E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.
Interactive media technologies are, at least in one sense, anticontextual. They open the field to new widths, constantly expanding relevance and reference, and they equip their user with a powerful grazing tool.
Sven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
The triumph of the digital seems to have also brought the triumph of the factual. As literature, as the idea of literature, suffers depreciation, it gets ever harder to make the case for imagination. And what is imagination if not the animating power of inwardness? The subjective self takes in the world and fashions meaning; art and religion are it
... See moreSven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
“Embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence, and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it
... See moreJeff Jarvis • The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet
The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether.