In The Age of Total Images, art historian Ana Peraica focuses on the belief that the shape of the planet is two-dimensional which has been reawakened in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and the ways in which these ‘flat Earth’ conspiracy theories are symptomatic of post-digital image culture. Such theories, proven to be false both in Antiquity and Modernity, but once held to be true in the Medieval Period, have influenced a return to a kind of ‘New Medievalism’.
MULTIFILE
On the internet we see a continuously growing generation of web applications enabling anyone to create and publish online content in a simple way, to link content and to share it with others: wellknown instances include MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia and Google Earth. The internet has become a social software platform sailing under the Web 2.0 flag, creating revolutionary changes along the way: the individual, the end-user, comes first and can benefit optimally from an environment which has the following keywords: radically user-oriented, decentralized, collective and massive. ‘An environment in which each participant not only listens, but can also make his own voice heard’: the Social Web. This document describes a brief exploration of this Social Web and intends to gain insight in possible fundamental changes this phenomenon is causing or might cause in our society. Particular attention will be paid to the impact of the Social Web on learning and education. For how do two apparently contrary developments touch and overlap? On the one side we have the rapid growth of technologies bringing individuals together to communicate, collaborate, have fun and acquire knowledge (social software). And on the other hand we have the just conviction within the world of education that young people should not only acquire knowledge and information, but should also have all kinds of skills and experience in order to meet social and technological changes deliberately, and prepare for a life long of learning.
