Postdigital openness

Abstract

In 2014 President Obama promised to open a US embassy in Havana. Leaked private emails between Hollywood actors about the film which depicts the assassination of Kim Jong Un forced media giant Sony to apologise for promoting terrorism. Robotic lander the Philae was the first human artefact which landed on the comet. Steven Hawking warned that Artificial Intelligence could end human life on Earth. Worldwide prices of oil crashed to peanuts. Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 took off and mysteriously disappeared. A deadly outbreak of Ebola, coupled with police brutality in the US and international conflicts in Ukraine, Crimea, Israel, and other places, have dominated everyday news. A new understanding of media has started to take off, and concepts such as fake news and post-truth have started to receive more prominence. As I write these words in November 2018, this arbitrary selection of ‘most important events’ in 2014 compiled from ABC News (Keneally, 2014) and Mashable (2014) is outdated: Cuba is more open than ever, Steven Hawking has unfortunately passed away, and oil is again expensive. Yet, my selection still tells a lot about our contemporary moment: Artificial Intelligence has continued to take over more and more jobs previously performed by humans, police brutality and armed international conflicts continue, post-truth has entered mainstream discourse and has significantly contributed to the election of the current US president Donald Trump (see Peters, Rider, Hyvönen, & Besley, 2018). Five years is a long time for media outlets that publish news on an hourly basis. Nevertheless, some news from my little blast from the past are obsolete, while others are as relevant as ever. Writing this text in November 2018, it is trivial to say which 2014 news are relevant today. But who could predict, back in 2014, which news will be relevant in November 2018? In ancient Rome, haruspices read the future from intestines of sacrificed animals; in today’s academic journals, editors read the future from reading, researching, talking to people, and intuition. These talents are unexplainable and unevenly distributed: hard work makes many solid researchers and editors, but the glory of reaching the pantheon of scientific revolutionaries (Kuhn, 1962) is reserved for the few. However, even the lousiest academic researcher and editor has a double role: we need to cor(respond) to current events, and we need to develop human thought by new ideas and their applications. Fruits of our work will probably never reach Plato’s ideal of complete timelessness, yet they should serve us at least a bit longer than a few days – if for no other purpose, then as stepping stones for researchers to come. In Research Methods 101, this usually amounts to definitions of ‘scientific contribution’ and to muddy differences between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ research; in editing business, this distinction often serves as a dividing line between ‘high theory’ and ‘low theory’ (Jandrić, 2017, p. 107). However, the concept of openness equally embraces various types of research. During the past five years, the Open Review of Educational Research has become a practical example of a specific model of openness introduced in Michael Peters’ inaugural editorial. This model sees openness as ‘intellectual commons’, which ‘provides an alternative to the currently dominant “knowledge capitalism”’, while ‘being conscious of the historically different accounts of openness especially as it applies to education’ (Peters, 2014). Five years after Michael published