Yesterday at Blast Theory’s ACT Otherwise workshop I dropped the term post-digital in the middle of a set of deliberate provocations. It’s a term that has drifted occasionally around the DCRC over the last year, and seems to be in the process of Arriving. My arguments have been that digital cultural research (which the centre does) should all now be contextualised as post-digital research.
So what do I mean by post-digital? Because just like post-structuralism and post-modernism it is easy to get caught up in the concept of it being reactionary or negative as opposed to developmental. I’m also not entirely sure I mean one thing by it myself.
My simplest explanation however, now that I’ve had a little time to think about it, is that post-digital is when the categories of digital and non-digital become meaningless. There is a point where the two so thoroughly infuse each other that they are not two separate domains. I.e. that there is no sense in talking about digital media and non-digital media when they are all now just media. Digital production techniques so thoroughly infuse what might be seen as traditional media, that it is not the same anymore. The digital is now already there, not becoming, and false binaries keep us in the past, if they even ever existed as clear dualities. And this extends to cover synonymous debates such as virtual vs real or online vs physical. These are all already hybridised.
When I dropped this concept of the post-digital yesterday Andy Field did a nice little example/summary of post-digital when talking about how the nature of reading a book has changed. And I’m paraphrasing his words in my language, because it is not that books have physically changed, but that they’ve managed to stay a (meta)stable form in a network of changing production and consumption technologies. But I think some of the reaction to the concept of going post-digital are common in foregrounding the digital as a simple transformational force. People get stuck and struck with the sheer wonder of the changes “Did you know that digital/technology has fundamentally changed X?” And the answer is yes and…? How do we get on with stopping marvelling at the fact that it is changing things and work out what we do with that?
Matt Locke’s talk after mine was about post-digital attention. It wonderfully charted that pre to post trajectory and did end up asking that question of “what next?” His central argument is that contemporary technologies now allow content producers to experience the attention of their audiences. But he doesn’t end there, he asks, in a beautifully embodied way, “What does that feel like?” and “How does that change the practice of producing worK?”
I co-opted and twisted Matt Adam’s metaphor (or maybe it was a challenge) about technology development as an explosion that has already happened, and said that I thought technology had exploded, taking it beyond the sense of explosion as growth to explosion as blown apart. And I still like that, it has exploded and the little pieces are everywhere, embedded in the quotidian. It is time to stop being awed by the explosion and look at the fragments.
Technology is also necessary to the expansion of knowledge, according to Simondon. It is not the mere application of scientific knowledge, so much as it is the precondition for there to be such a thing as scientific knowledge: if only because scientific knowledge is generated when technology doesn’t work as expected, when it breaks down or deviates from its utilitarian function.
If things work then we’re not interested in why. When they don’t work properly we start getting curious and develop science to give us explanations for why they don’t work. Then we can fix stuff.
Decades before the fact, Simondon is here theorizing and advocating what today would be called hacking and hacker culture. Indeed, I think that the culture of hacking still has not caught up with Simondon, in the sense that hacking is mostly justified in pragmatic and/or libertarian terms, whereas Simondon adds a third dimension, a depth, to hacking by showing how it is essentially tied to technology as a basic component of human beings’ presence in the world.
Hacking is a way to figure out where things break, or work. To lead the way for “scientific” development to follow up in the wake of the not working. Hacking and dirty invention are not only a valid methods of inquiry, they are vital. There are interesting parallels with CS Peirce’s abductive reasoning.
This is edited highlights from a talk I gave in Bath last November. Mostly based on the Gamification and Gameful Design set of presentations that Sebastian Detterding, Rilla Khaled and I have done over 2011. The catchy soundtrack must have been put on in post-production.
In September the lovely folks at playARK in Cardiff asked me to come speak at their festival. They videoed me fiddling with their lighting set up and showing footage of half naked cricketers.
The following are a list of links and basic ideas that I used for a second year creative technology students at UWE (Web Design, Digital Media, Games Tech, Music Tech).
Even in this high tech vision some things stay the same. White people are centre stage in expensive hotels, offices and homes. A black man carries the ladies luggage, there is some kind of middle eastern charity and the chinese guy has to take the subway. Even the man fetching the car looks somewhat swarthy.
Though one good thing. It looks like they’ve banished all fonts except Helvetica and everyone lives in a grid system world sucking down infoporn. Everything is a bit gamelike, including the points the little girl is getting for doing her homework.
Recent years have seen a rapid proliferation of mass-market consumer software that takes inspiration from video games. This is sometimes bundled up in the term ‘gamification’. However this word has become tightly intertwined with a specific flavour of instrumental marketing activity. In this talk I define what is meant by ‘gamification’ in a way that moves it on from this simple, surface, approach to a more engaged form of gameful design. In the process detailing some pre-history and current work that presents a sensitive and thoughtful approach to using games in everyday life.
It’s free and but they would like you to register.
The Innovation Centre
Carpenter House
Broad Quay
BA1 1UD Bath
United Kingdom
Friday, 28 October 2011 from 17:00 to 19:00
The effects of alcohol on behaviour are determined by cultural rules and norms, not by the chemical actions of ethanol.
And coffee culture would not be any better. I’m glad I’ve gone teetotal on the coffee. I seem to be getting into fewer fights since giving it up.
If I were given total power, I could very easily engineer a nation in which coffee would become a huge social problem – a nation in which young people would binge-drink coffee every Friday and Saturday night and then rampage around town centres being anti-social, getting into fights and having unprotected sex in random one-night stands.
I would restrict access to coffee, thus immediately giving it highly desirable forbidden-fruit status. Then I would issue lots of dire warnings about the dangerously disinhibiting effects of coffee.
Pervasive and street gamers are compared and contrasted with the infamous subculture known as hipsters, showing that although they are quite different social groups their aesthetics operate in similar ways. Specific attention is given to the emergent, socially relative nature of these aesthetics and the operation of ‘cool’ cultural capital. These findings are based on ethnographic field work carried out in 2010 at the Come Out and Play festival.
Yesterday on radio4 I overheard a fascinating description of an audio piece for railway stations and have been doing a bit of poking about. I’ve not experienced the piece but the descriptions by participants and the artist make it fit nicely into the concepts of the liminal and subjunctive worlds. Lavinia Greenlaw’sAudio Obscura is meant to be like a camera obscura for aural experiences.
Train stations are essentially liminal spaces, places of strangers, and everyone is passing through these thresholds on their own little or large journeys. The way that the voices you are hearing become attached to passersby and become overheard, internal monologues is a wonderful example of the subjunctive connections between two worlds, a diegetic amalgam. It is especially telling that Greenlaw places it in Manchester Piccadilly and London St Pancras and describes them as being international. Her use of words such as “physical,” “immediate” and “unsettled” as well as saying that the piece is intended to “give yourself away to those around you” shows how it works with the ideas of the liminal and with communitas.
It also occurred to me today that the deeper psychological explanation for subjunctivity and liminality is possibly to do with cognitive dissonance. Or experiencing tensions, breaking points and stretchings of dissonance.