- ‘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.’
I must admit: I'm having problems with the concepts of "self", "the world" and "reality" put forth by this article. They seem to be very much personally-defined, a perception sole rather than rational recompilation of the human experience — and even then, it feels so removed from the real feelings that I can't empathize with it. "What is the self? No one really knows". We don't know what gravity is, either — and yet, we use and follow it. We don't know what consciousness is — and yet, we are conscious and are able to distinguish between the two states. One does not need to know what their (or the) self is to notice the patterns of reaction that go "I belong here" or "This is alien to me". "How can I be myself?" is as useless a question as "What is the self?". It doesn't matter. If you're aware enough to retrospect and intelligent enough to make conclusions, you're beyond well-equipped for being yourself. The author, it seems, confuses advertisement and social networking with the world, saying that it is intrusive when it's very much not. I stopped following the news a while ago; I don't have apps that send obnoxiously loud notifications on my phone or on my laptop; I hid most of the intrusive stuff away on the social network. The world is what it is; you, however, have a choice what to look at.