The ClassDojo app: training in the art of dividuation

This article emerged in response to the increasing ubiquity of the ClassDojo app, a Silicon Valley-developed digital communication and behavior management platform, in grade schools throughout the world. The author engages critically with ClassDojo by situating it within current scholarship around network governance, describing how the app may reflect a broader transition from Foucauldian disciplinary societies to Deleuzian societies of control. Through a focus on ClassDojo, the author provides an account of how technologically driven processes of ‘dividuation’ encourage a qualitatively different form of power—what Savat, following Deleuze, referred to as modulation—to augment disciplinary power’s longstanding role in producing the ‘good student,’ the ‘good teacher,’ and the ‘good parent.’ The author argues that the modulatory effects of ed-tech platforms like ClassDojo mark an important shift away from schools as sites for the production of neoliberalised individuals and toward schools as networked nodes for the anticipation of dividuals.