AW::

So, Felicitas, here we are at the end of a fascinating and inspiring project, working together with leading and emerging scholars in the field of postdigital participation to explore the complexities around the term, the practices, and implications for power relations that both influence and derive from the use of technology in education, in society, in culture, in politics. And we want to try to pull together the various strands of the debate explored by the authors here and answer some guiding questions, right?

FM::

Yes. These questions point not only to the performative nature of postdigital participation with its mutual contingencies, but also to the ‘who’ and the ‘how’—words that point directly to these power relations. Perhaps it makes sense to break down these issues into three guiding questions: How is the postdigital deployed in the chapters of this book? How do contemporary media constellations shape participation? And who participates how in these contemporary media constellations? We have been thinking about these questions for some time now, Andreas, and we repeatedly come to the conclusion that the last two have to be treated together. The contingency and performativity of postdigital media and participation means that one cannot be answered without the other, right?

AW::

Absolutely. If we were to treat these questions separately, we would only end up repeating ourselves; these questions themselves bear witness to the intricate entanglements of the postdigital condition.

FM::

But firstly, let’s begin by considering how the postdigital as a concept is deployed in the chapters of this book. What I found the most interesting here was how all the chapters of this book disrupt binaries in some way. They all refer to traditional binaries such as the technological versus the biological, the material versus the virtual, online versus offline, and so on, but argue that these are so entangled in the postdigital that they can no longer be clearly distinguished from one another.

AW::

Yes, we now have heterogeneously interrelated elements.

FM::

The chapters also deploy two of the three different senses in which the term postdigital is being used—we referred to this in the introduction (Weich & Macgilchrist, 2023). Most of the chapters in this book understand the postdigital as a condition of current life: how the world is organized today, how technology, sociality, politics, economics, materiality, affectivity, history, biology, and much more are entangled, and how all these elements interact in the present day in which we live. (And the question of who ‘we’ are is also important here—most of the authors in this book are socialized in Western Europe and so thinking about a ‘we’ with that orientation.) Most of the chapters also adopt the postdigital as a critical approach, as a scholarly perspective, even if they don’t do so as explicitly as in Chap. 6 by Jennifer Grüntjens, Maike Altenrath, Sabine Schaper, and Sandra Hofhues, for example, which takes an explicitly critical stance on the world today (Grüntjens et al., 2023). So what we don’t see in this book is a third stance that sees the postdigital as a goal to be striven for—in the sense that the ‘purely digital’ is now ‘out’ or ‘old-fashioned’ and that the ‘postdigital’ is more desirable. That’s a position we can observe in some of the recent public or policy discourse around the postdigital.

AW::

That’s true—none of the chapters takes that position, but this is not really surprising. What I think works very well here concerning the term ‘postdigital’ is that all the chapters share a common ground regarding how technology is positioned within a mapping of the world: entangled, as you said, Felicitas, but also a critical view of those entanglements. And even if the chapters don’t explicitly welcome the postdigital as a ‘goal’ per se, they certainly share the objective of reflecting critically on these entanglements. It’s interesting that the chapters seem to share this critical approach to postdigitality although they come from different academic disciplines. I think this was also one of our main visions for this volume—that the postdigital might function as a connecting concept—and a catalyst for debate perhaps?

FM::

Yes, the term postdigital has brought together scholars from multiple disciplines with similar interests; it’s perhaps an overarching umbrella term that encompasses a shared critical approach. And I think this also holds true for much of the writing in the field around the postdigital, including the Postdigital Science and Education journal and the Springer book series on Postdigital Education; work in this area always moves beyond education in the narrow sense to inspire conversations between people from very different fields.

AW::

Absolutely. I hope that the volume might also serve to take the concept of postdigitality back into the disciplines that its authors come from and perhaps help to include more scholars in the conversation. I think the various concepts of Bildung explored in this volume, particularly in Chap. 4 by Marlene Pieper, Till Neuhaus, and Michaela Vogt, open up a fascinating conceptual space that might serve as an inspiring common denominator for scholars from multiple fields (Pieper et al., 2023).

