusses technology, he is referring to a technological way of disclosing the world to people instead of just talking about the technologies themselves.

For Borgmann, living a good life is one of engagement which centres on focal things. These things give meaning to life and the focal practices that are espoused by them. He argues that technological devices do not add value and can’t be seen as a method of facilitating a good life (Chughtai, 2020). Here, the most significant trait of technology is the manner in which it disburdens us. By this, he means that devices decrease the effort required to accomplish tasks which is why people use technologies at all. Devices do this by creating availability. As Borgmann illustrates, when we wish to heat our house it is no longer necessary to gather wood, chop it and so forth. All we need to do is turn on the thermostat and the heat is available readily. The effort that was required in a pre-technological situation is now relegated to machinery. It is in this manner that heating becomes a commodity to be consumed without direct involvement in how it came to be. This disburdening trait is central to making sense of technology on Borgmann’s view. In releasing people from their efforts to do things, technologies alter the way people become involved with reality, the way they experience reality. This is a similar argument made by Heidegger who speaks of alienation from the act of doing.

Devices encourage a new way of dealing with themselves than with pre-technological objects. For Borgmann (1984), a device is an object that provides a product or service as a commodity, with no effort required from the person using the device. However, although devices might be able to provide comfort they are different to focal things which add value and lead to focal practices which are the acts connected to focal things. Focal things demand effort, but without this kind of effort the potential rewards of meaningful existence become “lost in the vapid disengagement of the operator of a smoothly functioning machinery” (p. 204). It becomes the effort required to achieve meaning from interacting with the object that gives the focal thing its essence if we were to look at it in this way. The issue for Borgmann is that devices free means from ends and by doing this undermine focal things and practices which is where meaning is made. However, this view has been critiqued with scholars claiming that it is indeed possible to engage meaningfully with digital devices (Verbeek, 2002). For instance, Coyne (2014) claims that these focal things exist in the technological age but have different significance.

Although Borgmann (1984) would claim that technological devices are not focal things, this paper argues that communication platforms combined with hardware such as mobile devices have become a focal thing around/through which we congregate to tell each other stories to be social as well as learn which require effort and engagement-- that mobile devices in schools have become digital focal things given their ability to engage groups in meaningful activities. Digital focal things have been explored in the literature. Bødker (2017) for instance argues that phone charging stations could be focal things as they sponsor focal practices and bring people together in particular contexts. Another example is the 3D printer that invites social and complex engagement (Keymolen, 2016).

For Borgmann (1984), a focal thing is an object that joins people in meaningful activities which holds value in and of itself. Following Chughtai (2020), I view the availability of digital devices as having transformed engagements so that digital devices are not only understood as a means to an end but also as meaning-making devices. This kind of meaningful activity was found in junior high schools in the Central region of Ghana where students congregated around a digital device, whether a laptop or a mobile phone, and made meaning through their learning experiences.

However, while there is something beneficial about the communication assemblage provided, this mediated existence comes at a cost. The cost can be evaluated according to the categories of decontextualisation and reductionism (Feenberg, 2000). Borgmann (2011) argues that the “cultural leveling of modernity” is worsening as a result of globalisation and computer innovations. The world insists on reality and truth as being determined by efficiency, or we could call this a set of calculations. In other words, only what can be measured is actually of worth or can be justified as reality. This can be seen in the increasing AI-driven standardisation activities of personalised education or precision education. These focal things as platforms and practices attempt to reduce one’s educational life-world to calculations and predictions for engaging educational activities fitted to a specific individual. These kinds of pedagogical moves that replace feelings between bodies with pixels through wires have the potential to re-order phenomenal worlds, or a student’s subjective world, while increasingly trying to penetrate and understand a student’s inner life.

A question Borgmann asks is relevant here: “Will information technology create a division between the haves and have-nots or deepen the old division? This is surely a fair question. But it tends to divert us from the deeper question of whether the recent and imminent flood of information is good for anyone, rich or poor” (p. 4). Although extant research has addressed the importance of focal things and practices, as well as human values when engaging with digital technologies, a lot remains to be understood about the role of digital focal things in digital education. This paper now moves to an outline of methods, followed by an analysis of digital focal things in the context of junior high schools in Ghana.

