What does it mean to speak, be heard, and be seen within a university shaped increasingly by algorithms and analytics? The public role of the university has long rested on its contribution to collective reasoning, civic engagement, and the articulation of social values. As an institution situated between the state and civil society, it has historically served as a space where knowledge circulates, critique is enacted, and public discourse is cultivated. Yet this role is being reconfigured in the digital age, where platforms mediate communication, and visibility becomes something managed rather than emergent.

This post draws on Charles Taylor’s conception of the public sphere to examine how digital technologies reshape the university’s civic function. Taylor situates the public sphere within the broader notion of the social imaginary, the shared understandings through which people imagine their social existence (Taylor, 2004). In contrast to Jürgen Habermas’ focus on formal deliberation, Taylor emphasises the moral and cultural background that makes such deliberation possible. The public sphere, in this account, is not simply a forum for rational debate but a historically contingent structure of perception: a moral order defining who counts as a speaker, which topics are seen as legitimate, and what it means to appear in public (Taylor, 2002).

These structures of visibility are increasingly platform-mediated. Digital infrastructures such as learning management systems, student engagement dashboards, and institutional communication tools introduce new logics of publicity. Visibility is no longer incidental to scholarly activity; it is operationalised, curated through interfaces, quantified through metrics, and governed by algorithms. These platforms do not merely reflect institutional priorities; they shape them, often by embedding speculative visions of automation and efficiency into the design of educational systems. As Knox, Wang and Gallagher (2019) argue, artificial intelligence and algorithmic tools are not neutral instruments but carry assumptions about inclusion, performance, and the very purpose of education. They participate in the construction of educational futures, futures in which moral judgments are increasingly delegated to automated systems and human agency is reconfigured through infrastructural constraints (Williamson, 2017; Knox, Wang and Gallagher, 2019).

This transformation has pedagogical and political implications. Platform infrastructures determine not only what is seen but also who is heard, and under what terms. For example, a student’s presence might be rendered visible through activity logs but remain pedagogically silent if contributions are filtered or undervalued by algorithmic logics. Similarly, staff visibility is increasingly tied to quantifiable outputs, marginalising forms of labour that resist easy codification. In this way, the architecture of visibility substitutes for the moral architecture of the university, redefining legitimacy in terms of exposure rather than engagement.

The digital university thus becomes both participant in and producer of a changing imaginary of the public sphere, one where data-driven exposure displaces dialogic presence, and where the metrics of visibility risk crowding out the ethics of mutual recognition. This post argues that reclaiming the university as a space of plural publics requires resisting such reductive imaginaries. It begins by interrogating whose voices are amplified or diminished by digital infrastructures and asks how educators might respond by reimagining visibility not as a metric, but as a condition for shared inquiry.

Charles Taylor’s account of the modern public sphere offers a nuanced rethinking of how democratic societies imagine collective reasoning and civic participation. Building on but departing from Jürgen Habermas’ foundational theory, Taylor emphasises not the procedural mechanics of discourse, but the background moral understandings that make public reasoning both intelligible and desirable. For Taylor, the public sphere is not merely a space of communication, it is embedded within the social imaginary: the shared but often unspoken frameworks through which people understand their social existence and legitimate institutional practices (Taylor, 2004).

In Modern Social Imaginaries, Taylor traces the emergence of a modern moral order in which the public sphere plays a central role. This moral order assumes that individuals are free, equal, and capable of deliberating about matters of common concern. Crucially, it links legitimacy to publicity, public acts, public reasoning, and public accountability are seen as normative ideals. This is not simply a technical or organisational development; it reflects deeper assumptions about personhood, dignity, mutual recognition, and the ethical significance of being visible and heard (Taylor, 2004).

