Cyborg ontologies and the lecturer's voice: a posthuman reading of the ‘face-to-face’

The lecture is often posited as the prototypical ‘face-to-face’ educational encounter, seen as embodying key features of the pre-networked academy. These are implicitly characterised as forms of boundedness or impermeability, in terms of both the physical and temporal context, and the ontological status of the participants and the nature of the event in terms of rhetorical structure. However, the increased ubiquity of digital technologies such as virtual learning environments and networked mobile devices has altered the nature of the lecture in profound ways. Drawing on posthuman theory, this paper will argue that both overt and covert uses of digital media in ‘face-to-face’ educational encounters such as lectures have served to undermine several taken-for-granted binaries, such as: material/virtual, digital/analogue, then/now and here/not here. It will conclude that this breakdown of dualisms – in terms of social and representational practices – repositions lecturers and students as hybridised ‘cyborg’ subjects.