Methods

Participants and settings

The present paper is informed by data generated from a larger ethnographic study of three socially and geographically diverse schools in Ghana conducted in 2021/22. The schools were all government-run and for the purposes of our study are put into Categories 1, 2, and 3. A Category 1 school has a functional computer lab or other ICT infrastructure that allows teachers to engage students using digital tools. Category 2 schools have very few computers (at least 2) that may be used to explain concepts to students while Category 3 schools have no computers at all and teachers rely on their mobile devices to explain concepts to students. The junior high schools catered to students aged 13 to 15 years in the Central region of Ghana. Case study schools were selected to ensure diversity in relation to what were identified as key factors such as access to and use of ICT infrastructure.

Data collection and data analysis

The initial stages of our larger project included obtaining ethical clearance from the University Research Ethics Committee. We then sought and obtained permission from the Ministry of Education to conduct the study in the Basic school system. Following this, we approached three schools to request access to pilot a large-scale survey we intended to deploy to a larger sample of 23 schools to make sense of issues of access and use. All three schools had been recommended to us by the University of Cape Coast as satisfying the categories we had assigned to the schools where we wished to do in-depth ethnographies. These schools had a history of working with the university, so permission to conduct our project in that community was given readily. In keeping with ethnographic research, our initial approach was deliberately exploratory (Atkinson, 2015). Using classic school ethnographic methods (Delamont, 2014) to explore everyday life, techniques such as interviews, observations, and document and policy analyses were employed to obtain a detailed account of how different actors negotiated new technologies. We also took extended field notes to capture the everyday details of our ethnographic activity (Clifford, 1988)

Our main source of data collection was immersed participant observation (Van Maanen, 2011) and interviews. However, the observational research did take place along a continuum from non-participatory observations to participation in some classes. For example, at the time of writing, our preliminary fieldwork included interviewing and general observations; participating in meetings; taking photographs; making video and sound recordings; and exploring the schools’ online systems and other digital spaces if there were any. These activities generated a larger corpus of empirical data; only a small sample is identified in this paper.

Semi-structured interviews were used as a primary source of data collection as they were well-suited to obtaining clarity into participants’ elaborations of their lived experiences in the world (Kvale, 1996: p. 105). Drilling down from the data obtained in the survey, preliminary interview topics explored in general how new technology was used in school. Initial examinations drew on a thematic analysis of our corpus of data, structured by the following research question: How are digital focal things working in schools? From here, we used a deductive approach to data analysis in six phases to create meaningful patterns: (1) familiarising oneself with the data (and transcription of verbal data); (2) generating initial codes; (3) searching for themes once data have been initially coded and collated; (4) reviewing themes; (5) defining and naming themes; and (6) producing the report (Braun and Clark, 2006).

Follow-up interviews were conducted in order to obtain richer accounts of emergent themes. The present work focuses on both staff and student perceptions. Interviews about digital focal things comprised discussions about awareness of the use of new AI technologies in the digital school, attitudes towards online monitoring tools, and perceptions of the effect of these new technologies on the behaviour of students and teachers. An interview schedule was developed to ensure specific areas were addressed in each interview. The interviews varied in duration from 30 to 45 minutes.

Device paradigm

The concept of the device paradigm is connected to the pursuit of a good life based on values and how significant things and ethical actions facilitate such a life. The good life, for Borgmann (1984), is one of engagement. Here, engagement is bound to focal things, which give meaning to an individual’s life, including the focal practices attached to them. Technological devices, on the other hand, he argues, do not add value and, therefore, cannot be seen as a way to facilitate a good life. Device paradigm offers a reimagining of Martin Heidegger’s concept of Ge-stell, which claims that the essence of technology is a view where everything can be understood as a resource to be exploited (this includes everyday things, places, human beings and natural resources). Sometimes translated as enframing is what Heidegger (1977) would consider the essence of technology. Here, the world becomes raw material, or standing reserve, to be enframed categorised and optimised, used for human needs. In this sense, enframing is not a structure but it is a way of disclosing the world to us. In the current time, the essence of modern technology is disclosed as the dominant way of making sense of the world. Borgmann extends the concept of device paradigm beyond Heideggerian technological understandings, illustrating the ethical issues that relate to how technological devices facilitate separation of means from ends. A device (a mean) is used to perform a task (an end) in a manner where an individual’s comportment is rid of value and effort. The information in the device is more than a representation of reality, it becomes a replacement without value (Feenberg, 2000).

