DIGITAL PLENITUDE
  • Home
  • Chapters
    • Introduction
    • 1. The Great Divide
    • 2. Popular Modernism
    • 3. DIchotomies
    • 4. Catharsis
    • 5. Flow
    • 6. Remix
    • 7. Procedurality
    • 8. Social Media
    • Conclusion
    • References
  • Additional texts
    • Books in the Plenitude
  • About
  • Comments

Conclusion

Jay David Bolter. The Digital Plenitude: The Decline of Elite Culture and the Rise of New Media (MIT Press, 2019).  

Let’s return to the dichotomies laid out in chapter 3 and discussed in chapters 4–8. We have seen that the column on the right represents new practices, preferences, or aesthetics that are particularly at home in born-digital media, such as video games, social networking, and microblogging sites. But in most cases, the aesthetics or preferences on the left are not disappearing. Cathartic film and television are flourishing. Traditional single-authored books continue to be published and read (on paper and as ebooks). Our datafied society is really a half-datafied society in which millions of people still do not track their likes on Facebook or their steps on a Fitbit or Apple Watch. Digital media have come to constitute an ideal environment for sup- porting diverse preferences and multiple communities—ideal for fostering all the fragments of the deflated cultural hierarchies of twentieth century.  This multiplicity is our future. 
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This multiplicity is our future. ​

This site is a companion to The Digital Plenitude: The Decline of Elite Culture and the Rise of New Media (MIT Press, 2019).  

Contact Jay David Bolter at jdbolter@icloud.com
  • Home
  • Chapters
    • Introduction
    • 1. The Great Divide
    • 2. Popular Modernism
    • 3. DIchotomies
    • 4. Catharsis
    • 5. Flow
    • 6. Remix
    • 7. Procedurality
    • 8. Social Media
    • Conclusion
    • References
  • Additional texts
    • Books in the Plenitude
  • About
  • Comments