ABSTRACT

The final chapter of the book looks both backwards in terms of what has been said about postdigital storytelling in the previous chapters, but also forwards in terms of cutting-edge developments such as artificial intelligence (AI) and the sort of machine-to-machine interactions captured by Trevor Paglen’s How to See Like a Machine project (2017). Indeed, artists such as Paglen remind us that we are fast approaching a time when the majority of machine activity will not involve any direct human input at all. If digital storytelling is increasingly these cybernetic stories that machines tell each other, postdigital storytelling has become the imperative by which we can champion the ‘being-in-the-world’ of the human condition. The chapter argues that transdisciplinarity is critical here, providing an approach by which the essentiality of this human experience is foregrounded. As the chapter notes, postdigital storytelling and transdisciplinarity are irrevocably intertwined, each the child of a new ontological paradigm, a paradigm I’ve termed metamodernism. Storytelling has much to offer the research of global imperatives such as resilience and empathy, yet without the means to reach across traditional academic boundaries, we risk being overwhelmed by the sheer scale of what faces us.