For Borgmann, technology alienates human beings from reality by replacing it with a form of hyperreality and by bringing forth consumptive instead of focal practices. Technology then fails to enrich human life. That said, this thesis has been critiqued because it presupposes the “existence of an ‘authentic’ way of existing and taking up with reality, but also because it makes an empirical claim that is at odds with empirical reality” (Verbeek, 2002: p. 52). In short, the pattern of disengagement in people’s everyday lives is the device paradigm. At times criticised as a grim view of the meaningless consumption of information communications technology (Tijmes, 1999), the concept of device paradigm has been positively accepted as a critical contribution to the philosophy of technology (Feenberg, 2000; Verbeek, 2002).

Drawing from Borgmann, Verbeek (2002) highlights, the icon for explicating consumption as a technological manner of taking up with reality is the couch potato – an individual passively watching television without being actively engaged in the reality that surrounds them. For Borgmann, growth of consumption as a way of life attests to the irony of technology: “Whereas technology promised to disburden and enrich people’s lives, in fact it takes away people’s engagement with reality. Technologies fulfil their promise of enrichment and disburdenment in such a way, that the disburdenment they offer impedes true enrichment” (p. 49). As such, he makes sense of digital technologies as a paradigm which provides a pattern for the way people live their lives that occurs when these technologies are used. Verbeek (2002) claims the device paradigm is not a transcendental object which gives one the opportunity to make sense of what make technology possible—it is an empirical observation of the impacts of technology. As Feenberg observes (2000) Borgmann would agree that many devices are useful, but the generalisation of the device paradigm has a ‘deadening effect’; primary instrumentalisation characterises technical relations in society, which comprises four reifying ‘moments’: Decontextualisation, reductionism, autonomisation and positioning. This paper concerns itself with two moments: decontextualisation and reductionism.

Devices separate things into machinery and commodities. Their interconnectedness with context that characterises things is relegated to their machinery so that people can enjoy their commodities with as little concern as possible. On this view, the lives of people are full of consumptive practices rather than being engaged with reality. It is in this way that technology frames and shapes people’s lives through the technological experience. The focal things that people gather around in meaningful activities hold value for their own sake but cannot survive the functionalising attitude of the device paradigm. However, in a recent interpretation of device paradigm, Coeckelbergh (2015) claims that electronic and digital devices are still devices (in a classical sense), and while they can be disengaging they also allow us to “use them in such a way that we engage more, not less, with others and with the natural, social, material, and artificial (indeed often natural/artificial) environment” (p.187).

For example, during the first round of fieldwork in Ghana (10/2021), while it was evident that commodification of schooling in rural contexts was occurring through digital devices, these devices were also being used as digital focal things where students and teachers engaged in use of a digital device to learn. In one of the schools, none of the students owned laptops (Category 3). Instead, they relied on the ICT teacher’s personal resources to learn about digital literacy. The teacher would bring his laptop to school, with Windows and Microsoft Office installed on it. There were two Information Technology teachers from the school who did not know about the applications being used on the network, as such were unaware of the privacy policies attached to the applications. While commodification in this sense simply revolved around the companies (e.g. Microsoft) being able to direct the focal practices of the laptop given the software, the laptop itself was first a focal thing before being a commodity in the school setting. These devices as focal things were imbued with a particular kind of focal practice that involved a didactic component. It took the students and teachers effort to obtain the necessary information to learn about digital literacy. Given there was only one laptop, students had to gather in groups and discuss the implications of what they were learning. In this way they were engaging with the device itself as a focal thing which evoked meaning making and affect. While one could argue that the laptop had a disburdening effect inasmuch as students did not have to exert themselves when calculating mathematical questions, for instance, and using the computer’s calculator, the laptop remained the centre of a gathering where stories were told, meaning and values were made, and effort was enacted to learn. The act of focal practices around the focal things was meaningful.

