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The Post-digital Condition
by johan

    ‘Post-digital’ doesn’t mean that the digital era is behind us. The concept heralds a new phase wherein the digital has become self-evident, hardly distinct from the ‘non-digital’. The digital turn has been accomplished, there’s no way back. You’ll just have to put up with it, just like you live with the neutrinos that rage, billions per second, through the material body which is yours.

    In the post-digital, reality, has also become difficult to recognize, just like the self. At the same time, it can’t be avoided either. It seems we are obsessed with reality but before everything, the (social) media are already there, making an act of it, a story, an anecdote. In a comment on the Dutch poetry blog ooteoote, poet Maarten van der Graaff wrote the following reaction in a discussion that arose around one of his poems: ‘Even if I resist, the world in which I exist invades my language, even with only a slight cough, and that world, next to so many other and far worse things, can be mundane and exhibitionistic (…) This is no joke to me, nor some trendy influence, it is a phenomenon that drives me to despair sometimes.’