Taylor’s interpretation contrasts with Habermas’ (1992) more institutional and structural account of the bourgeois public sphere. Whereas Habermas focuses on the rise and decline of rational-critical debate through print capitalism, coffeehouses, and salons, Taylor shifts the focus to the underlying imaginaries that render these sites morally and socially coherent. The early liberal imaginary, in this view, presupposes a public composed of reasoning individuals engaged in open deliberation, grounded in norms of respect and reciprocity. These norms are not imposed from above but sustained by a shared moral background.

However, Taylor also recognises that the ideal of a singular, rational public has fragmented. The contemporary public sphere is characterised by multiple, overlapping, and often unequal publics, shaped by global media, cultural pluralism, and increasingly, by digital platforms. Visibility today is no longer a simple function of expression; it is algorithmically sorted, commercially filtered, and politically contested. While the moral ideal of public reasoning persists, the institutional conditions that once supported it have been radically transformed (Taylor, 2002).

This transformation has significant implications for how we understand the university’s role within the public sphere. As the university becomes entangled with digital infrastructures, dashboards, data systems, branding platforms, it also becomes implicated in reshaping the conditions under which public voice and civic reasoning occur. Platforms do not simply mediate participation; they reconfigure the very norms and boundaries of what it means to be a public institution. In this context, engaging with Taylor’s account enables us to ask how pedagogical and institutional practices sustain or undermine the moral background assumptions, about fairness, dialogue, and recognition, that give public reason its force.

Understanding the university as a participant in this evolving imaginary requires us to treat platforms not as neutral tools but as interventions in the moral architecture of public life. This recognition sets the stage for examining how digital technologies remake the terms of visibility, legitimacy, and participation across higher education.

In the platform era, the university’s public mission is increasingly refracted through metrics, branding, and algorithmic governance. Where academic visibility was once a consequence of scholarly activity, through teaching, research, or civic engagement, it is now a target of strategic management. Digital infrastructures such as learning analytics systems, institutional dashboards, and branding platforms recast visibility as something to be engineered and optimised. As Komljenovic (2022) argues, these platforms are not neutral tools but infrastructures of value extraction, reorganising higher education in ways that commodify data and visibility. In this context, being seen becomes not just a marker of academic presence, but a condition for recognition, funding, and institutional legitimacy, detached from the intrinsic value of meaningful engagement (Williamson, 2017; Komljenovic, 2022).

Institutional dashboards do not merely describe activity; they actively shape how academic labour and student participation are imagined and valued. Performance indicators such as completion rates, NSS scores, and attendance metrics act as proxies for educational quality, while citation indices and grant income figures stand in for research excellence. In these systems, metrics are not neutral: they encode assumptions about what constitutes effective teaching, valuable knowledge, and desirable learning behaviour (Knox, 2017; Slade and Prinsloo, 2013). As Knox (2017) demonstrates through the “Learning Analytics Report Card” project, learning analytics do not simply reflect student engagement but actively construct it, organising educational practices around specific data logics and rendering certain behaviours visible while obscuring others. Slade and Prinsloo (2013) similarly argue that learning analytics are inseparable from institutional power and ethical complexity: they position students within systems of surveillance and intervention, raising urgent questions about autonomy, consent, and the boundaries of pedagogical care. Together, these critiques make the ethics of visibility and the politics of measurement central to pedagogical design.

These changes are not confined to institutional strategy; they reconfigure the everyday experiences and labour of those within the university. Academic work that resists quantification, such as mentoring, dialogic teaching, or collaborative inquiry, is often rendered invisible, while quantifiable outputs are elevated. Staff are incentivised to perform productivity in ways that align with metric visibility rather than educational integrity. Meanwhile, students are increasingly interpellated as data subjects, that is, recognised and shaped by systems that track their behaviours and translate them into actionable insights. Log-ins, clicks, and time-on-task become proxies for engagement, often at the expense of deeper, less visible forms of learning.