Another school (Category 2) had few resources, yet the teachers made do with what they had and often used their own personal effects to educate their students. For example, one male teacher would use his phone to locate pictures of parts of a computer (e.g. laptop), print out a copy then laminate the object at the local copy and printing shop. In a similar school (Category 2) the teacher also used his own laptop to guide the lesson. Moving between his laptop and the board, he would write down the functions of a projector on the board. From here he wrote about digital watches for recording time to perform an activity. The teacher would use his laptop as a reference point to check that the information he was presenting his students was accurate.

These practices engaged the person using the focal thing in multisensory capacities, in exertion and effort—contrary to what Borgmann would view as a typical device function. The teachers did this because their students did not have access to a laptop and students were not permitted to bring mobile phones to school as there was no way of filtering out unsuitable websites. As such, they could not search for these images themselves at school. What one of the teachers taught them through this mobile phone as a focal thing was related to digital literacy and digital education more broadly. In this instance, the teacher used the phone as a focal thing that invited participation as did the teacher who used his laptop.

Another teacher, the chemistry teacher (Category 2), used his laptop to find an image of formulae which he also printed out and laminated. The laminated image served to teach students about chemical compounds. We could say that these are constructs of focal things or the outputs of focal things attached to engaged focal practices. In addition, the teacher exerted effort into the production of the laminated images that the focal thing invited him to engage with in order to obtain classroom resources for his students to help them understand concepts and debates. In this sense, as Chughtai (2020) points out, a digital device may also have positive effects on engagement. He writes:

digital work can be interpreted as engagement with focal things that are pervasive in both our personal and organizational sphere. That is, in our everyday dealings, one does not see a phone as an artifact or device on its own but rather something that brings their diverse practices together, for example, to send a text message to a friend or attend to one’s work-related activities. (p. 34).

The commodity - empirical observation of the impact of technology

Focal things comprise what Borgmann calls “commanding presence:” a power to challenge us and make demands upon us, addressing our ability towards effort and engagement with the world. As Fernandez (2002) observes, these practices:

embed the means-to-ends relations of purposive action within a rich, growing, and continuous network of connections to nature and community. Furthermore, focal things are constantly bringing these connections to disclosure and they are not readily separable from them. They lead us to develop our character, expectations, and skills in response to the demands and satisfactions they throw into our path. They also help us weave together the diverging strands of our life and to tie them firmly together to those of other individuals, and to the life of our communities. (p. 11)

Borgmann would argue the commanding presence of things is being gradually replaced by the availability of commodities (Verbeek, 2002). The engaging role ‘things’ play in our everyday lives is whittled down to one function: it or a sum of its parts becomes a commodity. Borgmann describes these processes as eventuating in a mood of emptiness brought about by unreflective use of these devices.

There is a difference between a commodity and a thing. Commodities are objects that have no attached significance. Things, however, are not simply just objects; they also evoke one’s affect and capacity to make meaning. Returning to the example of heating a house, people had to exert effort which in turn created an ‘intense’ engagement with their realities: they gathered the wood, chopped it, cleaned the hearth and sat around it together. For Borgmann, a hearth was a focal thing as it was the focus of the attention of people. The process involved in heating their houses gave people an engaged way of interacting with their world. A central heating system removes this engagement and instead produces the commodity of heat with no effort to obtain it. In contrast, a commodity offered a more instantaneous and efficient attainment of the good or service desired. This lack of active participation by the subject can be said to lead to meaninglessness in respect to constructing reality.

As a contrast to our previous two schools, there was one school with a suitably equipped computer library (Category 1). This school had the infrastructure necessary in place to ensure each student had access to computers and relevant applications. There was even access to Wi-Fi. Embedded in these systems were operating software applications and browsers like Microsoft, Facebook, Google Chrome. Information inserted into some of these applications would create a user profile which is sometimes bought, traded, sold to third party actors. Some of these systems were driven by recommendation engines and underpinned by advertising strategies that would then bounce back to the student depending on ‘likes’ accrued on Facebook, for example. As one student notes of unsolicited advertisements that he received all the time:

As for me, if what I am watching is interesting, I only wait for the 5 seconds to skip the advert. But some of the adverts are very interesting that you end up watching the full advert. There was once I clicked on such adverts and completely forgot about what I was doing.

