Digital Platforms in the Educational Field: Transformation of Power, Control and Subjectivation in the Culture of Digitality

Abstract

The ongoing digitalisation of schooling transforms relations of power, assessment, and authority. While recent research has examined digital tools in classroom settings, little is known about how platforms reorganise epistemic authority and subjectivation in everyday teaching practice. This article asks how digitally mediated classroom environments reconfigure power, control, and visibility, and what this means for the determination of valid knowledge and the establishment of authority. Empirically, it draws on ethnographically oriented observations from remote teaching at a German school in 2021, analysed with grounded theory methodology (Strauss and Corbin 1996). The theoretical framework centres on Bourdieu’s field theory and draws selectively on Foucault’s analysis of power and Stalder’s concept of digitality. The analysis identifies three central dimensions. First, elements of epistemic authority shift from teachers towards platform- and interface-mediated orders. Second, digital platforms establish visibility and feedback regimes that promote responsiveness, self-governance, and broader forms of participation and performance. Third, epistemically ambivalent zones emerge in which teachers mediate, qualify, or reconfigure claims in situ to uphold the validity of knowledge. Digital platforms thus operate not as neutral tools but as structuring infrastructures within a field constituted by technical and social relations. They shift symbolic struggles over valid knowledge and alter the possibilities for converting digital capital into recognition. These findings point to practical requirements for educational practitioners and platform designers: transparent assessment frameworks, clear and communicable metrics, and context-sensitive feedback. Such measures can help stabilise fairness, legitimacy, and pedagogical authority under conditions of digitality and accountability.