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.”

I introduce the question of what digital technology is – why it is so powerful, why it is different in kind from other media – by focusing on the convergence of two themes. First: Regarded as a tool, digital technology does not really do anything; it does not straightforwardly act on the material world. Unlike steam engines or wheels, it performs no particular physical task. Its scope of action is unspecified and unrestricted. Second: It is a social technology. Its appeal does not reside only in its instrumental means and uses, but in its power to connect us into a single global nervous system. This is in part because information technology is a technology of intentional responses. By responding to us in terms of information and by making our responses themselves the subject of measurement, digital devices engage us personally and in kind. These features thus represent the twin promises of total effectiveness and total responsiveness; that is, digital technology is both a new tool for measurement and a new medium of being in touch with others. It is this synthesis of measurement with medium – of quantitative analysis with social reality – that is most distinctive and transformative about it.

This chapter demonstrates an approach to studying digital culture within Brazilian cultural studies that both plays to the existing repertoires of scholars in this area and incorporates the agilities and sensitivities required to do justice to digital culture. It presents a case study of the famous Brazilian internet meme “Cala boca Galvão” of 2010, a joke played by Brazilian internet users at the expense of foreigners, which mushroomed from a catchphrase shared on Twitter during the FIFA World Cup, protesting the verbosity of well-known television presenter Galvão Bueno, into a spoof fundraising campaign to save an endangered parrot in the Amazon. Adopting and adapting a framework put forward by Brian T. Edwards, the chapter analyzes the “meaning,” or content, of the meme (a dispersed collection of texts) and its “movement,” or circulation, revealing how both touch on issues of national identity (including the ongoing importance of television) and the relationship between Brazil and the world. The chapter argues that the continued reverberation and sedimentation of “Cala boca Galvão” and the proliferation of memes emerging on a daily basis in Brazil make digital culture – and the intersections between it and other cultural arenas – essential topics for research in Brazilian cultural studies.

Our contemporary moment sees a new impetus toward commemoration, fueled by the government-sponsored “Decade of Centenaries” program, spanning the years 1912–1922, from the centenary of the Ulster Covenant to the Irish Civil War. From the diverse cultural initiatives that have resulted to date, an imperative to expose and question what is memorialized, or what has been allowed to be of public matter, is already proving to be the most powerful feature of this commemorative decade. What has also become evident is the importance of new technologies and new modes of communication that look backward and forward: They invite new ways of thinking about the past that are already proving to be transformative in the present. Central to these activities is the development of new audiences and networks for the reception of Irish culture and, as this chapter also demonstrates, many offer the individual artist and their works a newly invigorated public role.

This coda considers in dialogue two influential Irish publishers, The Irish Times and Tramp Press, that have successfully adapted to the digital age while maintaining a deep commitment to literature and readers. The Irish Times is a venerable newspaper of record founded in 1859 whose form and content reflect contemporary conditions, while Tramp Press is a small, independent press founded in 2014 whose venturesome publications have garnered enthusiastic critical praise. As divergent as their organisational structures and objectives, these publishers share a common mission in advocating literature, and particularly Irish literature, as an essential and durable cultural instrument – one that not only helps readers to apprehend their contemporary moment, but also encourages them to think critically about the past and to imagine possible futures.

As the impact of the internet has rippled in ever larger circles over the past twenty-seven years, Pound’s presence on the web has slowly made itself felt: as web aggregators starting anthologizing poetry, selections from his work, particularly the shorter poems, were showcased on websites like Poetry Foundation, Bartleby.com or Poetry Archive. Universities, in their turn, began hosting modernist literature projects, such as PennSound in Philadelphia, where parts of Pound’s work are presented and commented on next to that of other modernist writers. Online libraries or book clubs hold scanned versions of the New Directions edition of The Cantos in closed access. Commentators publish their own work with extensive quotations in blogs or digital magazines, and artists upload artwork inspired by Pound and his poem. Wikipedia now boasts a long article on Pound himself, one on The Cantos and one on a ‘List of Cultural References in The Cantos’.