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УДК 316.4
Deriugina A. student 3nd year, Faculty of Sociology St Petersburg State University Russia, St Petersburg FROM THE DIGITAL TO POST-DIGITAL: WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE DIGITAL AND HOW THE POSTDIGITAL CAN FIX WHAT IS WRONG?
Annotation: Post-digital is one of the most discussed topics in the society. How our future can look like? The article is an over-view of the articles connected with the topic of digital and post-digital society. In these papers I have discussed some of the problems and mistakes of digital society in different spheres. What I more, some suggestions and assumptions about future post-digital society were made.
Keywords: Digital, post-digital, society, information, data, surveillance
Introduction
Conception of "post-digital" term can be seen as a description of the relationships between society and computer age as a dominant paradigm in a time of global mixing, intertwined economies, population certainty and planetary limits. The main idea of this paper is to show an issue that understanding of the post-digital is not an aim to describe the life after the digital. I would like to show attempts to present the opportunity of exploring the consequences of digital and computer age. Human experience flows seamlessly from physical space to digital space. Society has spent about three decades to become digital, so the question is what our future is and how the post-digital can operate and deal with the "mistakes" of the digital. During the digital age society was getting used to technologies and it came that some expectations about how technology would incredibly change the world have not met the reality. Now, from my opinion, people express their high expectations from the post-digital. My goal in this paper is to show what problems society has nowadays due to digital age and what can be done for our common post-digital future.
It is important to mention that there is not one definition which can fully describe the idea of the Post-Digital as this term refers and connects with a big number of different spheres. Every sphere has at least several interpretations and views at this point and, what is more, expectations how post-digital world can be seen through their eyes.
To make a comparison of the digital with the post-digital clearer and more legible I would like to divide this paper into several sections: Politics, Control, Time, Education and Identity. According to this, my goal is to show how situation is presented nowadays, in the time of digital age and what recommendation or dreams can be drawn about the future "post-digital" society.
Politics
Another important factor is that human communication can be clearly seen
through the politics. It is all about involving relations of power and using strategic or tactical rhetoric, aiming to persuade other people to act, obey, maintain relationships or think in a particular way. According to an article "Disinformation society, communication and cosmopolitan democracy" written by Jonathan Paul Marshall (2017), lying and hiding are normal parts of communication and politics as well, as if even a dialog forms an unpredictable system, so: "being non-factual is inherent to political and social action, even though it can become disruptive of that action" (Jonathan Paul Marshall, 2017,"Desinformation society, communication and cosmopolitan democracy"). In capitalism, advertising or "producing in front" becomes the model for communication.
The algorithmic self might be seen as another manifestation of a postmodernist critique of modernist selves such as the liberal self or the psychoanalytic self. That is certainly now new. It is possible for a society to think of how industrial capitalism molded a subjectivity that realizes itself by means of hard work, obedience, diligence, and frugality (Gramsci 1971) or how consumer capitalism molded a subjectivity that realizes itself by means of consumption, hedonism, and individualism (Bell 1976). We might now ask how informational, digital, network capitalism molds a subjectivity that realizes itself through publicity, exposure, communication, sharing and surveillance (van Dijck 2013; Fuchs 2011; John 2016) and through delegating the understanding of the self to technological systems, the underlying rationale of which remains completely opaque and inaccessible for auditing through natural language.
Control
Surveillance become an integral part of modern society. It can be seen in the basic actions as supervision of internet usage at one's workspace or tracking and collecting database. Digital society got used to the fact that "corporations control the economic behavior of people and co-erse individuals in order to produce or buy specific commodities for guaranteeing the production oa surplus value and for accumulating profit" (Allmer, Thomas, 2011, "Critical surveillance studies in the information society, p. 588). In the way how I see this issue, rapid changes have to be made because for now it can be seen as an ideal architectural figure of modern disciplinary power called "The Panopticon" - a notion introduced by Foucault.
