Closing Keynote (Asia/Aus) - Towards Digital Modus Vivendi: Living Together Through Connections
Channel: Connected Learning Alliance
Date: 2022-08-18

Digital media and social networking is one of the crucial factors to bring the younger generation, in the midst of struggles, frustration, and often hope, in experiencing and imagining their lives. In this condition, an important question may not be simply how to use digital media for connected living, but more importantly, how to live together in digital ecology by creating new forms of collectivity, coexistence and conviviality. Focusing on the Korean younger generation in their 20s-30s, Yeran attempts to delineate them with four categories: 1) solitary, 2) practical, 3) entrepreneurial, and 4) political. In surveying each category of identification or disidentification through living in a specific mode of daily engagement with online media, Yeran argues that the major part of current social conflicts (and perhaps development too) in the contemporary postcapitalist-digital world is generated from the differences and hostilities between (and even within) the categories of the digital modus vivendi, a considerable part of which is formed and conducted through digital media activities and social network relations. In other words, it also sheerly depends on how to practice digital media and social networks so that a society may become better on the democratic basis of freedom, equality, diversity, and care through connectivity and collectivity. It is crucial that the younger generations learn not only digital media as an instrument for practical reasons or entertaining, but more significantly, co-making a way of life as such, which may be called ‘digital modus vivendi’. And this may be quite an experimental and yet necessary matter in our thinking of connected learning for the next generations to come.