This site is a companion to my book The Digital Plenitude: The Decline of Elite Culture and the Rise of New Media (MIT Press, 2019). Each chapter on the site contains materials that I couldn't put in the printed version, especially YouTube videos of film trailers and excerpts as well as Ted talks by some of the people explaining our media culture today. The key idea is that our media culture is a plenitude. It is a universe of products (websites, video games, blogs, books, films, television and radio programs, magazines, and so on) and practices (the making of all these products together with their remixing, sharing, and critiquing) so vast, varied, and dynamic that is not comprehensible as a whole. The plenitude easily accommodates, indeed swallows up, the contradictory forces of high and popular culture, old and new media, conservative and radical social views. Digital media now provide an ideal environment for this plenitude—for our flattened media culture in which there are many focal points but no single center.
This multiplicity, this loss of the center, is not a "problem" to be solved. It is simply the condition of our culture today.
Introduction
This chapter tells you what plenitude means.
Chapter 1: The Great Divide
The divide is or was between elite and popular culture.
Chapter 2: Popular Modernism
How elite culture became popular.
Chapter 3: Dichotomies
Some ways of thinking about our media plenitude.
Chapter 4: Catharsis
Catharsis is the "old" media aesthetic: from Casablanca to Avatar and some videos games.
Chapter 5: Flow
Flow is the "new" media aesthetic: Facebook, YouTube, and most video games.
Chapter 6: Remix and Originality
Hip hop and other forms of remix redefine originality (out of existence?).
Chapter 7: Procedurality
Machine-like thinking: from Chaplin's Modern Times to FitBit.
Chapter 8: Social Media and the Politics of Flow
Social media, identity, and politics (and of course Donald Trump).
Conclusion
Back to the dichotomies.
References
All the linked references in the book.
This chapter tells you what plenitude means.
Chapter 1: The Great Divide
The divide is or was between elite and popular culture.
Chapter 2: Popular Modernism
How elite culture became popular.
Chapter 3: Dichotomies
Some ways of thinking about our media plenitude.
Chapter 4: Catharsis
Catharsis is the "old" media aesthetic: from Casablanca to Avatar and some videos games.
Chapter 5: Flow
Flow is the "new" media aesthetic: Facebook, YouTube, and most video games.
Chapter 6: Remix and Originality
Hip hop and other forms of remix redefine originality (out of existence?).
Chapter 7: Procedurality
Machine-like thinking: from Chaplin's Modern Times to FitBit.
Chapter 8: Social Media and the Politics of Flow
Social media, identity, and politics (and of course Donald Trump).
Conclusion
Back to the dichotomies.
References
All the linked references in the book.