FM::

Bildung flags one thing I was wondering about while reading the chapters, though. Most of the chapters place a clear emphasis on reflection, seeking to strengthen and support reflexive practices—or critical engagement—among students, teachers, and other actors, who are called upon to develop a critical and reflexive mindset. There is a strong focus on reflecting, talking, thinking, on narratives and discourse. They do so to the extent that I wonder whether this might be too cognitively oriented—too cerebral. And I wonder what that means for the debate around the postdigital; what does this mean for current engagement with this term in scholarship?

AW::

But not all chapters have that focus.

FM::

Right—the first two chapters, for instance, break away from this to a certain extent and show different approaches. Nina Grünberger (2023), in Chap. 1, for example, speaks about infrastructures and architectures—the materialities if you like—which shifts the debate away from the cognitive, epistemic focus. And the authors of Chap. 2, Petar Jandrić and Sarah Hayes, discuss the biological or bodily aspects of the postdigital—which they refer to as the “postdigital-biodigital age” (Jandrić & Hayes, 2023).

AW::

Yes, looking at experience, or affective media theory—a discourse from media studies that might be a promising approach to looking at other ways of engaging with the postdigital beyond the cognitive focus on knowledge production. This might be a channel to address the affective dimension around experience, empathy, and involvement. I think the idea of the postdigital has the potential to build bridges in that direction too. I agree that Petar Jandrić and Sarah Hayes are pointing us in that direction, but I think there is great untapped potential there for thinking about the postdigital in the directly experiential sense. And as I said just now, the diverse concepts of Bildung open up a productive space in this regard, with the potential to build bridges to cultural education—or what we call kulturelle Bildung in German—which focuses on the idea of formation and process rather than output and product.

FM::

Yes, absolutely—and the concept of doing; the materialities of doing—rather than “only” thinking and reflecting. All the chapters nod toward materiality. But I wonder whether, by thinking about participation, we are being drawn back too strongly into the idea of participation as doing by a person, by humans—rather than a posthumanist, new materialist approach that moves beyond that to include the more-than-human and indeed which has always played a part in research on the postdigital. How might we think about doing the postdigital beyond that—doing the practices that don’t necessarily need a person, or where the human subject is at least decentered? This seems to be an especially interesting challenge for research on postdigital participation: a posthumanist, new materialist approach.

AW::

Yes, that’s true, perhaps especially in the stronger sense of participation that pertains to decision-making, or actively shaping processes. But the other, more all-encompassing concept of participation, with its focus on taking part in the postdigital, in the entanglements described so poignantly in this volume, moves beyond doing the postdigital as a human to include simply existing like other entities as part of these “messy” and complex entanglements.

FM::

Yes, and the first chapter by Nina Grünberger really emphasizes the structures, the structures of capitalism and monopoly capitalism, the architectures, infrastructures, equipment, and environments of what we might call media constellations. These are shaping how participation can unfold. And this brings us very neatly to our second and third questions, which can only be considered together: How do contemporary media constellations shape participation? And who participates how in these contemporary media constellations? What would you foreground from the chapters about this?

AW::

I think Grünberger’s chapter addresses both levels of participation. How can we participate in postdigital culture? Where are the places where we are not only taking part in it but also contributing to its unfolding? And she also talks about the limited opportunities for individuals to actually participate in shaping this condition due to exclusionary structures such as large IT companies and other neoliberal orientations that prevent certain people from having a voice.

FM::

Absolutely. Chapter 7, by Tim Fawns, Gill Aitken, Yathu Maheswaran and Kanastana Yasotharan, also addresses the limitations and constraints on participation due to the design of the online environment, but also due to the materialities and socialities of that online environment in which participation happens (Fawns et al., 2023).

