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The Analog City and the Digital City
The structure of a medium of communication guides and directs our attention. Television, for example, directs our attention to the physical characteristics of a political figure in a way that print and radio don’t.
L. M. Sacasas • The Analog City and the Digital City
Fact-checking, however well-intentioned, does not solve the problem; paradoxically, it may in some cases make it worse. It is an Analog City solution insufficient to the problems of the Digital City.
L. M. Sacasas • The Analog City and the Digital City
Other peer groups remain, of course: family, school, colleagues, neighborhoods, religious communities, and so forth. But the formative power of these groups wanes in comparison to that of the digitally mediated audience, which lends the Digital City its Skinner-box quality of instant reinforcement.
L. M. Sacasas • The Analog City and the Digital City
It is one thing to think with a pamphlet, another to think with a newspaper, yet another to think with a televisual image, and still another to think with a meme.
L. M. Sacasas • The Analog City and the Digital City
Digital communities emerge in shared time rather than in shared space; simultaneity is the coin of the realm.
L. M. Sacasas • The Analog City and the Digital City
The profound erosion of trust in the Digital City leaves a vacuum, and we look to our tools to fill it. We seem set upon interlocking trajectories: of ever greater swaths of the human experience being computationally managed, and of intractable human subjects increasingly breaking down or revolting against these conditions.
L. M. Sacasas • The Analog City and the Digital City
The transition to smartphones and tablets, which made digital media a constant presence in our lives and our default media environment, has occurred only over the last decade. In other words, only recently has the Digital City begun to manifest itself in the public spaces that have been hitherto ordered by the priorities and sensibilities of the An... See more
L. M. Sacasas • The Analog City and the Digital City
Oral societies, Walter Ong argued, were deeply conservative because knowledge was scarce and fragile. All memory was living memory, and knowledge would die with those who held it if they did not pass it on to another person.
L. M. Sacasas • The Analog City and the Digital City
The triumph of shared time and the demise of shared place in the Digital City changes the experience of social belonging. While the modern state is not going anywhere anytime soon, the relationship of citizens to the nation is evolving.