Podcast

This paper, which has 14 authors writing their sections and two author-reviewers examining the whole paper at the end, is an experimental postdigital dialogue on postdigital dialogue. It serves as a starting point for developing new dialogical research approaches fit for our postdigital reality. Authors were asked to reflect on Petar Jandrić’s book Learning in the Age of Digital Reason (2017) or to produce new insights. A symposium on this book was held at the 2018 American Educational Research Conference. The symposium participants (Peter McLaren, Michael Peters, Derek Ford, Sarah Hayes, Nataša Lacković, Petar Jandrić) criticized the author for his ‘lack of political attitude’ and ‘anything goes’ approach in the book. They asserted that postdigital dialogue, which was not competitive but aimed at collaboration, needed to focus on human agency and its complex relationships to emotions, artefacts and feelings; and this could be achieved by expanding postdigital dialogue to more direct forms of political organisation.

​

For Petar Jandrić, digital technologies have provided new affordances for dialogue and that today’s dialogue is inherently postdigital. Thomas Ryberg points out that the digital is not as ethereal as we think but firmly rooted in the material world. It is also not purely based on rational scientific reasoning but underpinned by particular understandings as well as interact constantly with its social contexts. Jeremy Knox believes the postdigital should dismiss the banality of non-thinking our way through the rise of learning machines and encourage thinking as reflective political beings. According to Nataša Lacković, the understanding of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media as cohabiting artefacts in the postdigital can be examined more deeply by adopting multimodal and semiotic approaches. In discussing the prevailing misperception that technology acts alone, Sarah Hayes explores where we choose to place ‘value’ in our discourse about technology. 

​

A postdigital critical pedagogy, as Juha Suoranta explains, reclaims the digital sphere as a commons, producing surplus consciousness and educational superabundance. As an artist cum teacher, Mark Smith shares his experiences that the process of decontextualisation of our sense-informed, empirical perceptions can be used to underline the need to contextualise the production of cultural artefacts. While Anne Steketee observes that the shift towards the postdigital facilitates our collective unlearning in order to relearn, Derek Ford discusses how a paranoid education in the postdigital enables the incommensurable and unforeseeable to breathe. Gordon Asher states that postdigital dialogue generates genuine, substantive, radical or participatory democracy, focusing on the interactive over the institutional, thus committing to political struggles in, against and beyond capitalism. 

​

Callum McGregor writes that a task for postdigital organic intellectuals, who concern with the material interests of the oppressed and marginalised, is to challenge populism and education and move education beyond training for the capitalist machine. Following Georgina Stewart’s view that a critical conversation article, which transcends commentary or op-ed status, has potential to be a full research article, Petar Jandrić and Gordon Asher say that this paper provides a prime example of ways in which our postdigital environment can shape different forms of interactions between authors and readers.

​

Lastly, Ben Williamson (author-reviewers) comments that research in the postdigital ‘precision’ sciences of signal detection and decoding, as this paper reveals, is an urgent priority for future educational scholarship. Andrew Gibbons (author-reviewers) laments that the word ‘affordances’ used by Jandrić (when he talks about digital technologies) is a dialogic killer – a rhetorical device that tends to ask less of the imagination. He also criticises the NZC digital technology curriculum, thinking that it is another example of what McGregor explains as a ‘fetishization of lifelong learning, as a panacea for retaining competitive advantage’. It is also not looking for the ‘prefigurative’ dialogue that, as Asher argues, is essential to the ‘democratic values and objectives’ in education.