Does 'the vigilance of intersecting gazes' (Foucault) mean that MOOCs disempower? H
yper-visibility of our exchanges where we don't always know who, if anyone is reading our posts may mean that the consciousness of the gaze of others makes us self-censor more than in other media. New technologies are frequently represented as bringing equality, opportunity, liberation and untrammelled good. Perhaps they each carry utopic and dystopic potential: not bad but dangerous, not to be responded to with apathy, nor smashed luddite-fashion but treated with 'a hyper- and pessimistic activism' (Foucault cited in Rainbow, 1986: 343), expecting harm but seeking to ameliorate it.
In this way, rather than feeling the need to decide between the uses, technological or social determinism described by Chandler, we might conceive of these three alternative possibilities being in constant dialogue with one another. This dialogic conception of the relationship between the technological and the social is present, for example in Raymond Williams' work on the social significance of TV in the 1970s.
