Posts by Jemma Stokes

Truths Written With The Help Of Figures by Jon Sharples

All you need is a little faith, trust, and pixie dust… or so said Peter Pan, as I was reminded when watching the 1953 Disney classic with my four-year old niece recently. Which of those three ingredients seems the most fanciful today? We live in the age of bad faith – a term borrowed from contract law to describe our shameless society in which we have become desensitised to accusations (or proof) of dishonesty, falseness, and lies. And the most celebrated new technology of the past decade is blockchains and distributed ledgers, the essence of which is a mechanism to remove the need for people to trust each other. It’s been a cliché of cultural studies for most of the time since the Peter Pan release to worry about a contemporary world ‘saturated’ with images in which our material desires, aspirations and political views are manipulated by the malign forces in control of those images for profit and power. You’ll be relieved to hear that I didn’t trouble my niece with any of that, but as I watch her handle an iPad far more expertly than my dad does, I can’t help but worry about what her journey through “third nature” will be like without even the memories of the pre-internet world that my generation has....