No abstract

The Five Star Movement, or M5S, is a popular anti-establishment, populist political party in Italy. One of its key features is the Rousseau platform, an online space designed to enable direct democracy. Named after the eighteenth century thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it banks on the idea that the traditional state is corrupt, while the people's will can be more directly polled and executed as a governing force. However, Rousseau has also been critiqued for defending despotism and characterised as the enemy of liberty. This paper takes a closer look at Rousseau's 'Emile' and 'The Social Contract', and points out how a critical reading could raise questions about the platform's true meaning. The analysis focuses specifically on the illusion of autonomous choice and covert authoritarianism. The platform becomes a powerful tool of both preventive as well as repressive social control. As an anti-modern public sphere, it holds inherent threats to democracy itself.

Mobile and wearable technology now offers new avenues for technology-supported meditation practice and learning. Through a qualitative-dominant con-vergent parallel design, this study explored new empirical findings on the human perception of such technology-guided meditation training. A purposive sample of six participants trialled the device in several sessions during three weeks. Post-use, they commend the device for prompting self-guided learning. They highlight the importance of personalisation and adaptivity in educational technology, befit-ting Western pedagogical thought. Though these are guiding principles in current technology development, as they are believed to improve learning efficiency, they also prove crucial to user satisfaction and continued use of these technologies of the self.

No abstract

No abstract