Postdigital Brave New World and Its Educational Implications
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Postdigital Brave New World and Its Educational Implications Julia Mañero 1 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Keywords Capitalism . Education . Covid-19 . Postdigital . Solidarity . Triage
Besides, we have our stability to think of. We don’t want to change. Every change is a menace to stability. That’s another reason why we’re so chary of applying new inventions. Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy. Yes, even science. (Huxley 1932: 198) In a blink of an eye, stability as we have known it has collapsed. Consequences of the coronavirus pandemic reach beyond the realm of public health and impact all aspects of socio-economy (Whitworth 2020); its causes reach deep into our ideologies and social arrangements. According to Noam Chomsky (in Polychroniou 2020), the pandemic could have been prevented, but there was no profit to be made from preventing a potential disaster—so the world did nothing. How similar is this to other threats to our species, such as global warming? Will humankind be able to learn a lesson from the Covid-19 crisis and apply it to other threats to our existence? As I write these lines on April 11, 2020, in Sevilla, Spain is the third most impacted country in the world, with a staggering death toll of 15,843 people, and the rate of approximately 500 new deaths per day (World Health Organization 2020a). In a country of ca 47 million people, approximately 834,000 job positions have disappeared only during the month of March, generating poverty and despair (RTVE 2020). We are not just dealing with the pandemic but also with attempts to redefine our jobs, manage stress and anxiety associated with isolation, and fight general feelings of powerlessness. Our main strategy against the virus, social distancing, has also caused emotional and economic distancing.
* Julia Mañero [email protected]
1
University of Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain
Postdigital Science and Education
In our complex, messy and unpredictable postdigital condition (Jandrić et al. 2018), struggle against these disturbing trends develops curious reconfigurations between the digital and the physical sphere. The digital has indeed become ‘the master narrative of our world’ (Fuller and Jandrić 2019: 215); yet, the biological is more important than ever. Social media have evolved from toys for spending pastime to our essential communication lifelines; digital payments exceed cash flow (Agarwal 2020). Digital devices track people’s movements, strongly reminiscing dystopian science fiction movies from the past (Torbet 2020), reviving ‘disciplinary diagrams’ of surveillance and control (Foucault in Peters et al. 2020). However, these newly minted postdigital reconfigurations between the digital and the physical sphere are far from cast in stone. ‘Dialogue through postdigital conversations offers the possibly to unlearn in order to relearn, together; this is hope.’ (Jandrić et al. 2018: 173). solidarity: n. [the support that people in a group give each other becau
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