Digital Paradoxes: Technology, Education and Unintended Transformations

In late 2018, Egypt began implementing an audacious reform project involving the “digital transformation” of its public education system. Located within a state-led project to build a New Digital Egypt and forge a New Digital Citizen and accelerated with the coronavirus pandemic, this educational digitalization promised to transform Egyptian education and solve its entrenched problems. This research presents an inquiry into the realities of digital technologies in education. Deploying a critical sociological lens, it moves away from idealized visions and utopian promises of positive technological transformations. Instead, it examines the empirical realities, unintended consequences, and politics of techno-educational reforms, situating them within their political-economic and socio-historical contexts. Using the case of Egypt and building on three years of digital ethnographic fieldwork, this research shows how digital technologies produce paradoxes in education, contradictions between digital promises and educational realities, on the levels of educational institutions, learning and assessment processes, social inequalities, and resistance practices. With those contradictions, it contends that while technology indeed transforms education, it transforms it in unintended and conflicting ways. By offering an empirically rich, theoretically grounded, methodologically innovative and practically significant intervention from the global South, this research contributes to timely conversations on technology, education and society; speaks to students, scholars, practitioners and policymakers; and has critical implications for digital and educational futures beyond Egypt.