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.

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.

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.

Digital communities emerge in shared time rather than in shared space; simultaneity is the coin of the realm.

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.

Our political culture has been hitherto formed predominantly by the Analog City, which reflected to varying degrees both the inheritance of print culture and the conditions created by electronic media. What we are now witnessing is the ascendancy of the Digital City, which is characterized primarily by the advent of ubiquitous Internet connectivity... See more

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.

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

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

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