Branding functions in parallel. Universities now operate within global education markets where visibility is synonymous with value. Institutional identities are curated across digital platforms to appeal to funders, students, and rankings bodies. As Stack (2021) argues, global university rankings are not neutral assessments but instruments of marketisation that restructure academic priorities, marginalise dissent, and reshape public understandings of educational worth. The result is a form of strategic publicness: polished narratives of excellence that suppress internal critique, flatten institutional diversity, and obscure the lived complexity of academic life. External visibility and internal audit culture converge, reinforcing an imaginary in which education must be legible, marketable, and continuously monitored.

The cumulative effect is a university increasingly organised around the imperative to appear, what Beer (2016) conceptualises as metric power: the capacity of metrics not just to measure but to shape behaviour, produce norms, and exercise influence across social domains. Within higher education, this manifests as a culture of continuous visibility, where academics and students alike adjust their conduct not primarily to improve learning or scholarship, but to conform to the logics of quantification. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of governmentality, Beer shows how metrics govern through soft coercion, by making individuals complicit in their own surveillance and performance management. What is lost in this process is a conception of the university as a dialogic and pluralistic institution, one where opacity, complexity, and dissent have pedagogical value.

To contest this trajectory, we must interrogate the moral assumptions embedded in managed visibility. This opens space to reimagine educational worth not through metrics or market legibility, but through shared inquiry, solidarity, and unmeasured forms of care.

Educational technologies do not merely support teaching, they reconfigure the conditions under which presence, participation, and authority are made visible within institutions. As higher education becomes increasingly mediated by platforms, learning management systems (LMSs), analytics dashboards, video conferencing tools, and engagement trackers, these systems construct new architectures of publicity. That is, they establish technical and institutional frameworks through which individuals are made knowable, accountable, and legitimate. These architectures determine not only what is seen, but how visibility is structured, interpreted, and acted upon.

Platform logics, the rules and priorities embedded in design, shape these architectures in specific ways. LMSs frame engagement through click counts, log-ins, and assignment submission records. Engagement dashboards convert student activity into heat maps and alerts, often privileging frequency and timeliness over depth or reflexivity. Video conferencing tools present structured formats of participation, controlling who may speak, when, and under what constraints. These systems collectively prioritise presence that is consistent, measurable, and aligned with predefined behavioural norms. For example, a student who posts frequently in a forum may be deemed more ’engaged’ than one who contributes fewer but more reflective insights. In this sense, visibility is operationalised through data proxies that marginalise alternative or nonconforming forms of participation (Knox, 2017; Williamson, 2019).

Algorithmic mediation intensifies this logic. Recommendation engines, risk prediction models, and adaptive pathways promise personalisation, but in practice often reproduce normative assumptions about ideal learners and linear progress. As Selwyn and Jandrić (2020) argue, these systems do not simply tailor content, they classify, stratify, and channel users based on opaque and historically contingent data. Visibility becomes filtered and ranked, not in terms of critical voice or intellectual presence, but in alignment with metrics of productivity, persistence, or compliance. These filtering mechanisms challenge classical ideals of the public sphere, where visibility was associated with deliberation, dissent, and mutual recognition.

What appears to be expanded access and exposure is, in practice, often a narrowing of educational presence. Platform-mediated publicity tends toward standardisation and aesthetic coherence, aligning institutional visibility with brand management and reputational performance. As Stack (2021) notes, global ranking systems incentivise institutions to perform excellence in ways that are legible to external evaluators but may obscure internal diversity and dissent. Komljenovic (2022) similarly shows that platform infrastructures commodify visibility itself, treating engagement as a data asset to be measured, traded, and optimised.

Understanding EdTech systems as architectures of publicity allows us to interrogate the politics of educational visibility. Who is rendered visible, and on what terms? Whose actions are amplified, and whose are disregarded? What forms of learning and labour are made to count, and what remains invisible? These are not peripheral concerns, they strike at the heart of educational justice. As platforms increasingly govern what it means to teach, to learn, and to participate, the ethical challenge is to reimagine visibility not as a metric, but as a relational and plural practice of being seen and heard within a shared intellectual space.