As a possible recommendation for a post-digital era, Fuchs (2009,116) suggest "to create non-profit, non-commercial social networking platforms on the Internet, such as Kaioo" The idea is to have platforms where owners are not interested in collecting any data and supervising for future profit and advertising. Furthermore, it is necessary not only to create safe spaces, but also to use the right to show the limits and to say: "Here you may not go. Here you might not record. Here you may not track and identify people. Here you may not trade and analyze information and build dossiers." (Parenti, 2003, 212) and to be heard what is more important. "From Facebook's data use policy: "we use the information we have to improve out advertising and measurement systems so we can show you relevant ads on and off our Services and measure the effectiveness and reach of ads and services" (Fuchs, C. (2014). Social Media: A Critical Introduction. London: Sage,
p. 163) this is how Facebook pretends to show its users that collecting data is about their safety and benefit which is not the only factor.
Time
"Time is fundamentally embodied in everything we do" claims Hassan (2003, "Network time and the new knowledge epoch" p. 233). We think in time, speak, we breath in it and do everything like that. The idea is that the act of being seems to be too wide and interpretive to be "killed" by a technology. At the digital age society pointed out they idea that clock-time is not a 'real' thing are actually a social construction. Time is invisible, a person cannot catch it, stop and so that it is able to be 'killed'. "Timeless time, which is the time of the short "now" with no sequence or cycle, is the time of the powerful, of those who saturate their time to the limit because their activity is valuable" (Castells, M., 2009, "Communicatio n Power" Oxford. Oxford University Press. p. 50)
Talking about the post-digital I believe that transformation of the "realtime" to "network time" has change patterns of living in a really strong way. People do not have time to think about their future, they do not have time to have hobbies or pleasurable time-spending. Market made us took part in an invisible competition "the more the better" when the general idea of life is to think and do things fast: "Network time constitutes a new and powerful temporality that is beginning to displace, neutralize, sublimate and otherwise upset other temporal relationships in our work, home and leisure environments" (Hassan, 2003, "Network time and the new knowledge epoch" p. 235). Network time made us connected at every second and in every place where we are. That lead to the fact that now borders are blurred, and it is a kind of normal situation to send a corporate-mail at night or to call in a massager during the weekend. I believe that breaking the nexus will require a political revolution that would make the market and information technologies work for cultures and societies and not vice versa. According to Hassan (2003, "Network time and the new knowledge epoch", p. 239) "we will rapidly become accustomed to living in a constant present and our understanding of who we are will emerge through the context of the knowledges
Education
According to the digital age it is obvious to mention that data has become a valuable resource and education itself become a site for its associated entrepreneurialism. An examination of the increasing use of digital technologies in the governance of education in which the concerns of "digital education" are quickly becoming the concerns of education in the general. Students do not want to have only online courses at universities, skype tutoring does not seem to replace face to face teaching process. Now there is an exploration of the material dimensions of the digital, focusing on labor practices and natural resources.
It seems to be a significant point that digitalization in educational process is not only having an e-book in the class instead of paper one, but much more inside. Development of personalized learning systems customize educational process with the use of data. "This paper has suggested that the postdigital might be understood as a kind of 'holding to account' of many of the assumptions associated with
digital technologies in education" (Knox, Jeremy, 2019, "What Does the 'Postdigital' Mean for Education?", p. 367). So that, society is provided with a lot of expectations relying on post-digital educational future which seems to me to be quite useless. I claim the it is not only about having a new gadget which will rapidly change the social world pattern into something new.
"However, this is not to suggest that critical perspectives on digital technology are somehow new, but rather that, in the contemporary moment of data-intensive processing, we may need to rearticulate and redirect these critiques towards the center ground of education. Neither is this a suggestion that the postdigital serves as an umbrella term for all critical work; only that educational researchers might view the postdigital as a particular turn towards acknowledging the political economy of the digital." (Knox, Jeremy, 2019, "What Does the 'Postdigital' Mean for Education?", p. 367) System is moving to the point from open web to more closed so that private companies can better collect as well. For instance, while using app for learning foreign language a person is not only using a smartphone for educational reasons but, according to agreement, gives personal data in order to be analyzed and used.