In this particular digital educational ecology the device not only becomes a digital focal thing that turns itself into a commodity, it also turns the user into a commodity, a surveillance commodity where the users are monitored whenever they used the devices to congregate. This process connects to the idea of datafication, a practice that refers to the quantification of the life of human beings through data often for economic value. “To datafy a phenomenon is to put it in quantified form so that it can be tabulated and analyzed” (Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier, 2013: p. 78). The term has since acquired meaning as the wider transformation of human life to provide a continual source of data. This primarily benefits corporations but also states, civil society organisations and communities (Mejias and Couldry, 2019). There are other concerns that focus on the negative impacts of datafication such as surveillance creep, capture of development gains by transnational corporations and growing inequalities (Mann, 2018; Taylor and Broeders, 2015).

Human social life and human life in general is increasingly being monitored and categorised so that it can generate data from which profit can be extracted. As such, life is becoming surveilled to a larger degree, and appropriated through data through external processes of data extraction. As Couldry and Mejias (2019) note:

Just as in Marx’s eyes capitalism had disrupted human beings’ relations with physical nature, in the era of data colonialism, capitalism risks disturbing humanity’s relations to its nature—that is, our lives as reflexive, relatively autonomous human beings. (p. 32)

Couldry and Mejias refer to this kind of data appropriation as data colonialism which works through certain forces in everyday life that ensure compliance with interconnected systems of data extraction. For instance, schools using Microsoft applications become “tethered” to the infrastructures of data collection where users are not given a choice other than reliance on particular operating systems or proprietary products. When digital focal things are used, one could reasonably argue that the following processes are occurring: decontextualization and reductionism.

Helpful to understand the nature of these digital focal things is (Feenberg, 2000) writings on two aspects that comprise the essence of technology: one that explains the functional constitution of technical objects and subjects, which he refers to as “primary instrumentalization,” and the “secondary instrumentalization,” which focuses on the realisation of the constituted objects and subjects in technical networks and devices.

Decontextualisation and reductionism

With decontextualisation, object and subject are broken down into function and usefulness. As much as devices are made readily available in a decontextualising way, they invite disengaged use and thus contribute little to the value in one’s life (Chughtai, 2020).

As Feenberg (2000) observes “Nature is fragmented into usable bits and pieces that appear as technically useful after being abstracted from all specific contexts” (p. 306). In this capacity the nature of students/teachers whose information was being collected became a set of useful statistics that was fit for a machine instead of being able to offer a holistic of their lived experiences. This is in keeping with what Couldry and Mejias (2019) observe as the extractive nature of modern capitalism. On this view, the data collected from students and teachers is created by “abstracting the world into categories, measures and other representational forms…that constitute the building blocks from which information and knowledge are created” (pp. 6-7).

There are no limits to how much human life can be appropriated. This form of data colonialism concerns itself with the external appropriation of data on its own terms that are either partly or wholly beyond the control of the person from which the data is being extracted. As the authors put it, data colonialism dispossesses human beings of their capacity as agentic sites of thought and action. As such the continuous surveillance of human beings is not “exceptional” but “natural.” Feenberg (2000) observes that the thing is decontextualised and renders a quantified version of life that aims at efficiency, and one could not argue that the aim is at prediction and optimisation. This quantified life is also measurable and imagines itself as characters that would be able to fit into the logic of a particular system. Useful for surveillance practices as it can render objects into categories that can then be collected and sorted (Gandy, 2021).

These kinds of observations have been well rehearsed and are pertinent to the schools under study. According to one journal entry:

A student goes to the headmistress’s office to pick a projector. The teacher then walks in with a laptop and starts to set up. The teacher started by setting up the laptop, projector and a mobile phone to provide internet for the laptop. While at it, a student walks in with a standing fan and plugs it into the socket. The setting up was taking a long time so I stepped up to assist the teacher with the projector. I successfully managed to fix the projector for her. She requests help to connect her mobile data to the laptop in order to use the internet. I tried linking her phone to the laptop but this was not working so I quickly shared my data to enable the class to commence. This was done in less than a minute. The background screen was a flyer with the image of a student who was participating in a national competition. I guessed the idea was to draw attention to it as a reminder to encourage students to vote for her.

