Argues we are in a post-digital moment, where the blurring between the "real" and the "digital" has fundamentally reconfigured how we make sense of the world.
Postdigital Aesthetics is a contribution to questions raised by our newly computational everyday lives and the aesthetics which reflect both the postdigital nature of this age, but also critical perspectives of a post-internet world.
Reconsiders persuasion as a process of embodied information, arguing that rhetorical practice is irreducible to categories of humanism and must now exercise its posthuman capacities.
What is “digital rhetoric”? This book aims to answer that question by looking at a number of interrelated histories, as well as evaluating a wide range of methods and practices from fields in the humanities, social sciences, and information sciences to determine what might constitute the work and the world of digital rhetoric. The advent of digital and networked communication technologies prompts renewed interest in basic questions such as What counts as a text? and Can traditional rhetoric operate in digital spheres or will it need to be revised? Or will we need to invent new rhetorical practices altogether? Through examples and consideration of digital rhetoric theories, methods for both researching and making in digital rhetoric fields, and examples of digital rhetoric pedagogy, scholarship, and public performance, this book delivers a broad overview of digital rhetoric. In addition, Douglas Eyman provides historical context by investigating the histories and boundaries that arise from mapping this emerging field and by focusing on the theories that have been taken up and revised by digital rhetoric scholars and practitioners. Both traditional and new methods are examined for the tools they provide that can be used to both study digital rhetoric and to potentially make new forms that draw on digital rhetoric for their persuasive power.
In Gestures of Concern Chris Ingraham shows that while gestures such as sending a “Get Well” card may not be instrumentally effective, they do exert an intrinsically affective force on a field of social relations. From liking, sharing, posting, or swiping to watching a TED Talk or wearing an “I Voted” sticker, such gestures operate as much through affective registers as they do through overt symbolic action. Ingraham demonstrates that gestures of concern are central to establishing the necessary conditions for larger social or political change because they give the everyday aesthetic and rhetorical practices of public life the capacity to attain some socially legible momentum. Rather than supporting the notion that vociferous public communication is the best means for political and social change, Ingraham advances the idea that concerned gestures can help to build the affective communities that orient us to one another with an imaginable future in mind. Ultimately, he shows how acts that many may consider trivial or banal are integral to establishing those background conditions capable of fostering more inclusive social or political change.
'The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics' has assembled 48 brand-new essays, making this a comprehensive guide available to the theory, application, history, and future of the field.
Conceptualizing how digital artifacts can function as a frontier mediated by technology in the geographical, physical, sensory, visual, discursive, and imaginary, this volume offers an interdisciplinary analysis of digital material circulating online in a way that creates a digital dimension of the Mexico-U.S. border. In the context of a world where digital media has helped to shape geopolitical borders and impacted human mobility in positive and negative ways, the book explores new modes of expression in which identification, memory, representation, persuasion, and meaning-making are created, experienced, and/or circulated through digital technologies. An interdisciplinary team of scholars looks at how quick communications bring closer transnational families and how online resources can be helpful for migrants, but also at how digital media can serve to control and reinforce borders via digital technology used to create a system of political control that reinforces stereotypes. The book deconstructs digital artifacts such as the digital press, social media, digital archives, web platforms, technological and artistic creations, visual arts, video games, and artificial intelligence to help us understand the anti-immigrant and dehumanizing discourse of control, as well as the ways migrants create vernacular narratives as digital activism to break the stereotypes that afflict them. This timely and insightful volume will interest scholars and students of digital media, communication studies, journalism, migration, and politics.
Sounding New Media examines the long-neglected role of sound and audio in the development of new media theory and practice, including new technologies and performance art events, with particular emphasis on sound, embodiment, art, and technological interactions. Frances Dyson takes an historical approach, focusing on technologies that became available in the mid-twentieth century-electronics, imaging, and digital and computer processing-and analyzing the work of such artists as John Cage, Edgard Varèse, Antonin Artaud, and Char Davies. She utilizes sound's intangibility to study ideas about embodiment (or its lack) in art and technology as well as fears about technology and the so-called "post-human." Dyson argues that the concept of "immersion" has become a path leading away from aesthetic questions about meaning and toward questions about embodiment and the physical. The result is an insightful journey through the new technologies derived from electronics, imaging, and digital and computer processing, toward the creation of an aesthetic and philosophical framework for considering the least material element of an artwork, sound.