Education and digital media: the necessary synthesis of the use-value / exchange value contradiction

Abstract

Use value refers to the usefulness of social productions in the sense of the increasingly effective fulfillment of human needs, as well as the production of new, ever richer, more human needs. However, in a society oriented by the logic of capital, thus oriented to the production of goods for exchange (commodities), the use value will always be determined, though not unilaterally, by the fact that it is in indissoluble unity with the exchange value, which leads, as a rule, to the secondary consideration of supplying/ production of needs in favor of the increased production of plus-value, the source of capital profit. This paper analyzes, employing literature review, a discussion about the contradiction of use value / exchange value incident on the use of digital media in education. Based on the Marxian dialectical method, a discussion is made about this contradiction, analyzing (abstracting, isolating) on the one hand the rich possibilities opened by the development of these technologies; and on the other hand, the process of commodification incident on the educational phenomenon, which interferes with the realization of that possibilities. As a synthesis, it is argued that the ontologically human moment, oriented to the use value, although determined by the purpose of producing plus-value, constitutes the fundamental social reference for the critique of the commodification process that occurs in education in general, with consequences in the way the means necessary to achieve the ends are conceived and adopted, a fundamental critical attitude for digital technologies to be part of an effective humanization process.