Ten Years of the Postdigital in the 52group: Reflections and Developments 2009–2019

Abstract

This paper traces ten years of development of the concept of the postdigital in the works of six scholars (Richard Hall, Ian Truelove, David White, Mark Childs, David Cormier, and Lawrie Phipps) acting under the collective pseudonym the 52group. The first part of the paper reproduces the 52group's manifesto entitled 'Preparing for the postdigital era'. The second part of the paper reproduces 2015 responses to 'Preparing for the postdigital era' published on group members' blogs and websites. The third part of the paper brings together group members' responses written in 2019 for the purpose of this article. The conclusion analyses these developments and situates them within recent developments in postdigital thinking. The article provides deep insights into the nature of our postdigital reality and offers two main contributions. First, the article offers some intellectual ancestry for postdigital theory and practice. Second, the article offers a unique insight into the evolution of feelings of people who have thought deeply about our postdigital era. With these contributions, the article offers a much-needed historical view to the postdigital and situates current postdigital thought into wider philosophical, social, and educational contexts.

Hacking the MOOC: Towards a Postdigital Pedagogy of Critical Hope

“…Behind the construction of our global factory, as postdigital scholars have highlighted, is the science and technology of cybernetics-the intermeshing of humans and machines within expanding and intensifying mechanisms of control fuelled by the generation of data, themselves, generated through the constant surveillance and monitoring of our behaviour (cf. Jandrić et al 2018;Peters and Besley 2019;Knox 2019;Cormier et al 2019). Interpretations of data and subsequent operational, strategic, policy, or political decisions can be increasingly taken by computers with no human intervention.…”

Programming the Postdigital: Curation of Appropriation Processes in (Collaborative) Creative Coding Spaces

“…Code enables us to access the digital devices affecting us through their 'invisible' (Cormier et al 2019) interfaces. Historically and media-theoretically, the prefix post grasps a process of digital transformation, in which digital technologies are no longer 'perceived as disruptive' (Cramer 2015: 20), although they might be.…”

Postdigital as (Re)Turn to the Political

“…The rather unsatisfactory but concise answer is that digital technology is no longer just digital technology (and of course, it never was). A much better answer needs some elaboration (and is developed in this issue by the collective writing groups led by Sonja Arndt and Dave Cormier) (Arndt et al 2019;Cormier et al 2019). While the topics covered in this issue may seem somewhat indiscriminate, they are of course rather significant ways of understanding the digital.…”

“…Reflections and Developments 2009-2019' (Cormier et al 2019), it is precisely the separation of politics and economics that is at stake, such that the digital appears to offer increasingly less for notions of public life (doesn't it seem such a very long time ago that we all learned how social media platforms were actually about advertising revenue, rather than keeping up with friends or mobilising grassroots activism?). Indeed, one of the recurring threads in these reflections on the postdigital appears to be the shifting perceptions of online spaces, from early emancipatory potentials to later disillusionment and increasing corporatisation.…”