Interlude
‘lethargy arises not just from exhaustion or being ill at ease, but also because digital platforms specify that only certain forms of interaction – most obviously interactions that generate value – count as ‘being yourself’’. (Hu 35)
‘Welcome to the Digital Experience…’
Section 4 Contemporary Digital Writing and Algorithmic Reading
4A. Interface
Figure 29. Screenshot of the Interface Home Screen.
4B. Platformic Writing
Figure 32. Platformic Writing: Instagram post and caption.
Interlude
4C. Personal Research into digital and paper technologies in my life.
Figure 35. Chen Chen. A Small Book of Questions: Chapter III. Instagram post, @griefoflight
In this space, poetry behaves differently for me. Perhaps it is because Chen Chen writes with a beautiful blatant brightness that echoes an all-consuming love – ‘I kiss him’. Perhaps it is our own empathetic wiring that lets us see past the repetition, machinic and dull like hammered pixels.
Figure 37. Screenshot of Youtube “Journalling Ecosystems”.
My Journaling Ecosystem across Digital and Print spheres
Social Media, Digital Reading, and the Persistence of Print
The rise of social media has not precipitated the disappearance of print so much as it has recalibrated its cultural function. Digital reading practices offer immediacy and circulation, in contrast to the slowness and material depth of print. Rather than existing in opposition, digital platforms and print cultures operate in a mutually sustaining ecology. The ephemerality of social media and digital narratives drives readers towards the stability and authority of printed works. Print persists not despite social media, but because the digital intensifies our awareness of material permanence and aesthetic labour of the printed page.
– END
Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by
Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Hayles, N. Katherine. “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific
Analysis.” Poetics Today, vol. 25, no. 1, 2004, pp. 67–90.
Hu, Tung-Hui. Digital Lethargy: Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection. The MIT Press, 2022.
Kittler, Friedrich. There Is No Software. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael
Wutz, Raley, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2006, https://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/Engl800/Kittler-nosoftware.pdf