Hey there,
I study theater-didactic as my minor and I have to present the theme “Postdigital schooltheater”.
For the reflection on (digital) logic I imagined a warm-up which shows the advantages and disadvantages of centralized and decentralized networks. Hopefully the other students will understand the difference by a (maybe physical) experience in real life.
We are approx 16 humans there and I thought strings or sheets could represent the flow of information. I could not find a way to get the thing graspable.
Is there something known or has anyone a concrete concept?
The classic example is snailmail letterpost. Ordinary people used to write a letter, address it with a description of the recipient and their location, and hand it to someone going in the right direction. The letter might change hands several times before being delivered. Decentralized this was.
Then private postal services came along; I think the first organised ones were run by military and multinational banking. As I recall Lisa Gardine’s Renaissance history book Worldly Goods mentions this. There are also Roman ancedents. Postal services were much faster and were used for time-critical messages.
Postal services are natural monopolies, and in the 1700s I think countries began nationalizing them as state monopolies; in some places private third-party actors were not legally allowed to deliver letters or parcels.
Laws and many constitutions also guaranteed the secrecy of correspondance; the mail was sacrosanct and there were heavy penalties for tampering with it. Mail was delivered once to five times a day in most places. Same-day invites were sent and accepted by post.
The spread of the telephone decreased the number of local letters, and deliveries went down to about one a day. When e-mail came in it largely replaced the letter post, because it was so much faster. The parcel post increased in many places.
Amazon’s delivery services (“Fulfillment”) are subsidized by Amazon Web Services and by an effective cut of about 50% of the sales price of things sold on Amazon. Sellers who do not use Amazon to deliver their goods also get buried way down the search results. So despite Amazon’s services being more expensive than equivalent competitors’, and Amazon’s notorious working conditions and safety record, Amazon gets market share. Amazon delivers the parcels and governments cut public postal services because they are losing money.
Post is still a natural monopoly, of course. Amazon apparently wants to own it.
E-mail is not a natural monopoly. Decentralization does not noticably slow email down, and it makes it much more reliable and censorship-resistant.
The workshop covers everything I need and gives much more Information. So I hope the other students will have a remarkable experience.
The texts I have to read for preparation gives “MachinaEx” and “The Agency” as examples for performative theater according to “Postdigital schooltheater”.
