To oversimplify, here’s where we ended up. The Internet really did bring new voices into a national discourse that, for too long, had been controlled by far too narrow a group. But it did not return our democratic culture and modes of thinking to pre-TV logocentrism. The brief renaissance of long blog arguments was short-lived (and, honestly, it wa... See more

A cer­tain strand of tech­nology might be accelerating, but cul­ture is going nowhere in par­tic­ular — a decaying orbit around a decades-old gravity well; cycling & recycling; pas­tiche & déjà vu; playlist set to loop.

It’s possible that the idea of an “important” work of popular art, like the idea of movie stardom, simply can’t survive the transition to the digital era. The journalist and novelist Ross Barkan has done interesting writing on this theme, borrowing from Bret Easton Ellis’s concepts of “Empire” and “Post-Empire” to describe a shift from the post-Wor... See more