Seeing and Viewing Through a Postdigital Pandemic: Shifting from Physical Proximity to Scopic Mediation
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Seeing and Viewing Through a Postdigital Pandemic: Shifting from Physical Proximity to Scopic Mediation Mark Tschaepe 1,2 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract This paper addresses a particular area of concern regarding our habits that pertains to embodied experience and education through the Covid-19 pandemic: the shift from comfort to discomfort regarding face-to-face social interaction within the same physical space. To explore this transition, I use the related concepts of seeing and viewing from Isaac Asimov’s novel, The Naked Sun (1957), which are useful tools for investigating a probable collateral effect of rapid social distancing for the sake of avoiding contagion and includes replacing physically proximate interaction and procedures with a scopic mediation. Seeing and viewing provide concepts for understanding how values change in the midst of fears concerning contagion through physical contact that are mollified through the use of technology analogous to video conferencing. Postdigital education and the concepts of we-think, we-learn, and we-act provide critical tools for helping us understand this transition of perspective regarding educational and social practices in the midst of a pandemic. Keywords Contagion . Modes of interaction . Science fiction . Scopic media . Social
distancing . Values ‘We are living in the middle of a grand forced experiment, but we really don’t know how the experiment is going to play out’ (Jed Kolko, chief economist for Indeed, quoted in Tavernise and Mervosh 2020). The global pandemic caused by Covid-19 had immediate impacts on educational processes and procedures, including the way classes are conducted. Online video conferencing platforms, such as Zoom and WebEx, which were only recently considered optional by many administrations, faculty, and students, have now become mandatory for people who are practicing social distancing and quarantine. What might * Mark Tschaepe [email protected]
1
Prairie View A&M University, Prairie View, TX, USA
2
Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA
Postdigital Science and Education
have been considered by some skeptics as part of learning innovation theater in the recent past, meant to ‘produce the mere appearance, rather than the reality, of change and adaptation,’ has rushed to the forefront of common practice (Ralston 2020). Though the transition to online video conferencing does not necessarily entail classroom innovation, as Maloney and Kim rightly note (Maloney and Kim 2019), the rapid shift to courses conducted through scopic media carries a disruption of education habits, which entails unplanned re-habituation due to adjustments necessary for new pedagogical and day-to-day practices and procedures. Not only are we still learning how to use the scopic media effectively for education, but we are also forming new habits as we adjust. These habits pertain to long-term changes in the way we relate with the world, in addition to those that are in direct relation to the online classroom environment. This current d
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