AW::

And Anke Redecker (2023), in Chap. 5, also describes the various scenarios in distance learning that shape and restrict the ways in which participants can interact and communicate with each other. She describes drill-and-practice scenarios, for instance, which are highly individualized and offer little space for dialog. There is limited room for negotiation; either one fits in or one doesn’t. She also speaks about e-portfolios, which seem at first glance to be a more open and progressive structure for self-expression but at the same time foster a disciplinary practice of self-reflection without dialog or interaction. And so Redecker ultimately comes to the conclusion that video conferencing is actually the most dialogic means of distance learning, offering a positioning that allows for participatory learning practices.

FM::

I thought there was an interesting power aspect in play in this sociotechnical constellation. Redecker refers to the option students have of turning off their video cameras and thus escaping monitoring, for instance. This enables students to seize back the power to make decisions for themselves around their own participation in this moment: whether they wish to be visible or invisible, to participate or abstain from participation. So what looks like perhaps the most straightforward and uncreative mode of using digital technology (especially after three years of a pandemic situation, which is the case at the time of writing) is actually a much more radical educational constellation.

AW::

Yes, and the chapters address similar aspects on a range of levels. On the one hand, Grünberger talks about changing structures and capitalist modes of production; on the other, reflectivity and critical pedagogy are also about shaping and enacting change. It is a kind of double move of being reflexive and developing an education system that enables learners to shape and change these structures through their own participation.

FM::

While at the same time not putting too much emphasis on the role of each individual in overcoming these huge structures. I do sense a big open question in Grünberger’s chapter though. Researchers have done so much work in the area of reflection and critical engagement over the years; how can we expect fostering more reflection to change the capitalist architectures of our society?

AW::

Yes, the authors of Chap. 7, Tim Fawns, Gill Aitken, Yathu Maheswaran and Kanastana Yasotharan, also look at a specific course that fosters critical engagement while analyzing the complex power structures of higher education in which everything is entangled. So there is a huge ambivalence there.

FM::

These ambivalences are key to many of the chapters. When Marlene Pieper, Till Neuhaus, and Michaela Vogt reflect on Bildung, inclusion and Open Educational Resources (OER), for instance, in Chap. 4, they ascertain that even OER are not necessarily inclusive; the authors thus untangle the complexities around the concept of openness. Looking at how exactly the practices unfold reveals the messiness and co-constitutiveness of how it all works. And in these reflections, how do media constellations and participation mutually shape one another? The sociotechnical world of today is all a big mess. Not in a bad sense, but in a constitutive sense, where learners’ agency and critical engagement can shape what this mess looks like—what media constellations look like—and how learning materials are put into the world, how they are designed, used, and circulated.

AW::

A similar ambivalence is perceptible in Chap. 8, which I wrote with my colleagues Ina Schiering, Michael Friedewald, Philipp Deny, and Marvin Priedigkeit (Weich et al., 2023). On the one hand, it is about the production of meaning in a space that is concerned with privacy and individual freedoms; on the other, it is about participation and shaping the postdigital condition.

FM::

What I really appreciate about that chapter, and also Chaps. 4 and 5, is that the situatedness of our question becomes clear: Different elements of different contemporary media constellations are most relevant for different participatory settings. Media constellations only become those constellations in the specificities of the setting. In Chap. 8, this interplay—or, drawing on Karen Barad as you do, this intra-action, a very physical doingness between design, reflection and critical observation of the design—shows how situated and context-dependent these considerations are. Because it is all so messy and entangled, two words that pop up throughout the chapters. And so the extent to which participation also shapes media constellations is dependent on such interactions.

AW::

Chapter 9, by Marko Teräs, Hanna Teräs, and Juha Suoranta, also addresses those dominant discourses about what we would call the postdigital condition but also about digital media in general and how they have changed the world (Teräs et al., 2023). These discourses are relevant in many media constellations because they shape not only how the various materialities are formed, but also how practices evolve within those media constellations. There are dominant discourses that tell people what is ‘legitimate’ or ‘right’ or ‘good,’ and Chap. 9 discusses other ideas, other knowledges, other visions of a digital—or postdigital—future. The chapter is forward-looking to other, productive, visions for shaping today’s media constellations.