Digital infrastructures do not merely host educational interaction; they shape its terms. In the platformed university, participation is increasingly mediated through technical systems that privilege some voices while marginalising or rendering others invisible. Interface design, algorithmic logic, and moderation protocols work together to create a structured economy of visibility, one where the appearance of openness often conceals profound inequalities of voice and representation.

These asymmetries intersect with broader sociocultural hierarchies. The digital divide persists, not only in access to infrastructure but also in confidence, literacy, and institutional legitimacy. Students from historically marginalised backgrounds, racialised, disabled, working-class, or first-generation, often encounter environments that misrecognise their contributions or misread their silence. Participation is flattened into metrics of activity: logins, clicks, discussion posts. Those who do not conform to dominant communicative norms may be coded as disengaged, their intellectual presence lost in systems that value visibility over depth.

This dynamic exemplifies what Fricker (2007) terms epistemic injustice: the structural denial of credibility or intelligibility to certain knowers. In a digital context, these injustices are embedded in the architecture of learning platforms. The interfaces we use to teach and learn are not neutral, they carry assumptions about who the learner is, how they behave, and what counts as learning. These assumptions shape which contributions are surfaced, whose ideas are amplified, and whose voices remain unheard.

These exclusions are not only ideological but materialised in design. As Emejulu and McGregor (2019) argue, equity in education requires more than access, it demands an honest reckoning with how discomfort, dissonance, and struggle are often designed out of digital learning spaces. Non-participation may reflect resistance, fatigue, or trauma, not disinterest. Yet platforms tend to reward seamless interaction and penalise complexity. Students are asked to perform engagement according to pre-scripted norms, often shaped by managerial logics rather than pedagogical ones.

Moreover, what Ahmed (2012) calls non-performative speech acts, public commitments to equity that do not produce material change, are increasingly common in institutional rhetoric. Platforms may feature statements about diversity and inclusion while continuing to suppress dissenting or disruptive perspectives. Moderation tools, mute buttons, and algorithmic filters may ensure civility but at the cost of flattening pluralism. Critical voices are often tolerated only within the bounds of institutional acceptability, raising questions about who is allowed to speak, and under what terms.

Participation thus becomes presence, narrowly defined and externally verifiable. Students are not just learners but data subjects, evaluated against behavioural norms set by engagement analytics and learning dashboards. As Knox (2017) shows, these tools do not simply observe learning, they construct it. They render particular behaviours legible, codify them as desirable, and marginalise others in the name of insight.

To reimagine digital education, we must take seriously the question of whose knowledge matters. This means designing for epistemic plurality, enabling forms of participation that are dialogic, relational, and attuned to the ethical complexity of voice. It also requires that we resist the managerial impulse to define learning by what can be seen and counted. Visibility must be rethought not as a proxy for value but as a contested space in which educational justice is at stake.

Calls to reimagine the university often founder on the assumption that its public character is self-evident, an institution positioned to serve society, disseminate knowledge, and foster civic engagement. Yet such assumptions obscure how the very meaning of “the public” is contested and unstable. Charles Taylor’s conception of the modern public sphere draws attention to this instability, emphasising the historically contingent nature of reasoned discourse and civic legitimacy. In the platformed university, these ideals are strained. What is required, then, is not a return to a singular, coherent public mission, but an affirmation of plurality as both condition and aim.

Gert Biesta (2007) reminds us that democracy is not simply a political arrangement to be learned about, but a practice to be enacted through education. He proposes a shift from education for democracy to education through democracy, a process in which the subject becomes political by engaging in acts of shared world-making. From this perspective, universities should not model democratic consensus but enable dissensus: the frictional, open-ended negotiation of values, identities, and knowledge claims. The pedagogical task is to cultivate the conditions under which such agonism can be sustained.

