P

Postdigital from first uses of the concept to today’s practices.

The second phase, Postdigital Science and Edu-
Petar Jandrić cation, describes the adoption and adaptation of
Department of Informatics and Computing, the concept in the social sciences. While the
Zagreb University of Applied Sciences, Zagreb, inception of Postdigital Arts and Humanities pre-
Croatia cedes the inception of Postdigital Science and
Education that does not imply a clear distinction,
Abstract temporal or linear sequence, or a hierarchy. As of
2023, the postdigital is a transdisciplinary concept
Since 2000, the concept of the postdigital has
that has developed in interaction with all major
rapidly spread throughout diverse fields of
fields and disciplines.
human interest. Depending on the context, the
postdigital has developed in various directions
and carries different meanings. While there are
Postdigital Arts and Humanities
good reasons for why the postdigital should
not be firmly defined (see Jandrić and Ford
A major source of inspiration for early postdigital
https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00207-3
theorists is Nicholas Negroponte’s wired article,
2020), there is a need to describe its many
‘Beyond digital’ (1998). Reminiscing on the
facets and their implications. This entry
twentieth century’s mainstreaming of plastics,
describes the main uses of the postdigital in
Negroponte writes:
the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
Now that we’re in that future, of course, plastics are
no big deal. Is digital destined for the same banal-
Keywords
ity? Certainly. Its literal form, the technology, is
Postdigital · Science · Education · Arts · already beginning to be taken for granted, and its
connotation will become tomorrow’s commercial
Humanities · Social sciences and cultural compost for new ideas. Like air and
drinking water, being digital will be noticed only by
its absence, not its presence. (Negroponte 1998)
Introduction (emphasis from the original)

According to Jandrić (2022), the historical devel- Two years after Negroponte wrote that article,
opment of the postdigital can be divided into two the word ‘postdigital’ appeared in several inde-
phases. The first phase, Postdigital Arts and pendently developed publications. In the UK,
Humanities, describes the line of inquiry starting Robert Pepperell and Michael Punt wrote The

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023

P. Jandrić (ed.), Encyclopedia of Postdigital Science and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35469-4_23-1
2 Postdigital

Postdigital Membrane: Imagination, Technology A landmark publication cutting across the arts
and Desire (2000). In the USA, Kim Cascone and the humanities is the Special Issue of A Peer-
wrote ‘The Aesthetics of Failure: “post-digital” Reviewed Journal About ‘Post-Digital Research’
tendencies in contemporary computer music’ (Andersen et al. 2014). In his contribution to that
(2000). Cascone situates the postdigital in ‘the Special Issue, ‘What Is “Post-Digital”?’, Florian
“failure” of digital technology . . . glitches, bugs, Cramer writes:
application errors, system crashes, clipping, [t]he prefix ‘post’ should not be understood here in
aliasing, distortion, quantization noise, and even the same sense as postmodernism and post-histoire,
the noise floor of computer sound cards are the but rather in the sense of post-punk (a continuation
raw materials composers seek to incorporate into of punk culture in ways which are somehow still
punk, yet also beyond punk); post-communism
their music’ (Cascone 2000: 13). (as the ongoing social-political reality in former
This interplay between the analog and the dig- Eastern Bloc countries); post-feminism (as a criti-
ital, the technological and the non-technological, cally revised continuation of feminism, with blurry
and the biological and the informational has boundaries with ‘traditional’, unprefixed femi-
nism); postcolonialism. . . (Cramer 2015: 14)
remained a defining feature of postdigital thought.
With landmark publications such as Postdigital That Special Issue opened up a plethora of ques-
aesthetics: Art, computation and design (Barry tions beyond the arts and humanities and paved
and Dieter 2015), the aesthetic line of postdigital the way for a stronger uptake of postdigital think-
inquiry has continued to this day. ing in social sciences.
It did not take long before the concept started to
appear in related fields and disciplines. In Post-
Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing Since Postdigital Science and Education
1894, Alessandro Ludovico (2012: 183) argues:
‘There is no one-way street from analog to digital; Social sciences have their own trajectory of the
rather, there are transitions between the two, in early conversations about the postdigital. In 2019,
both directions. Digital is the paradigm for content Dave Cormier et al. presented the results of
and quantity of information; analog is the para- 10 years of development of the concept of the
digm for usability and interfacing.’ This line of postdigital in an educational context and
inquiry has developed into postdigital media stud- concluded:
ies and is championed by institutions and projects It is now clear that we need to give less attention to
such as the Leibniz ScienceCampus – Postdigital novelty, which is always bound for banal disappear-
Participation – Braunschweig (Leibniz ance into use, put much more emphasis on negative
ScienceCampus 2022). aspects of the postdigital, monitor algorithms, rec-
ognise digitally reinforced flows of power and priv-
In ‘Towards a post-digital humanities’, Gary ilege, open up political structures for refusing
Hall challenges the computational turn in the techno-fuelled colonisation, identify the people
humanities and asks a rhetorical question that beyond the technology, and focus on systemic cul-
describes a lot of his later work: ‘might we not tural practices which shape us. (Cormier et al.
2019: 500)
also benefit from more of a humanities – . . .
perhaps even post-humanities – turn in our under- This trajectory from the identification of
standing of the computational and the digital?’ disappearing novelty to politics is remarkably
(Hall 2013: 782). In 2018, Hall founded the Cen- similar to the development of the postdigital in
tre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University the arts and the humanities. However, the contin-
(2022). A few years later, he stressed that ‘my uation of the dialogue within the social sciences
collaborators and I are trying to operate differently has been marked by strong academization and the
to the individualistic, liberal humanist ways of institutionalization of discourse.
working and acting traditionally associated with In 2018, Petar Jandrić et al. published a land-
being a theorist in the fields of art and culture, mark article entitled ‘Postdigital Science and Edu-
especially of the “star” variety’ (Hall 2021: 163). cation’ (2018), followed by a new journal in 2019
Postdigital Science and Education, a book series
Postdigital 3

