Seeing and Viewing Through a Postdigital Pandemic: Shifting from Physical Proximity to Scopic Mediation

This paper addresses a particular area of concern regarding our habits that pertains to embodied experience and education through the Covid-19 pandemic: the shift from comfort to discomfort regarding face-to-face social interaction within the same physical space. To explore this transition, I use the related concepts of seeing and viewing from Isaac Asimov’s novel, The Naked Sun (1957), which are useful tools for investigating a probable collateral effect of rapid social distancing for the sake of avoiding contagion and includes replacing physically proximate interaction and procedures with a scopic mediation. Seeing and viewing provide concepts for understanding how values change in the midst of fears concerning contagion through physical contact that are mollified through the use of technology analogous to video conferencing. Postdigital education and the concepts of we-think, we-learn, and we-act provide critical tools for helping us understand this transition of perspective regarding educational and social practices in the midst of a pandemic.