[Air-L] New book: The Poetics of Digital Media

[Paul Frosh]

Apologies for cross-posting.

New book:

The Poetics of Digital Media, by Paul Frosh.

Published by Polity, and available in Paperback, Ebook and Hardback. 

For more information please visit the book’s webpage: http://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9780745651316 <http://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9780745651316>

Short excerpt available here <https://www.academia.edu/37682296/The_Poetics_of_Digital_Media_-_Cover_and_Excerpt_from_Introduction>.

*Description*

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. It investigates how the "given" world we inhabit is given through media.

*Endorsements*

"The Poetics of Digital Media is a groundbreaking contribution to the study of digital media as a technological, social and symbolic environment. It will be a key point of reference in the study of digital culture for years to come.”
 
- Lilie Chouliaraki, London School of Economics and Political Science

"When I find myself puzzled by some weird thing in digital visual culture, Paul Frosh is my go-to thinker. This book counters the wide suspicion that poetics is formalist or frivolous and shows how the deepest questions of justice, ethics and the public world are poetic ones. It is a guide for the perplexed in these digital times.”

- John Durham Peters, Yale University


*Contents*

Prologue: Monster’s Inc. as a Poetic Manifesto                                                                     

1. Introduction: Media Poetics

2. Composite: The Morality of Inattention in Pre-digital Media

3. Screenshot: The "Photographic" Witnessing of Digital Worlds           

4. Tag: Naming Bodies and Incarnating Selves in Social Media

5. Selfie: The Digital Image as Gesture and Performance

6. Interface: Remediated Witnessing and Embodied Response

7. Conclusion: To Infinity and Beyond


*About the Author*

Paul Frosh is a Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His previous books include The Image Factory: Consumer Culture, Photography and the Visual Content Industry (2003) and Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication (2011, edited with Amit Pinchevski).