Tekno is never a bad dog : cognitive fetishism and the information pet

Electronic pets are advertised as fun, convenient and educational. In this article we perform a cultural analysis of the robotic dog and explore the educational implications of its construction. Our argument is that the current version of the robotic dog expresses a reductionist view of learning and knowledge. We use Bruno Latour's notion of "factish" to address the robotic dog as an entity with social agency and its alignment with other things. In critiquing the reductionism of the robotic dog as a pedagogical technology we tum to Donna Haraway's conceptualisation of "cognitive fetishism". Finally we challenge the conceptual circularity inherent in the construction and behaviour ofthe robotic dog - and its implicit "learning" model - by taking relationships between humans and biological dogs seriously.