Aesthetics and text in the digital age

This chapter focuses on the aesthetic dimension and briefly reviews the key skills needed to make functional communication work aesthetically and aesthetic communication functional. It argues that the new literacy is intricately connected to digital writing technology, and should take a creative but also critical stance toward it, ensuring an awareness both of its affordances and its constraints. The return of aesthetics was also a return of color, with the dreary colors of public transport and the black of motor cars making place for brighter colors, and magazines, photographs, films, and newspapers one by one abandoning black and white and moving to color. The importance of provenance in aesthetics means that aesthetic literacy is not only a matter of understanding the affordances of different semiotic modes and of recognizing rhetorical figures and parallelisms, but also of recognizing cultural references.

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