She starts by telling the students they require an internet connectivity in order to send an email. To this end, she said, one could be hooked onto a WiFi network, use a modem, or a local area network to access the internet. With knowledge from their previous lesson, a student was called in front to launch the browser (internet explorer). The student explained that, in order to launch the browser, you have to put the curser on the specific browser and double click on it. The teacher then interjected and explained that there are different internet service providers including Google, Yahoo. Explorer, etc. The default browser used in the class was the explorer. The teacher explained further that to compose means to create. To be able to create an email, one requires an email account which means you have to sign up with the particular internet service provider.

A student was called in front to create a new email account as the teacher guided her in the process. The student spent about 15 minutes without success in creating the account. There were instances where they needed a telephone number to complete the sign-up process. The teacher used her personal phone number to help with that process (Category 2).

While it is clear that this excerpt suggests meaningfulness and effort when using the mobile phone as a focal thing, as well as teaching and learning occurring throughout, an element of reductionism also occurs when using these digital focal things. Reductionism refers to when deworlded (or decontextualised) things are simplified and removed of their qualities that are technically useless. They are then reduced to aspects through which they can be incorporated into a technical network. As Feenberg (2000) notes, these are qualities of primacy to the technical subject which are seen as necessary qualities for the accomplishment of a technical programme. Quantification is the most complete reduction to what Feenberg refers to as “primary qualities.” Quantification refers to abstraction, of transforming the “flow” of social life and meaning into numbers that can be process in a technical system. As Couldry and Mejias observe (2019), the kind of abstraction comprises both cognitive and evaluative factors.

When teacher and student data were inserted into the mobile device applications, it was only data that was relevant to the technical system, or data able to be processed by the system such as name, age, gender, likes and so forth—primary qualities. These factors allow the applications to categorise and sort and, at times with AI recommendation engines, predict particular behaviours—this is especially noticeable in the way these data are used for behavioural advertising. As Shoshana Zuboff (2019) claims, we are living in a new stage of “surveillance capitalism” where human experiences are taken as the raw material that offers the behavioural data used to influence and predict our actions. Similar views have been expressed by those discussing the way marketers try to influence consumers through data analytics, or “data behaviourism” (Rouvroy, 2013). A rereading of Marx argues that the most basic structure of datafication is not labour but the abstracting force of the commodity which can transform life processes into “things” through abstraction, things that have value (in Couldry and Mejias, 2019). In the case of the digital focal thing being used to teach students, the data inserted into the applications by the teacher and the students render them into surveillance commodities.

“Secondary qualities” are the qualities that remain, including facets of the object that may have been most important in the course of its pre-technical history. Heideggerian (1977) enframing refers to the reduction of reality to primary and secondary qualities. These secondary qualities contain potential for self-development. To elaborate, Feenberg (2000) uses the examples of a tree trunk, when reduced to its primary quality of roundness to become a wheel it loses its secondary qualities of being a habitat for species or a growing member of its own species.

While teacher and student data such as personal information, logins, or likes were captured what made them human beings outside of this digital information could not be accounted for, especially not with or for predictive analytics. The past history of the users could not be appreciated by the system, nor could the complexities of their everyday lives, including their spiritual lives. In this respect, the information accrued only rendered one version of the teacher or student, one that was able to be processed by machine intelligence. As such, secondary qualities could not be captured despite various aspects of the human being and of nature itself, “inscrutable” powers being subverted and dissected intellectually then represented through algorithms. Everything has to be measurable, knowable and predictable for optimisation purposes.

Despite their limitations for disclosing the world in a quantifiable manner, these strategies also have the power to define what counts as knowledge and what is a priority. What Michel Foucault (1966) referred to as episteme—a manner in which certain structures could be imposed on the world in order to make sense of it. It was evident that in school (Category 2) what the knowledge gained from the information presented to them as a recommendation had shaped what the teacher, at least, had chosen for the lesson.

In the school (Category 2) the ICT teacher was using a trio of a laptop, her mobile phone, and a projector to teach her students about ICT. She began her lesson with a discussion on how to sign up for an email and compose a message, mentioning that email service providers such as G-Mail offer opportunities to have unique accounts that allow people to correspond with each other. She explained the process of log-in or sign-in as a way of accessing an account, whether email or a platform account such as Facebook. The teacher also spoke about other important things while she and her students were gathered around the digital focal things that were her mobile phone and laptop. She taught her students about how usernames and passwords were necessary to access an account. She also started teaching the students about how to compose an email message.

