The Poetics of Digital Media

by Paul Frosh

Media are poetic forces. They produce and reveal worlds, representing them to our senses and connecting them to our lives. While the poetic powers of media are perceptual, symbolic, social and technical, they are also profoundly moral and existential. They matter for how we reflect upon and act in a shared, everyday world of finite human existence. The Poetics of Digital Media  explores the poetic work of media in digital culture. Developing an argument through close readings of overlooked or denigrated media objects – screenshots, tagging, selfies and more – the book reveals how media shape the taken-for-granted structures of our lives, and how they disclose our world through sudden moments of visibility and tangibility. Bringing us face to face with the conditions of our existence, it investigates how the ‘given’ world we inhabit is given through media. This book is important reading for students and scholars of media theory, philosophy of media, visual culture and media aesthetics.

224 pages, Paperback

Published January 22, 2019

Reviews

[Tristan Kennedy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Technology mediates our social lives. It adds something, good or bad, to everyday interaction. Technical mediation has been identified, theorised, and re-identified with great frequency. This book reconfigures the discussion in examining the infinite possibilities of enfolded digital worlds brought into being by social media. Frosh unfolds several possibilities of social media – and a few Pixar films – positioning them as poetic encounters that not only mediate but bring the world and ourselves into being.

There is immense danger in positioning virtual worlds as antithetical to real-life. This book explains why.