Theories of Postdigital Heterogeneity: Implications for Research on Education and Datafication

Postdigital theory assumes that the digital is no longer new, and disruption now mundane. It gets us beyond binaries such as online/offline, virtual/real, old/new media, digital/analogue, technical/natural, biological/informational (Cramer 2014; Jandrić et al. 2018).1 Rather than being shiny and new, we can, suggests Jörissen, ‘think of the digital as mycelium: the actual organism consists of the large invisible, interconnected, subterranean linkages’. What we think of as a mushroom is ‘only the mycelium’s fruiting body; a secondary manifestation’ (Jörissen 2017).2 With this metaphor, when we look at hardware, software, algorithms, data, etc., we are only looking at secondary manifestations. Like mycelia, the digital is more than the fruiting body; digitality is deeply woven throughout the contemporary world, and we thus live in a postdigital condition. At the same time, the postdigital condition is one of ‘imperial and industrial ruin’ (Tsing et al. 2021). Precarity threads through many lives, whether due to personal economic circumstances or with a gaze to the future of the planet. The idea that technological progress is inevitably social progress has, for many observers, crumbled. One prominent reaction to this, however, is concern that humans are losing our autonomy and freedom as we face ‘a new global architecture of behaviour modification’ (Zuboff 2019) or today’s ‘emerging grid of surveillance and data extraction’ which is on ‘a truly global scale’ (Couldry and Mejias 2019). I have been looking for concepts to help analyse education and datafication within this postdigital/precarious condition but outwith these universalising humanist