Reflections on a Post Digital Event.

After a very successful  launch of Mudlark in Fazeley Studios on Friday.  I just thought I would gather my thoughts and try and make sense of them.
It seems that many of the talks whether intentionally or not touched on the issue of “Post Digital” and what it means especially in relation to our post Greed/ post Credit world. Can new technology  be used to highlight and develop a better understanding of where we went wrong and where we should go from here?  When we pick up the pieces, what bits should we put in our pockets and which ones should we leave in our wake?
Post digital according to the wikipedia definition is:

“an attitude that is more concerned with being human, than with being digital”

As Dan Heaf pointed out in relation to digital companies that are still sucessful like Amazon, are the ones who have a stake in the real world. Who embody the internet made real. Click of a button – book through the letterbox.
Russell Davies pointed out how the internet is making the large newspaper installations redundant, but yet we still like the tactile nature of real things. How can the 2 things be united? The ubiquity of the web publisher and the written word. Uniting the blogosphere ( hate that word, but it sort of fits) with ink on a page. he suggests a sort of global parish newsletter where we print to our micro audiences.
It also made me think of  another conference where someone said the future will be about revisiting technologies that we’ve cast aside. Is there still mileage in newspaper?
We should be careful what we throw away in this accelerating knowledge culture whenwe often assume the answer is in front of us not behind.

Which brings me neatly onto reflection and data. With the collapse of the banks  and the economic systems we placed so much trust in, we need to create a more balanced relationship to data. Data became too abstract, bankers trusted graphs on a screen over actual realities on the ground. The real became unreal and people began to believe it. We weren’t factoring in human scales or reflecting on what was going on. We need to create applications that pause for thought and allow the operators time to assess their actions.

We need to understand the ramifications of data. Like Karsten Schmidt’s amazing work produced by 3d printers. We need to embody the digital, give it shape and substance. So we can feel the trunk of the elephant in the room.

Code has opened some amazing avenues but we have made it all shiny surfaces and not enough nobbly bits.
Adrian McEwan showed us how even the action of twittering can be embodied by a cheap mass produced toy – Bubblino (no disrespect) . Each entry relating to the event produced a shower of bubbles. Quite fitting that twitter entries are represented by froth!

He talked about his own experiments using Arduino to understand electricity usage and how he was posting his findings for others to use. Which made me think about a society where we no longer had to rely on a centralised means of mass production, but maybe in a not to distant future we will be able to make things bespoke, as and when we need them. Where the internet acts as a universal assembly manual and components search facility for everything we might need from kettles to spaceships.