I’ve been doing some talking and thinking about post-digital recently. A big part of this involves how our everyday lives have been - and are being - shaped by exposure to online networks and how this immersion in networks of practice permeates into our real-world thinking.
Usually this is best revealed through our behaviour
and expectations, but colleague and friend Chris Applegate pointed me towards this
awe-inspiring blog post by James Bridle that seems to neatly invert the notion of post-digital by
re-imagining a very digital product through a very non-digital channel.
Specifically, the James has published in book-form the entire series of edits made to the Wikipedia article on the Iraq War across a five year period from December 2004 to November 2009 – from invasion/liberation to retreat/victory.
The series totals 12 volumes and incorporates a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages. It's truly awesome.
This idea absolutely inspired me. It sets out and makes tangible the idea of history not as a fixed entity of knowledge for knowing, but as a historiography; a fluid discourse; a body of knowledge in flux.
Ex-Cluetrainee and Berkman Center Fellow, David Weinberger, in his book Everything is Miscellaneous, terms this process social knowledge while the blogger in question, James Bridle, puts it more eloquently when he states that Wikipedia is:
"not only a resource for collating all human knowledge, but a framework for understanding how that knowledge came to be and to be understood; what was allowed to stand and what was not; what we agree on, and what we cannot.”
I cannot agree more.
Call it what you will, the sooner we - and particularly those in positions of authority, influence and power - can recognise and accept that the representation and manifestation of knowledge and
power is a dynamic, fluid, process that yields meaning and suggests outcomes that change over time, the sooner contemporary society will
benefit.
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