In his text, Post-Digital and the New Aesthetic, Justin Hodgson looks back into the recent past as we move ever forward to reckon with our evolving ways of being in the world.

He argues that we are already so immersed in a post-digital experience where the boundaries between the human and the technological are “blurred.”

In 2011, designer and futurist James Bridle grappled with the concept, curating artifacts on a Tumblr account that engaged with what he viewed as an emerging “aesthetic sensibility,” according to Hodgson, one marked by some awareness of the enmeshed relationship between digital technology and humans.

For Hodgson, this “two-way” relationship, or “eversion,” as Hodgson borrows a term from William Gibson, can be located in architecture, the arts, but also in our daily interactions.

He’s deeply invested in the aesthetic paradigmatically; he wants to restore it to its rightful place.

To “recover” it, he cites Philosopher John Dewey, who argued that the aesthetic is immersed in our perceptions, it connects to the senses, the body: this resonates with the DIY theories we’ve encountered this semester.

But using the work of Jenny Edbauer Rice, Hodgson goes further, engages with the New Aesthetic as a rhetorical ecology. He wants to use “its rhetorical dimensions to help call to attention its operative contours.”

Here are the four he names and discusses.

He goes big and gets granular, focusing not just on artifacts but also on the human-technological assemblages that engage this aesthetic to trace the “circulating intensities” in and of this ecology. How can academics, rhetoricians, and all rhetors involved in making in our post digital world “leverage” this new aesthetic? It’s ever-present but hard to grasp.

Well, let’s take the contour of the pixel orientation. He focuses on how we all know the pixel, even if it’s is being effaced on the level of our new, sleek screens. It’s fundamental to our interactions with technology.

To call attention to it in our making, then, is to call attention to how the pixel has dug into us, and how we’ve dug into it.

In so doing, we’re counteracting the numbing effect that Marshal McLuhan would have argued technologies can have on us. This also allows us to think creatively about pre-digital works that employed similar aesthetics.

It affords an “embodied mode of human understanding” (95). And our everyday worlds can shift .

He also cites the work of Luis Hernan whose digital art engages with perceptions beyond the human sensorium.

Hodsgon’s discussion of “the rhetorical value of hypermediation”(8)  (where he cites Bolter and Grusin) reminded me of my recent work.

Such learning practices, and that’s how I view them, are empowering, enlightening, and immersive. They need to be grappled with on their own terms.

To that end, Hodgson engages Gregory Ulmer’s concept of electracy, which is nothing short of, “the third great epoch of human history,” those of orality and literacy have given way (137). To grapple meaningfully with electracy is to grapple with its style, for Ulmer and Hodgson.

Perhaps the most exciting part of the book for my work and long-term research is the section on play, something I could argue I’ve been doing all semester. But I kept wondering, if I had read this book before my last project, even before my first one, would my conscious desire to hypermediate have resulted in cleaner, more stable, but less fascinating work?

If artifacts “thrive in the liminal space between unselfconscious expression

and self-conscious design” (76), would my self-consciousness have stifled and trapped me?

And while creating hypermediated works is empowering us, it’s also empowering the companies who own the applications and services we’re using. Companies whose full power remains unchecked.

Lastly, if we’re constantly leveraging, and leveraging assumes constant immersion, what happens to silence?