“Profiles in Digital Scholarship & Publishing: Justin Hodgson”

Interview by Elizabeth Barnett | Xchanges 13.2, Fall 2018

Electracy and Thinking Digitally

Xchanges: Back around 2015 in a blog post titled “Introducing Digital Rhetoric at IU’s CMCL Colloquium Series,” you outlined the emergence of digital rhetoric, beginning with Cynthia Selfe and ending with Greg Ulmer and how his concept of “electracy” informs your own research.

Do you still use this term “electracy” and is it still a central part of your research focus today? Has your definition changed in the last few years? If so, how? Is there a difference between “electracy” and “digital literacy”? If so, what is that difference as you see it?

JH: “Do I still use it in my work?” The answer is a mixed bag of yes and no. To understand that, I think it helps to know the difference between the two. Electracy and digital literacy have a lot of overlap. They are playing in the same space, which is trying to account for what happens with digital technologies and how they’re impacting us. The real difference is they kind of operate from completely different epistemological orientations. Digital literacy by design is often tied to functional capacity with the technology and/or developing critical skills with the technology: knowing how to use it and how to interpret what’s going on. Whereas electracy is more of what happens when these tools set upon us. They fundamentally change how we see, interact, and engage the world.

Then the question is, “Does it still manifest in my work?” It does and it doesn’t. In the kind of conversations that I have across my campus and with other folks, the term digital literacy has gotten more stock. It’s easier to frame a lot of things in terms of digital literacy than to teach them about this electracy paradigm. But I think the principles that Ulmer’s after, the ways in which we start from the individual, we invent from the self, and that electronic technologies allow us to discover new things in new ways, and focus on matters of affect, engagement, atmosphere, and attunement, remain at the core of the inquiry that I do.

In my book Post-Digital Rhetoric and The New Aesthetic, essentially what happens is I’m performing a lot of Ulmer’s ideas, but just performing them in a scholarly mode, rather than talking about it as electracy. His life’s work is the series of books that are all leading to building an entirely new paradigm. Victor Vitanza once referred to him as the Aristotle of the 21st century. My term, post-digital rhetoric, that’s not a common frame. I’m trying to build my own platform to say, “Here’s how I want to think about it.” I’m just trying to bridge conversations because I’m between art, aesthetics, rhetoric, media studies.