I’ve been reading Justin Hodgson’s Post-Digital Rhetoric and the New Aesthetic, and it really made me think about how much digital life has blended into everything we do. Marshall McLuhan once said the medium is the message, and Gregory Ulmer emphasized the creative side of digital media. Hodgson picks up where they left off, but he argues that we have moved beyond thinking of digital as something new. It has become the environment we live in.
That is what he means by post-digital. The digital is no longer something separate that we add on to daily life. It is the background of our lives. Hodgson connects this to the new aesthetic, a term James Bridle uses to describe a digital way of seeing. Memes, mashup videos, social media edits, and even TikTok algorithms are more than passing trends. They shape the way we understand the world.
Hodgson put it this way:
“The proliferation of smart devices, digital media, and network technologies has led to everyday people experiencing everyday things increasingly on and through the screen… the boundaries between the ‘real’ and the ‘digital’ have become blurred and technology has fundamentally reconfigured how we make sense of the world.”
What stood out to me is that writing today is not just about words on a page. It is about the whole experience. It’s about how something looks, how it feels, and how it is perceived. Hodgson’s point is that we should stop treating digital as something extra and start recognizing it as a natural part of how we communicate, write, and create.
All quotations from Justin Hodgson, Post-Digital Rhetoric and the New Aesthetic (2019).
Liminal Wordsmith 
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