Ripatti-Torniainen (2018) extends this view by describing the university as a site where publics are not pre-given but emerge through pedagogical and institutional practice. Her notion of “becoming (a) public” foregrounds the relational, situated, and performative dimensions of publicity. In this frame, students and academics do not simply enter a shared space of deliberation; they help constitute it. The publicness of the university is thus a contingent and plural accomplishment, shaped through struggle, alignment, and difference.

Such a vision stands in stark contrast to prevailing imaginaries of the university as a coherent brand or managed system. Rather than perform an institutional voice through orchestrated messaging, the university must support a multiplicity of publics: epistemic, civic, disciplinary, cultural. These publics will often be in tension with one another, and that tension is productive. As Mouffe (2000) argues, democratic politics must embrace agonism rather than suppress it, recognising conflict as an ineliminable feature of plural societies. In the context of higher education, this means supporting forms of participation that do not collapse difference into consensus, but preserve the possibility of dissent.

This reimagining also has ethical implications. The politics of visibility, amplified by digital platforms, demands that we ask whose speech is seen, heard, and recognised as legitimate. Plural public pedagogy resists the logic of singular visibility in favour of layered, intersecting, and contested spaces of appearance. Dialogue, in this context, is not simply an exchange of views but a mode of world-building, a shared inquiry into what counts, who speaks, and how learning unfolds.

The university, then, must be reclaimed not as an institutional monolith, but as an assemblage of overlapping publics. Its value lies not in coherence or market responsiveness, but in its capacity to host dissensus, to nurture collective judgement, and to open spaces where education becomes a practice of democratic imagination.

The digital transformation of the university is not a neutral process of technological enhancement but a reconfiguration of its public mission, epistemic authority, and moral imagination. As this post has argued, the university is increasingly situated within a broader shift in the public sphere, one in which the conditions for visibility, legitimacy, and participation are structured by digital infrastructures. These architectures of publicity, often governed by opaque platform logics, do not merely facilitate communication; they delimit which voices can be heard, what knowledge is recognised, and how academic value is defined.

Rather than being passive instruments, learning management systems, engagement dashboards, ranking platforms, and performance metrics actively participate in remaking what counts as legitimate knowledge and authoritative voice. Visibility, once a by-product of scholarly activity, is now strategically managed and continuously optimised. These systems operationalise a moral order in which performance is tracked, comparison is valorised, and legibility to data infrastructures becomes a prerequisite for institutional relevance. As Williamson (2019) observes, the expanding data infrastructure of higher education is not merely technical but fundamentally political. Policy networks and commercial platform markets converge to define what counts as valuable activity within the university, shaping institutional legitimacy through performance metrics and digital visibility. As Taylor (1989, 2004, 2011) reminds us, the public sphere is not only a space for deliberation but also a repository of background assumptions, often unspoken, about what constitutes the good, the just, and the valuable. In the digital university, these assumptions are increasingly encoded in platform design.

To imagine an alternative requires resisting the default imaginaries of visibility and legitimacy that underpin much of contemporary EdTech. This is not simply a matter of improving interface design or making platforms more inclusive. It is a deeper pedagogical and ethical task, one that asks us to uncover and critically evaluate the moral assumptions that digital infrastructures embed. Following Taylor’s concept of strong evaluation (1989), we are invited to interrogate the qualitative distinctions we make about what matters most in education. These distinctions are not only reflected in our institutional technologies; they are co-constituted by them.

Educators, therefore, face a dual imperative. First, to challenge the notion that platform visibility equates to educational value. Second, to reclaim the university as a site of plural publics, spaces where multiple voices, values, and epistemologies can coexist without being subsumed by managerial logics of performance. The digital university must not only make knowledge accessible; it must cultivate the conditions for ethical deliberation and critical imagination.

The next post in this series will take up the challenge of platform neutrality. It will examine how educational technologies are not simply tools but moral actors, shaped by, and shaping, the normative frameworks within which they operate. Drawing further on Taylor’s account of strong evaluation, the post will explore how we might rethink digital infrastructures not as technical fixes, but as sites of ethical and pedagogical contestation.

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