Post-Media Tokyo Conference 2023, Post-University Roundtable Discussion

Post-Media Tokyo Conference 2023
Date: 18-19 February, 2023
Location: Tokyo University of the Arts

I was invited to talk for the Post-Media Tokyo Conference 2023 organized by Graduate School of Global Arts, Department of Arts Studies and Curational Practices, Tokyo University of the Arts. The leading organizer was Professor Yoshitaka Mori. The aim of the conference was, according to Mori,

We would like to rethink the possibility of another media condition that might have been possible. Or, we would like to critically reassess the possibilities and problems of the current digital media. By using the somewhat ambiguous magic word "postmedia" again, we hope to open up new horizons for new media and media studies.

INSTeM presents Roundtable Discussion
Post-University: New Formation of Knowledge Production and Scholarly Apparatuses

Speakers:

Mike Featherstone (Professor, Goldsmiths College, University of London)
Tomoko Tamari (Senior Lecturer, Goldsmiths College, University of London)
Osamu Sakura (Professor, Tokyo University)
Shin Mizukoshi (Professor, Kansai University)
Mariko Murata (Professor, Kansai University/IIAS Leiden University
Chair: Yoshitaka Mori (Professor Tokyo University of the Arts) 
Consecutive Interpreter: Naoto John Tanaka

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‘Dataism, Metrics and Universities’
Tomoko Tamari

Summary

The paper addresses how our world is increasingly governed and changed by dataism and AI technologies which also drive our academic life in higher-education institutions. Dataism was coined by David Brooks (2013) which refers to the situation which information processing systems with big data have become a prominent tool to measure, analyze and predict from consumption behavior to medical treatment, from weather forecast to political discourses.

In this context, metrics as a standard measurement become important to measure performance for improvement. The academic performance of the British universities is assessed through a metrics, Research Excellent Framework. The number of scholarly books and article publication is used for the assessment. This situation asks individual faculty members to prioritize the number of publications, rather than the quality.

The performance of the university can also be driven by ‘instrumental discourse of modern market democracies’ (Collini 2012). This led the situation which the 21st century universities expand not only in the number of students, but also in range of subjects. Universities need to offer two different types of knowledge: technical knowledge and intellectual knowledge/wisdom. In this situation, it seems that technical and professional courses become more significant than ‘humanities’ for successful business and marketing for the university administration. As a result of this, the university become a multiversity (Kerr, 1963).

Dataism is not just found in administration office, but also in lecture classrooms. On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released ‘ChatGPT’ AI system which works with a massive trained-data source. This is a system to allegedly generate various types of ‘sound’ and ‘scholarly’ academic essays. The biggest concern is that humans will be outsourcing not only their writing ability, but also their memories and their ability for critical thinking and inspirational creativities. Such externalization of memories and experiences is what Siegler calls ‘symbolic misery’ which leads to a loss of ‘embodied knowledge’.

Given such situations, the conventional definition and self-conception of the university is under threat. We now realized that universities are no longer seen as ‘the key frame of reference’ of knowledge formation. We also notice that knowledge formation processes are not fixed, but temporal and unstable. These analytical views are based on the sociological perspective which can be understood as what Nietzsche called ‘the art of mistrust’ (Berger 1963). It seeks for mechanisms which are hidden from the consciousness of everyday life. Hence, I would like to argue that from sociological perspective, we need to consider what could be an alternative frame of reference for knowledge. This question could also take us to the question of what a post university could be, if we can still believe that the university play a key role as a site of knowledge formation.