engleski

The Three Ages of the Digital

Digital technology is all around us – in our streets, workplaces, and bedrooms. Yet, when speaking of the digital challenge, we usually refer to microchip-based devices such as laptops, smartphones, home appliances, and automated factories. This chapter provides a broad historical perspective on the concept of the digital and shows its intrinsic links with human nature and education. In this perspective, the digital challenge is roughly divided into three ages. The First Digital Age covers relationships between human understanding of the world and the analog-digital continuum, introduces the problem of representation, and outlines some digital transformations in education and radical social action. The Second Digital Age describes the so-called Information Revolution and its aftermath with an accent to struggles over transformations in our social arrangements. These days we witness the first signs of the Third Digital Age, where digital technology has become taken for granted, and where the so-called postdigital challenge refocuses our attention from physics to biology. These changes have always been dialectically interconnected with education, which is simultaneously one of the main drivers of technological development (early computer development has taken place at research universities such as Stanford and MIT) and one of the main respondents to technological development (one of the main goals of education is preparing workforce for digital reality). The three digital ages are deeply intertwined and cannot be understood in isolation. Instead of describing neat scientific progress characteristic for natural sciences where each new theory (broadly understood as Kuhn’s paradigm [1970]) resolves some problems in preceding theories, each consecutive digital age has merely piled up new problems on top of existing ones. This shows the immaturity of our social sciences, which reflects the immaturity of social phenomena they grapple with. In the timeline of human history, digital transformations are very recent and far from complete ; they carry significant potential to develop in unforeseen and unpredictable directions. When attempting to neatly describe the keyword ‘digital’, therefore, it is necessary to warn that our contemporary descriptions will be at least as fluid as the described phenomena. However, this should not prevent scientists from trying to make sense of the contemporary human condition, its history, and possible futures. While we labor to make sense our present, we need to accept that our efforts will merely serve as stepping stones for more developed theories in the future – and we need to be aware that these theories might easily negate today’s insights.

postdigital, digital, history, genealogy

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