phrasing from 1977. The novel follows young college graduate Mae, who begins working at a major tech firm, called The Circle (but easily recognisable as a mix of Facebook and Google). Its working routines and social protocols among workers increasingly become cult-like and deliberately use the employees’ social media accounts as constant surveillance apparatuses – not only for themselves but also against those who would rather refrain from using them. Such social and economic pressures are well-known to so-called digital natives in class and may instigate critical discussion of such developments, especially with regard to scenes that dramatize them significantly.
In one such remarkable scene, an online community chases down Mercer, one of the protagonist’s former friends, and drives him to suicide. All this happens against the backdrop of social anxiety and pressure, exacerbated by the social media accounts of the so-called Circlers and the firm’s eerie desire for “completion”: a moment in which all accounts and technologies become united and immortalised, and that no less eerily echoes Google’s becoming “Alphabet” in the extratextual world. In its linking of the speculative and the actual, and of showing how technology shapes human behaviour and being, the novel is frightfully accurate and therefore pedagogically worthwhile. In Becker’s own words:
As more recent sociological and cultural studies on digital identity show, this instrumental perspective disregards the complex interactions taking place when an individual encounters digital technology. In today’s digital age, individuals do not only shape their digital environment but are, in turn, also shaped and influenced by this very environment. As such, one might argue, a concept of digital citizenship exclusively relying on an instrumental point of view cannot adequately prepare young citizens for the complex digital world they experience daily (2019: 168).
The point Becker so diligently elaborates is that new media significantly shape subjectivity and that literary writing can serve as a means of reflection on such effects of digitisation – although of course a so-and-so-many-pages novel might not be the first thing to come to mind when we think of digital competence.
And yet, this is exactly the point of “media competence without new media”. If part and parcel of critical media education is the ability and willingness to assess the complex influence of digital media on the daily lives and subjectivities of prosumers, then literary fiction – with its indisputable potential for reflection and depragmatised experience of the mental and social worlds of fictional characters – serves us more than well as an analytical tool with which learners can gauge the effects of such transformative processes.
With regard to the nature of post- and transhumanist transformations of selves and societies, there is another significant point to be made for looking at literature (including, of course, film): the negativity of the imaginary visions. If we keep apart post- and transhumanism and say that the former is more concerned with critical analyses of the human condition, while the other is concerned with techno-utopian fantasies of ‘Man’ writ large, we can use this very distinction in our analyses of fiction. Looking at the texts I just mentioned (or any other, really, from The Matrix to Ex Machina), we can see that they are radically pessimist, or at least thoroughly cautious, when it comes to techno-utopian brave new worlds. This means that we have, vis-à-vis the allure of techno-optimism, the literary texts themselves: they tell a very different story from stakeholders in tech firms as well as players in the educational fields that try to sell us digitisation as panacea for everything, from the cost of teaching materials to student motivation and differentiation in inclusive settings. Story after story, they confront us with the apprehension that these developments inevitably end in dystopia. This is something we must at least acknowledge when we take seriously the truism that we teach literature because it has meaningful things to say about us and our lives. It suggests, in this case, a posthumanist perspective on transhumanist storyworlds. Because these texts are, in the best sense, relatable and ask us to let go of stubborn subjectivity in our attempts to see the potential of fiction for future-oriented speculation and thought experiments, they become meaningful and relevant learning materials that prepare us for a future saturated with, and on the brink of being determined by, digital media. In other words, by providing opportunities for critical distance, literature indeed teaches media competence without new media.
4. Teaching the Posthuman: Literary Learning without Literature
Literary learning is more than critical analysis, however. Research on the reception of fiction as well as competence frameworks that include volitional, intercultural, and self-reflective components point to the relevance of emotional or affective, largely empathetic elements as prerequisite of understanding literature as well as others (Volkmann 2015). This concern will now be in the centre of attention – but with the twist that I will approach the post- and transhumanist dimensions of digitisation by suggesting forms of literary learning without any traditional literary text. If this is meant to be more than a witty paradox, we need to be more precise about the meaning of the expression “literary learning” of course. That aesthetic experiences are to be had with media other than novels or plays is nothing new for sure. However, and the current situation of remote education puts this into sharp relief once more, what we have to acknowledge and better understand in the future is that the change brought about by digitisation and digital media in particular not only changes human subjectivities but also ways of learning and engaging with knowledge. Some of this may be lamentable – think of “digital dementia” (Spitzer 2012), “existential displacement” and “absent presence” (Turkle 2011 and 2015), or the false promises of the “global village” (Robson 2014). Some of it, however, might be important and noteworthy for educators. In particular, I am referring to practices of empathy and connectivity – relatability-requiring stuff, in other words – which digital media afford and engender, and I want to see if those can be utilised in the context of concerns of understanding the other as developed in literature pedagogy (Nünning 2007). What we need to understand for this is that for a text to offer such moments of connection and aesthetic experience, it needs to be perceived as having no direct purpose, as being responsive to interpretation, and as being semantically overdetermined (cf. Brune 2020). We find these factors realised in literature fiction for sure. Yet we also find them in – memes.
Highly popular amongst many learners but so far little attented to by pedagogical research (but see Höfler 2021), memes fit the literary and cultural curriculum because of what they have to say about meaning-making and relatability in (sub-)cultures. Their significance in this regard becomes clearer if we remind ourselves of their conceptual origin, not as internet images but, as Richard Dawkins argued in 1976, as a concept for how cultural ideas spread from individual to individual via media transmission rather than genetic information exchange. Memes, in other words, set out as a concept in neurobiology before they became a popular text type in digital communication – and they have retained some of the former’s potential for collective cultural meaning-making. It is this aspect I want to focus on in the following. Two observations are relevant in this regard, one assuringly old-fashioned, the other surprisingly novel.
Generally speaking, a meme combines an image that has semantic surplus value because it has been shared repeatedly and therefore has acquired iconic status with a caption that is highly formalised. A certain bear image stands for confessions, for instance, and a seal captioned with the phrase “When you …” recounts awkward moments. Like other forms of the literary, their meaning relies to a large extent on belonging to a certain interpretive community: you have to know them to understand them. Unlike other such forms, however, they are in constant flux and demand active participation: memes are constantly created, critiqued by new memes and recreated in a context of communicative participation. They thus stand as instances of participation in a larger cultural field, by way of their multimodality as well as by their bridging of moments of reception with moments of production. It is easy to see how they thus also offer differentiated educational potential.
It is important to note, however, that a meme’s formal structure is not so new after all but can be linked to other forms of multicodal, age-old communication (such as the emblem). And here comes the first observation: with memes, we are still on safe cultural-historical terrain and might use their form for cultural-critical, comparative analyses in the classroom. Just as the emblem knew lemma, icon, and epigram, a meme