“Profiles in Digital Scholarship & Publishing: Justin Hodgson”
Interview by Elizabeth Barnett | Xchanges 13.2, Fall 2018
Post Digital Rhetoric
Xchanges: Your book comes out in March 2019. Who is your audience for this work? How you see James Bridle’s New Aesthetic operating in a post-digital world? Are we post-digital?
JH: My argument is that we’re so saturated by digital technologies now that we have as many, if not more, mediated experiences than we do non-mediated experiences in a very meaningful capacity. Digital is now just fundamental to the human condition in developed countries, and even in many non-developed countries. In the same way that writing dramatically impacted culture even in cultures that didn’t write, the digital has done the same thing. To talk about the digital as something distinct or different or out there or unique is problematic today.
The metaphor that we used to use was cyberspace—this world that exists outside, floating out there. But it’s not out there anymore, it’s actually down around us. We’re not in cyberspace; it literally has “everted” into the world. Once that happens, the distinctions we used to make and the way in which we think about our relationships to technology have to accommodate the fact that it’s no longer a separate, digital/real dynamic. The digital and the real are just one and the same. To answer your question, I do think we’re post-digital in this regard.
James Bridle is a digital futurist and around 2011, he makes a blog post on a site called Really Interesting Group. He basically writes that he’s been noticing there’s this new aesthetic that’s happening—all these aesthetic things from this computational world, intentional or otherwise, are manifesting as aesthetics in a digital yet material world. For example, we are surrounded by Wi-Fi but we don’t see it. There is an artist and design theorist by the name of Luis Hernan who figured out a way to take photographs of Wi-Fi, mapping the different intensities to a color spectrum using a long exposure lens. What Luis has done is he’s reoriented the world to Hertzian space.
The question with all this stuff is how do we become aware of that? How do we re-attune our sensibilities to take stock of the things that we can see or can’t? I study it as an ecology, with its practices, to try and discern a set of guides for doing rhetoric in a post-digital culture. I’m trying to not systematize it but let it coalesce enough to hand off to other people and say, “Here’s a set of ways you could think about human technology relationships today and how you can use them as a guide for making things.”