lujeen1113

Elder generations had then envisioned the human society nowadays to be on digital. Then younger people of this generation seem on the contrast to their predecessors to have run out of the beautiful imagination of mankind stories. It is a very good topic to raise ‘What is post-digital’? According to the typical bipolar mechanism of digital system – [0,1],  from non-digital to digital, it is a leap from nothing to everything. Hence, would the post-digital simply be from digital to non-digital? A reverse procedure of the previous social development procedure as from everything to nothing (again)? I consider the answer is Yes.

To elaborate the short answer further, I am going to explain from both technical point’s view and social scientifical point’s view and if needed, I will integrate both argument streams together for efficient communication.

a). Technical aspect:  Current electronic -devices along their evolution paths, owing to the underlying design philosophy that Technology should ease Human Life, have arrived to their regime of AI power already. The ideas of smart home, etc have quite demonstrated human pursuits of extremity in every aspect of life exploration of possibilities that include how to relax themselves from undesired labour. For one instance, if the previous phase of e-devices still asked the favor of their owners’ manual movement for them to be switched ON and OFF [0,1], then current phase of e-devices have endeavored further to avoid even bothering their owners’ efforts as much as possible and that’s exactly ‘to your wish, your majesty’.  In the former case, man still needs to make efforts to decide whilst in the latter, the efforts have been minimized as much as possible already. It is a change of the bipolar mode of [0,1] to [0] – an accumulated social and technical development of mankind that leads to a new epoch. A new epoch doesn’t mean PLUS and PLUS instead it means to start from a completely new scratch again simply because there arrives new problems to the ever changing human societies.

b)  Social aspect: The statement that human society is forever on the track of development optimistically towards the future is not correct. Keeping an above-low energy to sustain on the earth might work better instead of the former. Being a man either in social or in wild, man and others are inseparable. Mass matters. I consider elite education seems to be malfunctional and poses a surviving menace to mankind and his society. From this point’s view, education should shed in light through everyone’ opened window. To blame on human own traits (selfish, greedy, etc) only reflects back the reality that education has not been capably tolerating enough to be run to public. Further-more to blame on educational or professional institution’s mishandling in managing people invites in unnecessary and another new round of capital wasted on the subject of people management, esp. in current digital age.  Though, after-digital, there comes non-digital, it is not a return to  digital’s origin given a windowed timeframe. Instead it is a continued progress along the forever stretching timeline into completely unknown infinite.  Given the writer’s shallow knowledge in education on the global context, management the subject in higher education belongs to social science, which had been less invested by capital (human and non-human) for timespan that could have significantly slowed down the pace of the subject to head up with those subjects invested heavily by society, such as Computer Science, Finance, etc. A make-up investment is not going to make the balance sheet turn green again simply because time never waits. With time, things happened, happen and continue happening.

That said, current wars, battles, conflicts and arguments occurred for reasons that existed before the timing of these incidents and await generations that live after the incidents to trace back and dig out.  The situation will be very harsh for younger generation if current generation were incapable to progress towards optimality meanwhile settle the permissiveness of disputes passed down by their own elder generations.

This year of 2025 has been almost 100 years away from world war already. 100 years make up for three generations within a family household or even close to four generations. In Chinese modern literature, there had a book named ‘Four Generations within a Hall’ (四世同堂). But it is a very sad story, a typical style of modern mandarin novel writing that echoed the four seasons within a year along time – from flower blossoming wild of spring to snow blanketed earth of winter. The novel tells how a household prospers and decays. The writing style and contents have nothing to do with the attributes of the author himself simply because the novel became a huge success in the society. A novel’s success by mass has far more less relating to the author’s own background etc instead more relating to the author’s writing skills and mastery of the written words to his social contexts.

From this perspective, mankind as being pushed by the tides of time, has indeed arrived to the new epoch whereas clerks of our old story telling are gone and new story telling are emerging via currently new technology platforms. It is from bipolar to singular – a singularity from a completely new dimension – from everything fulfilled to brand new nothing again.