If our social worlds are entangled in digital space, how might we describe the spaces of postdigital education?

In 1994, Annemarie Mol and John Law presented three ways of conceptualising the topology of social spaces. Their initial conceptualisation uses the condition of anaemia as a framing device to explain these three ways, showing how each way was inidividually inadequate, but used in combination enabled a meaningful positioning of the anaemia.

Region space

First, they described the topology of regions: objects are physically near or distant, and based on their proximity, boundaries can be drawn around them to demarcate the clusters. This is the idea of space most familiar to us; the kind of space which we consider measurable with a ruler. It’s what makes possible the social construct of a “neighbourhood”. To illustrate, Mol and Law described geographical regions of high and low anaemia (Africa and the Netherlands to be specific).

Regions, while aligning best with the idea of physical distance, are social constructs because they are defined by humans based on our judgements of how close-is-close-enough-to-cluster, what’s-in-and-what’s-out, and the dynamics of power, ownership and belonging based on the boundaries we draw.

Network space

Next, Mol and Law described network space, in which objects’ proximity is defined not by their physical closeness but by the nature of the relations between them. For example, I am close to the friends with whom I share a daily group chat, regardless of their physical locations. The relationship I share with my next-door neighbours is fair, but cannot compare to the intimacies exchanged in the feed. And the objects are recursively shaping and shaped by their relations with other objects. Every object is a dependent variable, and every relationship an unstoppable force. My relationships with my friends influence the way I live and perceive my life.

Following their anaemia theme, Mol and Law refer to the networked spaces of blood labs, which are close because they do the same thing (blood analysis) and share their information to form a networked database.

At first glance, network space seems resonant with digital space – of course, the space of networks! – but it is perhaps inadequate for describing the experience of socially-populated space over time. Maps of networks are static images, illustrating relationships, dependencies and shaping influences across networks of objects. But social spaces are action spaces; relations are continuously shifting. And so Mol and Law’s third form offers a further dimension to help describe such dynamics.

Fluid space

Mol and Law’s proposed third form of social topology was that of fluid space. As a concept this is as indefinite as its name: in fluid space, objects, boundaries and relations are shifting, continuous rather than discrete. A group of friends may sometimes include and sometimes exclude; the boundaries of a territory are negotiable or dependent on who’s asking and why. And most perplexingly, in fluid space, things can be missing without being missed. If an object is not present, relations do not break down, but adapt to accommodate the gap. Fluid re-configures itself to what is there and not there, like water fills the space in a pond when a stone is removed.

I may be explaining this poorly, but as I understand it, these topologies are not mutually-exclusive alternatives but rather layered dimensions of social space. Social worlds (including but not only digital ones) are at once regional, networked and fluid in various ways.

Fire objects and properties of the digital

John Law continued to theorise about these forms of topology, and 11 years later with Vicky Singleton, he proposed a fourth form: fire objects. They described these as “patterns of discontinuity between absence and presence”. It’s an interesting idea – that social objects are actually defined by what is not there, what is “other” to them. The article proposing the idea uses warplane wing design as an analogy, suggesting that planes’ wings are shaped in ways that acknowledge the wind, the air pressure, the enemy aircraft, all of which are not there when the wing is designed and constructed. The idea is that change, in fire objects, is not a continuous and fluid process, but a kind of instantaneous “flickering” between a state of being and not being. Law and Singleton characterise fire objects as “transformative and generative”, driving change in the people implicated by them.

Lesley Gourlay suggests that postdigital education is a fire object. Although I think the word “fire” is a little pretentious here, I can see some of the ways in which these properties are relevant to social behaviour in digital space. This requires some understanding of what is meant by “digital” in the first place.

Digital means “of the digits”, and it originally referred to counting on the fingers. Now when we say something is digital, we mean it is composed of countable data. Digital objects are discretely quantifiable, existing (or not existing) in absolute terms. Think binary code: it’s either a 1 or a 0. Digital objects are, by their very definition, not fluid; they flicker in and out of being, as well as between discrete states of being.

Online education spaces are informed by presence and absence, the notion of asynchronicity being a dynamic in which a students’ being-there-but-not-there, physically and temporally, is the point.

Topological multiplicity in postdigital spaces

Inevitably, of course, we must confront the reality that online/digital experiences are always held by embodied people existing also in physical space – and those embodied people are (in developed economies) almost continuously experiencing digital connection at the same time as physical. This condition has been described as postdigital (please read the linked article, I slaved over it!) and has profound implications for how all people in our society experience space.

We therefore need not one but many views of social topology to help us understand how space might be experienced in the postdigital. We can recognise that our environments are structured by negotiated boundaries and potential relations, and that these dynamics shift in both continuous and discrete ways.

I was tempted to illustrate some kind of cute matrix of earth, air, fire and water as a handy mnemonic (earth as regional, air as networked, you get it). But that insinuates that this is somehow a complete framework of topological models – which is of course the opposite of the point. These are each ways of conceiving of the layered spaces we inhabit. There are other ways. Each of those described above is a metaphor, and every metaphor becomes strained when extended too far (a reason why I think “fire” is already ill-fitting its own clothes) – and so in the absence of any absolute truth, we must continue developing metaphors which help us make sense.