Hybridization of Experience in Times of Digital Education

An Interpretation based on Merleau-Ponty

Abstract

Despite the massive and forced digitalization of social life during the Covid-19 pandemic,  embodied experience remains irreplaceable. In this sense, the post-pandemic "new normal" has not meant a digital overcoming of corporeality, as some enthusiasts of the ideology of technological solutionism and adherents of transhumanism think, but rather a new impulse of hybridization of experience in general, and of pedagogical experience in particular. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s approach in Phenomenology of Perception, in this paper I propose to address such hybridization by understanding the phenomenon of virtuality as a fundamental dimension of experience and corporeal reality. At the same time, I point out some limitations of the Merleau-Pontian approach to virtuality, which, nevertheless, allow us to make some relevant pedagogical remarks to question the supposed neutrality and inevitability of the current processes of digitalization of the educational field as a whole.