Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

More-Than-Digital Meaning-Making: Paratexts of the Postdigital

2024; Springer Science+Business Media; Volume: 6; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/s42438-023-00449-x

2524-4868

Lesley Gourlay,

Digital Media and Philosophy

I write this commentary as a companion piece to Ibrar Bhatt's 'Postdigital Possibilities in Applied Linguistics' (2023), published in September.I'm late, very late, having agreed to write it over the summer.I have a book deadline at the end of the year, I agreed to do this Special Issue on 'Postdigital/More-Than-Digital Meaning-Making' after Ibrar suggested it because I'm fascinated by the topic, but I've kept putting it off and feeling a bit uneasy that I 'should' exclusively focus on my book.As on previous occasions, Petar Jandrić's patience has allowed my deadline to be repeatedly delayed.So, it's no longer summer here in the UK, instead, it's November.I'm writing this in the middle of the night due to severe jetlag.My laptop is the only light in the room.I took a picture of a tree while on a day trip after a conference last week and put it on the laptop as wallpaper.It's a huge eucalyptus, shot close up, in afternoon sunlight.While reading for this piece, I've found myself placing the icons of pdfs of the papers by various scholars on the image of the trunk of the tree, vertically, as if scaling it.I have included one of my own, as I can't quite remember what I wrote in it but feel it may be connected to this piece.The other authors' surnames line up the tree bark.Some of them are people I know personally.Others are only names to me, plus maybe pictures on their university websites.We talk about voice in academic writing a lot, but right now, I can't hear the voices of the ones I know 'in real life'.But when I read their words, I can 'hear' their accents in my mind.They are not present.But I feel like right now, I am somehow part of a temporary, fleeting, secluded gathering with them-at least until this paper is written.Maybe I should place the icons around the bottom of the tree, I think.After that, maybe we will be woven in something like a fabric.I'm a very poor typist.