FM::

Yes, in the sense of what Donna Haraway or Eve Sedgwick have called reparative or generative critique. They refer to it as a ‘utopia,’ but it is not a naïve utopia in which everything is simply wonderful, but a complex utopia which is simultaneously a critique of the present. This is why new narratives are so important—because of the dominant discourses that constrain our visions of the future today.

AW::

True. Visions, and also voices. The question ‘who participates how’ has a lot to do with whose voice is being heard.

FM::

This notion of whose voice is included—in Chap. 9, it’s about whose voice is included in shaping futures. But it’s a theme that permeates all the chapters; it’s about whose voices are gathered, curated and perhaps also acted upon. When students are networking, reflecting on and organizing in their research practices rather than following notions of absorbing knowledge, they are shaping the postdigital messiness in which they have to operate. Chapters 6 and 7 are both about how students make their own decisions about their own learning, discourses, and futures. Chapter 10 by Eva Kleinlein (2023), about asynchronous audio messaging, is also about using technology to include people who struggle with basic reading and writing tasks in research projects, thus expanding research data to include their perspectives. This lowers barriers to participation in research projects.

AW::

Yes, what I really like about Eva Kleinlein’s chapter is that it is built on the question of what kind of media practices are emerging in contemporary media cultures, and how these can be made productive for research. So if you consider research to be something that articulates voices and renders them relevant in some way, we are looking at those two levels of participation combined: on the one hand, being able to take part in everyday media practices and on the other, shaping those very media practices. It is mediated by research, so not a direct decision-making process, but the scholarly discourse is likely to have an effect on shaping our everyday world. Or is that too optimistic a view of research?

FM::

It probably is, but we need to be hopeful! Research has to at least try to diversify the discourse in this way. This brings us back to the notion of materiality as well; asynchronous audio messaging is a simple everyday practice that is increasingly used to communicate and it’s through the very materiality of the hardware that we use for this practice that this research becomes possible. This is deeply entangled with capitalist structures as well, of course. Using WhatsApp to include more voices in research also means that research is using structures of huge tech monopoly capitalism. We need to constantly be aware of these complexities.

AW::

Yes, and the chapter reflects explicitly on that aspect. Eva Kleinlein’s chapter is a great match with Chap. 2; the final and the first full chapter creates a circle and connect up the dots in this regard.

FM::

And this brings the interplay between micro-structures and what are referred to as macro-structures to the fore.

AW::

So what thoughts for future research has this volume opened up for you?

FM::

I think we can see many traces of generative critique here, in the sense of designing new elements, particularly in Chaps. 4, 5, 7, and 8. These are chapters that specifically address design—workshops, learning scenarios, materials and so on—with a view not to creating best practices or next practices, but to critiquing the current conditions. Current planetary injustices are a disaster, and this is the background to creating new modes of learning. So generative critique in this sense—not in a naïve understanding of making the world a better place—but by critiquing not only inequality per se but specific elements to be removed, overcome, or re-designed. I might be biased because I’ve been thinking with this concept for a few years now, but I do think this notion of generative critique will be extremely important for postdigital research in the future around participation and contemporary media practices.

AW::

I agree. Another important aspect for future research in my view is the role educational media research can play in understanding media constellations more broadly. Most of the chapters address—implicitly or explicitly—how the design of educational media is intrinsically linked to the design of media culture itself and the structures on which it is built. Educational media research is a specific area of work, yes, but in my experience, reflecting on educational media and considerations around their design are always relevant for media constellations outside the educational sphere too.

FM::

Your words here are a wonderful conclusion for our volume. They show how specific educational media constellations provide an analytical channel to looking at issues of inclusion, democracy, equality, planetary justice, sustainability, peace, and so many pressing issues of our contemporary and crisis-ridden world. As Nina Grünberger says, some work raises more questions that it can answer. She wonders whether that is a failure of research. But is this raising of questions that we cannot answer perhaps precisely the role of research and part of the process of co-constituting and co-designing our postdigital world?