Identity
In the article "The cyberself: the self-ing project goes online, symbolic interaction in the digital age" (2016) written by Laura Robinson author argues that "the symbolic interactionist framework is crucial to understanding cyberself-ing process" (p.94) as cyberself "I", "me" are formed in the same way as offline self. Pursuant to the looking-glass, people see themselves indirectly through the "eyes" of other people, to be more precise, of the same social group, from different points. It is the way society evaluate us - according to the Goffmanian sense. Blogs represent one's "I" with the help of the homepage, for instance. So that blogging "requires sequential interactions that inform each other" (p. 104). Every single time an individual share something in the cyberspace it can be regarded as "performance" (Goffman, 1959:22).
Thinking about possibilities for post-digital it should be discussed what is more likely to happen: adaptation to or rejection of the constitution of the "digital self'. "Computation becomes something one operates while one walks around, is touched and touchable, manipulated and manipulable and interactive and operable through a number of entry-points, surfaces and veneers. Indeed, in a similar way to how the distinction between "being online" and "being offline" has become problematic, with widespread wireless networked devices, so too, perhaps, the term 'digital' describes a historical world of discrete moments of the computational." (David M. Berry and Michael Dieter Thinking Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design, 2014). To be more specific, the term "digital" was a relic of a time but that will happen no more. We started to integrate in the post-digital world with such features of cyberspace as talking with 'Siri' via Apple gadgets, using a Face ID to unlock a smartphone or use wrist watch to pay in a supermarket.
To my mind, cyberspace self-ing became such an integral part of our
personalities and our "I" and "me" which are seen for others, so that it is a kind of impossible for me to think that we can divide these two factors. "Interaction in cyberspace perpetuates the same self-ing that exist in the offline world" (p. 107108) and, what is more, adds it. Digital media have a very significant influence on the formation of knowledge. Conclusion
To sum up, the point of my paper is to highlight that since now whatever a post-digital future would look like we must be much more than just "digital" society. It can be said that humanity is on the step of entering a post-digital era, where "being digital" is not enough. All of all, digital now cannot be said as an opposition to normal real-world. Real and virtual spaces have always been existing together. A perfect example that confirm this issue are games, films and book where at least these two worlds coexist. As I believe, nowadays society has a tendency to connect the digital and the physical world, that is what might be called "post-digital". Nowadays we can see a tendency of reconsidering ways of using different forms of technologies, for instance, using analogical film cameras instead modern and progressive ones. These words conclude the idea that the post-digital can be shown as a way back to analogical.
During this essay I was showing that since now whatever a post-digital future would look like we have to be much more than just "digital" society. To conclusion, I believe this is an important time to recast how we think about the technology that surrounds us. We are building modern experiences that are in conversation with the world. The technology affects the world and draws from it.
References:
1. Hassan, Robert 2003. "Network Time and the New Knowledge Epoch". Time & Society VOL. 12 No. 2/3 (2003), pp. 225-241
2. Allmer Thomas, 2011. "Critical Surveillance Studies in the Information Society".
3. Ellison, Nick, 2013. "Citizenship, space and time: Engageme nt, identity and belonging in a connected world". Thesis Eleven, 118(1) 48-63. DOI: 10.1177/0725513613500271
4. Robinson, Laura 2007. "The cyberself: the self-ing project goes online, symbolic interaction in the digital age". New Media & Society, Vol 9(1): 93-110.
5. Taffel, Sy 2016. "Perspectives on the postdigital: Beyond rhetorics of progress and novelty." Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2016, Vol. 22(3) 324-338
6. Fuchs, C. (2014). Social Media: A Critical Introduction. London: Sage.
7. Castells, M., 2009, "Communication Power" Oxford. Oxford University Press.
8. Knox, Jeremy, 2019, "What Does the 'Postdigital' Mean for Education?".
9. David M. Berry and Michael Dieter Thinking Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design, 2014
10.Fisher, Eran, "Can algorithmic knowledge about the self be critical?" In Stocchetti, M. ed. (forthcoming), The Digital Age and its Discontent.
