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.

New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop.

When facts are few, persuading the ignorant is relatively easy. But information abundance, already characteristic of early modern societies, engenders a degree of skepticism: The more there is to know, the more likely we feel that truth is elusive. Information super-abundance, or the condition of “digital plenitude,” as media scholar Jay David Bolt... See more

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.

The digitization of social life has also enabled us to trace the detailed movements of ideas and influences, making it difficult to think of ourselves as spontaneous, original actors in our own dramas. Again, keen observers might have always been able to trace such lines, but now we are all overtly conscious of the flows of social capital, and we h... See more

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.

We appear to be both obsessive documenters of our experience, yet largely indifferent to or overwhelmed by the archives we create.

But free-speech maximalism flourishes in print culture; in the Digital City it appears less desirable. First, print culture sustained the belief that, given a modicum of good sense and education among people, truth would triumph in the marketplace of ideas. Writing and reading are slow and deliberate, encouraging the belief that false ideas will ev... See more

As is now well known, social media platforms have been deliberately calibrated — using likes, retweets, and other reward mechanisms — to hijack our desire for attention and approval.