(2021), and the Encyclopedia of Postdigital Sci- on postdigital research, Postdigital Research:
ence and Education (2023). In the article, Jandrić Genealogies, Challenges, and Future Perspec-
et al. (2018: 895) write: ‘The postdigital is hard to tives (Jandrić et al. 2023a) and Constructing
define; messy; unpredictable; digital and analog; Postdigital Research: Method and
technological and non-technological; biological Emancipation (Jandrić et al. 2023b), exhibit a
and informational. The postdigital is both a rup- wide array of theories and approaches under the
ture in our existing theories and their continua- broad umbrella of the postdigital. Shared values
tion.’ In the early issues of Postdigital Science and approaches include the recognition of the
and Education, contributors to the journal spent value of postdigital dialogue (Jandrić et al.
considerable effort in discussing the many mean- 2019) and transdisciplinarity (MacKenzie
ings of the postdigital. 2022), the emphasis on political economy, and
A lot of early work has focused on the word the importance of developing new postdigital
‘postdigital’. Andrew Feenberg (2019: 9) writes: knowledge ecologies (Peters et al. 2022). Post-
‘these terms “digital” and “postdigital” seem arti- digital work is strongly informed by the tradi-
ficial. If the terms have something like the content tion of critical pedagogy with its emphasis on
I am ascribing them, then the postdigital preceded themes related to emancipation and social jus-
the digital and should be called the predigital tice such as gender (Hurley and Al-Ali 2021),
instead.’ Paul Levinson (2019: 14) expresses a race (Matias and Aldern 2020), and (eco)-
similar sentiment, writing that ‘I do not disagree pedagogy (Jandrić and Ford 2022). The vast
that we are in a postdigital age. I disagree that we majority of postdigital researchers and practi-
are first entering it now.’ Peter McLaren (2019: tioners are situated on the political left (Hall
10) moves beyond words and asks: ‘Can we use 2021: Jandrić et al. 2018), yet postdigital
the term postdigital, be committed to the same approaches and theories can also be found on
values that led us to choose this conception of the far right (Fielitz and Thurston 2019).
the present and yet arrive at completely different
conclusions?’
Tim Fawns (2019: 142) expands on these cri- Summary
tiques: ‘in discussing postdigital ideas of educa-
tion, I am looking less for a linguistic shift and The postdigital is a vernacular, aesthetic, theo-
more for a shift in educational culture, where retical, scientific, and political concept, a prac-
educators think in the same way about learning tice, a political project, and much more. Over
activities – critically questioning design and prac- time, the arts, humanities, and social sciences
tice – whether they involve microchips or not’. have developed their distinct understandings of
Christine Sinclair and Sarah Hayes explore rela- the postdigital. Fundamental elements of these
tionships between the postdigital and (critical) understandings, such as the opposition to all
posthumanism to illuminate the ‘importance of kinds of binaries (digital-analog, technologi-
examining the role of language in bringing sepa- cal-non-technological, etc.) and resistance to
ration rather than continuity to an analysis of technological instrumentalism and determin-
human experience’ (2019: 127). Michael Peters ism, are shared univocally. Other elements of
and Tina Besley (2019: 40) call for ‘[a] critical the postdigital are shared loosely and are often
philosophy of the postdigital [that] must be able to interpreted differently.
understand the processes of quantum computing, For some, the postdigital represents philoso-
complexity science, and deep learning as they phy, ontology, epistemology, and research
constitute the emerging techno-science global approaches; others see it as an important element
system and its place within a capitalist system of their personal worldview, moral principles, and
that itself is transformed by these developments’. religion (Savin-Baden and Reader 2022), yet
As of 2023, postdigital thinking and research others see it simply as a useful tool for their
now belong in the mainstream. The two books
4 Postdigital

work. The postdigital can be found inside and Coventry University (2022). Centre for Postdigital Cultures.
outside of traditional institutions. https://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/areas-of-research/
postdigital-cultures/. Accessed 26 September 2022.
The postdigital is inherently transdisciplinary Cramer, F. (2015). What is ‘post-digital’? In D. M. Berry &
and political, but not uniformly so: different M. Dieter (Eds.), Postdigital aesthetics: Art, computa-
researchers and groups exercise different levels tion and design (pp. 12–26). New York: Palgrave Mac-
and forms of transdisciplinarity and political millan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137437204_2.
Fawns, T. (2019). Postdigital education in design and prac-
engagement. tice. Postdigital Science and Education, 1(1), 132–145.
The postdigital is also a malleable concept that https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-018-0021-8.
often contradicts itself and always defies defini- Feenberg, A. (2019). Postdigital or Predigital? Postdigital
tion. Nevertheless, ‘the prefix post(-) signals that Science and Education, 1(1), 8–9. https://doi.org/10.
1007/s42438-018-0027-2.
we have something to talk about’ (Sinclair and Fielitz, M., & Thurston, N. (Eds.). (2019). Post-digital
Hayes 2019: 129), and diverse postdigital cultures of the far right: Online actions and offline
approaches and theories allow for many different consequences in Europe and the US. Bielefeld: tran-
shapes and forms of that conversation. script Verlag.
Hall, G. (2021). Postdigital Politics. In S. Niederberger,
C. Sollfrank, & F. Stalder (Eds.), Aesthetics of the Com-
mons (pp. 153–177). Zurich and Berlin: Diaphenes.
Cross-References https://doi.org/10.4472/9783035803914.0008.
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