1 - Left to Our Own Devices

Summary

I have four integrated purposes in Chapter 1. First, it serves as a general introduction to media analysis. I discuss how each medium embodies some set of incentives that systematically select for certain kinds of content. Second, I introduce digital media alongside the other analogous sea changes in the history of communication and culture. I spell out here in new ways the distinctive features that account for the power of digital technology, chiefly that it organizes culture in a new way, that it fuses the functions of medium and tool, that it makes images palpable, that it escapes time and space, that it casts us into the role of customers, and that it occupies our whole field of attention. Third, I am arguing that digital media consequently promotes a certain view of what is worthy of communication and therefore of knowledge and attention. Finally, I make the case that digital technology is in some unprecedented sense “natural.” I mean that it is extraordinarily compelling precisely to the extent that – unlike literacy, which is a hard-earned and laborious achievement – digital technology is arresting and engaging to the exercise of attention as such. It is, as software companies say, “intuitive.”