The teacher highlighted that in order to compose and send an email one must have access to internet connectivity. Then the web browser should be launched which was Internet Explorer. Service providers such as G-Mail would go into the address bar then press enter. The teacher rounded off her lesson by talking about the features that may appear when opening an email account such as back, forward, refresh and compose. However, the only laptop or phone that could be used to practice these focal acts were the laptop and mobile phone belonging to the teacher. That is not to say that students do not go home and do their work anyway on their phones. In this case, the information that was being projected through the digital focal things (laptop, mobile phone, projector) were shaping how students understand the world; they were disclosing what was real.

When asked if the mobile phone had enhanced interaction with each other as teachers, the teacher responded as such:

I think it has improved communication with family and friends who live faraway. When it comes to preparing for lessons, the phone has everything you need. So it really helps to get your information from the phone without talking to the netperson. But sometimes I think it has also affected the way we relate to each other. Sometimes when you go for meetings and people are supposed to concentrate, you find them on their phones and that does not help with bonding.

Borgmann (1984) takes issue with digital devices, arguing that the connection between individuals and reality becomes profoundly transformed through such interactions, especially evident in the case of those who are affluent and those who are not, including what technological devices and information can to do indigenous populations:

Information is the element of technological affluence that invades the culture of the poor and premodern countries most quickly and easily…If information is not the medium of an overwhelmingly new culture, it is at least the entering wedge that permits indigenous cultures to seep away and disappear.” (Borgmann, 1999, p. 6)

When asked of a student, there is a response that suggests the mobile phone as a digital focal thing and as a mediator allows meaningful interaction between friends, but also is affecting the way we communicate with each other:

As a teenager growing up, sometimes you wish to spend time with your friends to chat and connect but there are parental controls that we have to obey. I think the mobile phone has helped to connect with some of my friends, especially during vacations when it is impossible to meet. Because of technology, I am still able to keep in touch with my friends who are not in Ghana. My mum tells me smart phones are destroying relationships and so there are times when I am not allowed to use the phone so we can talk to each other. (Category 2)

In this capacity, many advertisements and Western ways of being are transmitted through these devices, which leads one to wonder how digital focal things may change the way indigenous populations interact with each other. Max Weber offers a useful excerpt to illustrate that culture at large – co-driven by new technologies - comprehensively re-ordered the world but not in a way that was uplifting for the population. This reduction of the world to calculations and predictions dismissed an important part of what it means to be a human being. Weber noted that increasing intellectualisation and rationalisation,

do not amount to a growing common knowledge of the conditions of life we are subject to. They mean something else: The knowledge or the belief that, if only we wanted to, we could find out what those conditions are, that, in other words, there are no more powers that are in principle mysterious and incalculable and could have an impact, that rather we could, in principle, dominate everything through calculation. That, however, means: The disenchantment of the world. (in Borgmann, 2011: pp. 183-184)

It is clear that these writers are worried about societal cultures and environments disappearing as a result of conspicuous machinery.

Conclusion

We are social creatures, but as the pandemic has shown us, we have developed more of a habit of being social creatures through the internet, through machines. Increasingly, our being-with each other has become largely measurable. It has mostly become mediated by the digital where there is more digital to interaction these days than not as others have also written. The digital distance between us has rendered a divide between the parts of us that are not measurable. For example, our spiritual beliefs or the feeling of love for one another. We have a set of problems that are being solved by large companies with competing interests, collecting digital information about us in order to predict and direct what it is we can and should do.

On the one hand, while in the past, as Borgmann would write, people would engage with focal things as a meaningful activity that required effort and connection with the environment, digital devices create availability and have a disburdening effect which allows us to rely more and more on the devices while putting in minimal work with interactions with the world around us. Even the world has been replaced by the hyperreal thus disconnecting us further from the natural environment. On the other hand, digital focal things are shown to have an effect that is meaningful and is engaging for students and teachers.

This paper has attempted to consider how digital focal things have impacted junior high schools in Ghana that have so far been relatively untouched by the West and by China. It has sought to show that despite Borgmann’s concerns there have been opportunities for students to develop their digital literacies through congregating around these devices and making meaning as a social group. However, increasing the connectivity of these schools, the commodification of students as data nodes is also increasing, including turning the student into a surveillance commodity where every click and like is turned into value and profit.