Postdigital openness

In 2014 President Obama promised to open a US embassy in Havana. Leaked private emails between Hollywood actors about the film which depicts the assassination of Kim Jong Un forced media giant Sony to apologise for promoting terrorism. Robotic lander the Philae was the first human artefact which landed on the comet. Steven Hawking warned that Artificial Intelligence could end human life on Earth. Worldwide prices of oil crashed to peanuts. Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 took off and mysteriously disappeared. A deadly outbreak of Ebola, coupled with police brutality in the US and international conflicts in Ukraine, Crimea, Israel, and other places, have dominated everyday news. A new understanding of media has started to take off, and concepts such as fake news and post-truth have started to receive more prominence. As I write these words in November 2018, this arbitrary selection of ‘most important events’ in 2014 compiled from ABC News (Keneally, 2014) and Mashable (2014) is outdated: Cuba is more open than ever, Steven Hawking has unfortunately passed away, and oil is again expensive. Yet, my selection still tells a lot about our contemporary moment: Artificial Intelligence has continued to take over more and more jobs previously performed by humans, police brutality and armed international conflicts continue, post-truth has entered mainstream discourse and has significantly contributed to the election of the current US president Donald Trump (see Peters, Rider, Hyvönen, & Besley, 2018).

Five years is a long time for media outlets that publish news on an hourly basis. Nevertheless, some news from my little blast from the past are obsolete, while others are as relevant as ever. Writing this text in November 2018, it is trivial to say which 2014 news are relevant today. But who could predict, back in 2014, which news will be relevant in November 2018? In ancient Rome, haruspices read the future from intestines of sacrificed animals; in today’s academic journals, editors read the future from reading, researching, talking to people, and intuition. These talents are unexplainable and unevenly distributed: hard work makes many solid researchers and editors, but the glory of reaching the pantheon of scientific revolutionaries (Kuhn, 1962) is reserved for the few. However, even the lousiest academic researcher and editor has a double role: we need to cor(respond) to current events, and we need to develop human thought by new ideas and their applications. Fruits of our work will probably never reach Plato’s ideal of complete timelessness, yet they should serve us at least a bit longer than a few days – if for no other purpose, then as stepping stones for researchers to come.

In Research Methods 101, this usually amounts to definitions of ‘scientific contribution’ and to muddy differences between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ research; in editing business, this distinction often serves as a dividing line between ‘high theory’ and ‘low theory’ (Jandrić, 2017, p. 107). However, the concept of openness equally embraces various types of research. During the past five years, the Open Review of Educational Research has become a practical example of a specific model of openness introduced in Michael Peters’ inaugural editorial. This model sees openness as ‘intellectual commons’, which ‘provides an alternative to the currently dominant “knowledge capitalism”’, while ‘being conscious of the historically different accounts of openness especially as it applies to education’ (Peters, 2014). Five years after Michael published his inaugural editorial, and having recently taken up the position of Managing Editor of the Open Review of Educational Research, I would like to expand on his concept of openness as ‘intellectual commons’ towards the postdigital.

In a recent editorial for another journal, its editorial team wrote: ‘We are increasingly no longer in a world where digital technology and media is separate, virtual, “other” to a “natural” human and social life’ (Jandrić, Knox, et al., 2018, p. 893). Inspired by Nicholas Negroponte’s simple claim, ‘Face it – the digital revolution is over’ (1998),

the term ‘postdigital’ does describe human relationships to technologies that we experience, individually and collectively, in the moment here and now. It shows our raising awareness of blurred and messy relationships between physics and biology, old and new media, humanism and posthumanism, knowledge capitalism and bio-informational capitalism. (Jandrić, Knox, et al., 2018, p. 896)

In order to understand this mashup of philosophical, physical and biological factors which shape our reality (just to mention a few), it is crucial to have open access to information/knowledge and an open mind which can make sense of this information/knowledge. In the Open Review of Educational Research, open access to articles is supported by Taylor and Francis’ publishing model and by various individual and institutional funders. However, changes in one’s thinking cannot be bought by money. No one can grant us a waiver for developing an open mind; in our postdigital age, this is an urgent intellectual task and an urgent duty for everyone interested in the future of academic research.

Understood as ‘intellectual commons’, postdigital openness is a new form of individual and social labour. We need to embrace challenges pertaining to the takeover of human work and education by Artificial Intelligences (Peters, Jandrić, & Hayes, 2018); not because we think such takeover is inherently positive, but because embracing change is the first step towards shaping modes of co-existence between humans and ‘intelligent’ technologies in times to come. We need to question symmetry between human and non-human actors, for research purposes and in our daily lives (Fuller & Jandrić, 2018; Williamson, 2018); not because we think humans and Artificial Intelligences are indeed equal, but because this approach provides us with more power to shape our interactions. We need to question political economy of academic publishing (Peters et al., 2016); not because we think that everyone who works for large publishers is either a precarious victim or an exploitative capitalist, but because we understand that shaping today’s journals and books provides knowledge infrastructures for the future. We need to embrace that the postdigital is ‘both a rupture in our existing theories and their continuation’ (Jandrić, Knox, et al., 2018, p. 895), and that the choice of what gets continued and what gets ruptured is at least partially with us.

These choices should not be taken lightly. Postdigital ‘intellectual commons’ require what Peters and Besley call ‘a critical philosophy of the postdigital’, which ‘must be able to understand the processes of quantum computing, complexity science, and deep learning as they constitute the emerging techno-science global system and its place within a capitalist system that itself is transformed by these developments’ (Peters & Besley, 2018). Postdigital ‘intellectual commons’ require ‘possibilities for unlearning in order to relearn, together; this is hope’ (Jandrić, Ryberg, et al., 2018). Postdigital ‘intellectual commons’ are a body of knowledge, a community of practitioners, and a philosophy which embraces complexity and nuance without building new ivory towers. Postdigital ‘intellectual commons’ are research praxis in which education cannot be divorced from technology and society. Probably most importantly, postdigital ‘intellectual commons’ are an attitude which allows planting seeds of openness even in most hostile soils. Working with Michael on developing the Open Review of Educational Research, I am honoured and privileged by the opportunity to plant, grow, prune, and graft seeds and plants of postdigital ‘intellectual commons’ in years to come.