Book Review: The Poetics of Digital Med...

Every now and then we remember the world before digital media and start paying attention to how natural the experience of internet-born phenomena has become. In The Poetics of Digital Media, Paul Frosh interrogates the contemporary conditions of mediated life by engaging with the digital world-making forces through the notion of media poetics. It is particularly refreshing that Frosh turns to the question of poetics in the context in which computational technologies live in and mesh with the everyday almost to the point of invisibility. The exploration of this question is less about the observation that “new media” is simply no longer new, but rather about the processes and transformations through which—by disappearing in their implementation—networks of digital objects activate and extend lifeworlds. For Frosh, media are poetic entities: they come into play as both performative energy and infrastructures of cohabitation.