The Poetics of Digital Media

Paul Frosh

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780745651323, 9780745651316
• eBook ISBN: 9781509532681
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Media are poetic forces. They produce and reveal worlds, representing them to our senses and connecting them to our lives. While the poetic powers ofmedia 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.

1
Introduction
Media Poetics

Consider the following scenario. You wake up tomorrow morning in your still-dark bedroom, and before you open the curtains and look out of the window, you check for messages on your mobile phone. You notice that there is no reception; no sign of a cellular phone network whatsoever. You open your laptop computer and see that no matter what you do, you cannot connect to the internet. You turn on a portable radio and scan the spectrum in vain for a station, hearing only the sound of static. You turn on the television to be greeted by ‘snow’, the swirling dots of light and dark that reveal the absence of a signal. Finally, you rummage in the cupboard for an old landline telephone and plug the cord into the telephone socket: putting your ear to the speaker, you hear that there is no line. You still haven't opened the curtains and looked outside. How do you interpret this sudden isolation, an imposed solitude that has little to do with possible expectations about the particular media content you might receive and that has everything to do with the routine experience and expectation of connectivity made possible by your communication devices? What, in the most anxious recesses of your mind, do you imagine has happened? The answer is clear: it is the end of the world.¹

Media are poetic forces. They perform poesis; they bring forth worlds into presence, producing and revealing them. As this ‘disconnection scene’ shows, media do this not just through representing worlds, imaginary or otherwise, but by connecting us to worlds beyond our immediate physical perception. The smooth functioning of media signals to us, in ways we usually take for granted and irrespective of the specific content they convey, that those worlds continue to exist even though we cannot directly perceive them. Though they are routinized to the point of invisibility, these signals of connectivity and perpetual world presencing, which we can call ‘vital signs’ since they are indicators of life elsewhere (see chapter 3), do become conspicuous precisely at the moment of their sudden cessation. It is in the malfunctioning or termination of what Jakobson (1960) calls the ‘phatic function’ of communication (the aspect of communication charged with opening and maintaining channels of connectivity, about which I shall have much more to say in the chapters that follow), that this world presencing and its importance for our sense of physical and social being in a shared world with others, frequently becomes overtly apparent.²

Of course, to say that media produce worlds is not a particularly controversial claim. It certainly appears pertinent to the development of rich and complex imaginary worlds that have accompanied the emergence of digital media technologies, thanks in part to the increasing significance of computer gaming as a cultural experience and the expansion of media franchising (Star Trek, Marvel Comics, etc.: see Johnson 2013) as a ‘transmedial’ mode of cultural production which fleshes out fictional universes (Wolf 2012).³ The tenor of this book so far – with the prologue's attention to works of literature and narrative film, its invocation of middle-class childhood fantasies (and middle-class fantasies of childhood) ‒ might misleadingly situate its concerns within a broadly ‘fictive’ intellectual school in media and communication studies, where genres of fiction, folklore and art serve as models for other, possibly more prosaic but politically more predominant, genres: the hardcore categories of journalism, news, opinion and documentary. More troubling still, it might also seem to endorse an approach to media that is removed from more phenomenological and ethnographic appreciations of how media intersect with everyday habits, experiences, interactions and lives.

Yet it would be a mistake to restrict media poetics to fictive artistry. The resulting exclusion of informational reporting or everyday communication would reiterate a widely challenged dichotomy, since the importance of narrative, metaphor, conjecture and world-making to journalism, the social and natural sciences and everyday discourse and experience has become a commonplace principle among many scholars in these fields.⁴ Moreover, it would also threaten to confine our attention to the overt construction of worlds and to veil the fact that the poetics of media are crucial to world disclosure (Kompridis 1994, 2006) – to making present and revealing our being in a world already experienced as given. What can be called the ‘fictive mode’ of media poetics – usually intense imaginative engagements with conspicuously alternate worlds – is merely part of the story.

So, to repeat: media are poetic forces; they bring forth worlds into presence, producing and revealing them. Accompanying this more inclusive concept of media poetics are two key assumptions. The first is that our relations with media have a profoundly existential significance. This book is deeply sympathetic to recent writings foregrounding media, existence and ‘the meaning of life’ by such thinkers as Paddy Scannell (2014), Amanda Lagerkvist (2017) and John Durham Peters (2015); it also owes a debt to the prescience of Annette Markham who, in 2003, suggested that computer-mediated communication should be conceptualized as a ‘way of being’: ‘a transparent state wherein the self, information technology, everyday life and other are vitally connected, co-existent’ (2003: 10, my italics). Or as Peters puts it about media more generally: ‘Media are our infrastructures of being, the habitats and materials through which we act and are’ (2015: 15). Media are means for living, reflecting upon and defining our lives within shared human conditions and limitations. These conditions are several, and include natality (we are born), mortality (we die), dimensional existence (we inhabit dimensions of space and time), embodiment (we are physical bodies in physical settings; we grow, we decay), sociality (we are social), emotion (we can feel for ourselves and others), consciousness (we think, remember, imagine and are reflective), symbolization (we use symbol systems, primarily language) and – last but by no means least – technicity (we use and develop tools to survive and thrive and to aid in managing the other conditions of our existence). For all of the historical, social and cultural differences between individuals and groups that characterize human existence, this much – and it is much – we hold in common.

These human conditions of existence coalesce in experience through the formation of worlds. The principal world is that of our ongoing, everyday, shared sensate living and relationships: what phenomenological approaches have termed (with varying definitions) the ‘lifeworld’ – the world as already given, though dynamically so, to intersubjective experience and which pre-structures all systematic or deliberate attempts (scientific, philosophical, artistic) to analyse or explore aspects of existence.⁵ Other worlds which overlap with the lifeworld, and can extend from and into it, include perceptual and symbolic worlds which are overtly imagined, such as fiction, and those which are beyond the possibilities of direct perception but which are presented or inferred as actual: e.g. the microscopic entities and environments, and macroscopic astrophysical systems, which science visualizes, as well as the cosmologies of mythic and religious cultures. Worlds are imbued with ontological density and complexity – they are understood to be populated by beings and objects but are not reducible to those beings and objects, which in turn are not reducible to the media or symbol systems by which they are perceived. Worlds possess a capaciousness that enables a sense of dwelling within them.

The various ways in which the lifeworld overlaps with or extends through these other worlds is, obviously, a crucial question. As the opening ‘disconnection scene’ suggests, media have become fundamental to encompassing and enlarging our lifeworld – the taken-for-granted ground of our lives ‒ through the routine presencing within it of worlds beyond the horizon of immediate experience: both the worlds inhabited by actual others, which are seen as domains of a differentiated social reality (the ‘small life-worlds’ of social phenomenology:...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• 1: Introduction
• 2: Composite
• 3: Screenshot
• 4: Tag
• 5: Selfie
• 6: Interface
• 7: Conclusion
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement