On the Materiality of Digital Media Discourses, Perceptual Preferences, and Media-Didactic Impulses When Dealing With Materials in the Context of Digital Education

Abstract

Substances on which digital devices and the technical infrastructure for digital processes are based enable digital learning in the first place. At the same time, these substances largely evade our perception. Dealing with them is also a blind spot in media didactic research. After an analysis of the current discourse on digital education, the article discusses that the currently dominant idea of digitization is based on a metaphor that conceptualizes digitization as an external process that rolls over our society, which we are powerless to face and to which we only react and not act in prospective way – even in the educational sector. This thought pattern, however, affects the general perception as well as pedagogical and didactic priorities in the field of digital education, for example by not understanding digitization as a resource-consuming global consumption process. The lack of reflection on the technical and material foundations of digital life and digital education can be understood as a collective preference in perception. Consequently, environmental damages and social injustices caused by the production of digital devices and the creation of digital infrastructures, especially in the Global South, are not part of the public consciousness and remain systematically hidden in the educational sector. The article shows that media didactic work can stimulate reflection processes on the material foundations of digital existence and its global implications, and how they can expand conventional media didactic fields by including socio-ecological aspects.