English Studies in Canada 36.4 (2010) includes a Readers' Forum that should be of interest across the faculties at an institution like ours. The subject is "Social networking and the Humanities" and the five contributions are quite diverse. Wish I'd been at the Congress session this forum is based on; at least it got videotaped. (See vimeo.com/24403809)

Among the contributions, I came across this particularly provocative claim by MSVU's Max Haiven, a member of the postdoc precariat, and it seems well worth quoting (and debating) here in the Landing especially. It both resonates and jars with my experience of the structure, use, and aims of the Landing, which is similar to other social applications but also critically different from them, not unlike the way AU is like and yet critically different from other universities. Anyway, Haiven writes:

Once, critical scholars spoke of the "hidden curriculum" of higher education as the enculturation of rote learning and hierarchies of knowledge and power that prepared workers for life in turgid factories and soul-sucking office towers (Giroux and Penna 34). Today, the hidden curriculum of the edu-factory is the training of individuals to net/work, to develop a neoliberal work-of-the-self fundamentally based in social networking: building tenuous and disposable linkages to maximize personal leverage in a world without guarantees. (23)

The full article and for that matter the whole forum are well worth reading in full to properly contextualize this comment, but in its own right it does crystallize some of the macro-level issues we grapple with locally and witness taking place globally.

Work Cited

Haiven, Max. "Net/working in the edu-factory." ESC 36.4 (2010): 21-6. Print.