(postmodernism) Designing Virtual Britain

Designing virtual britain (as a notion, in response to my previous post) seems to me to have an element of science fiction, H.G.Wells even. After watching the culture this last week ‘going underground’ exploring what was/is a very British sense of modernity and transformation, a need to dispose of the past in favour of anything/everything that can be new! But seemingly maintaining an element of a connection to the present by using existent objects to facilitate future thinking.

The London underground system is a point in question. The London underground delivers a strange type of time travel? Or a possible social and economic transformation, facilitating fluidity in population and social change, the London underground in the post war periods 1st and 2nd world wars. Think of network of tunnels, the tube (the web) delivering you from one existent reality to another, the suburbs to the glamour of the westend, or the eastend to the westend. Disappearing down a hole in the ground in what looks like a spaceship to arrive minutes later in Piccadilly or Mayfair. What relation have we here with the web/internet? The underground was re-designed at the hight of modernism, tube stations that looked like spaceships, posters created that painted the tube and its mobility in totally transformational light.

Can we juxtaposition this early 20th century time travel with our virtual time travel today? It does seem similar! Are virtual environments in need of navigable control beyond hypertext, what could be defined as (Harry Beck’s) original London tube map in combination with publicity defining/designing choices of arrival destination? This in my opinion has strong relation to education, we drop into the tunnel of education and arrive at destinations, qualifications, careers, further education possibilities etc. This thought must also have relation to possible learning destinations, can we design learning ‘destinations’ and associated possibilities?

This concept has relation to a small project I’m working on at that the moment, curriculum mapping in the digital university. I wrote a paper/essay on the subject in a previous MSCDE ED module ‘Info Literacies’.

These thoughts seem to segway nicely into #ededc 3rd study block - Katherine Hayles and posthuman etc.