— Nicholas Negroponte, 1998
Research on postdigital media is rapidly expanding across disciplines, yet current efforts remain scattered across institutions, methodological traditions, and geographical contexts. Early theorizations of the postdigital, including Cramer’s account of post-digital aesthetics (2014) and Jordan’s understanding of the postdigital as a creative modality marked by entanglement of digital and non-digital domains (2020), already articulated how contemporary cultural production unfolds within hybrid spaces where online and offline distinctions blur.
Building on these earlier framings of postdigital hybridity, recent work has begun to examine how these dynamics materialize in specific narrative and artistic practices, media formats, and reading contexts. We believe this momentum calls for a more structured platform.
To this end, we set up this interdisciplinary network that brings together scholars working on postdigital forms of narrative, authorship, reading and writing practices, literacy education and mediation. The aim is to facilitate dialogue across different cultural, linguistic, disciplinary, and methodological environments, and to chart this emerging field from multiple perspectives. Members approach the postdigital mediascape through diverse angles ranging from aesthetics, poetics, narratology, intermediality, and transmediality to media culture, AI-driven storytelling, new literacies, hybrid genre formations, platformed distribution, participatory culture, and educational or societal applications.
The network will be coordinated by Anna-Lena Eick (JGU Mainz), Inge van de Ven (University of Tilburg) and Astrid Ensslin (University of Regensburg).
