The Analog City and the Digital City

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

As late as 2011, journalists and technologists were praising social media’s emancipatory power in light of the role of Facebook and Twitter in the Arab Spring revolts. But, as has been noted many times, after the U.S. presidential election in 2016, such optimism increasingly appeared naïve and misguided. Now Facebook and Twitter are seen as corrosi... 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

While writing would allow far more knowledge to be preserved and accessed, it would also relieve individuals of the burden of sustaining collective memory themselves. Like writing and print, our use of digital media ordinarily generates an archive (as well as a trail of data, often invisible to users but of great value to others). But although digi... See more

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

Writing allowed for the durable storage of knowledge independently of human beings. Not only can written knowledge outlive a particular individual, it can outlive a whole culture.

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.

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.