There are two developments in the second half of the twentieth century have that helped to define our media culture in the twenty-first. One is the rise of digital media: websites, video games, social media, and mobile applications, as well as all the remediations of film, television, radio, and print that now appear
in digital form. Digital media are everywhere and provoke constant discussion and attention today. What nuclear power or space travel was for a previous
generation, the iPhone and Facebook are for us today.
The other development is the end of our collective belief in what we might call Culture with a capital C. Since the middle of the twentieth cen- tury, traditional hierarchies in the visual arts, literature, and music have broken down. This has been accompanied by a decline in the status of the humanities—literary studies in particular, but also history and philosophy. This is an open secret: we all know implicitly that it has happened, but seem unwilling to acknowledge the consequences. We know that the words “art” and “culture” do not have the significance that they had a few decades ago. We can no longer assert with confidence that one form of art is better than another: that classical music is better than rap, that the novel is a better form of expression than the graphic novel, or that film is a more profound medium than video games. Or rather, if we assert such things, we can expect to be argued with or simply ignored.
The relationship between digital media and the decline of elite culture is the subject of this book. It is not a matter of cause and effect. Digital media did not by any means cause the decline of elite culture, which began before the computer had developed as a medium—that is, as a widely shared platform for expression and communication. But digital media now provide an ideal environment for our flattened, or perhaps we should say lumpy, 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.
in digital form. Digital media are everywhere and provoke constant discussion and attention today. What nuclear power or space travel was for a previous
generation, the iPhone and Facebook are for us today.
The other development is the end of our collective belief in what we might call Culture with a capital C. Since the middle of the twentieth cen- tury, traditional hierarchies in the visual arts, literature, and music have broken down. This has been accompanied by a decline in the status of the humanities—literary studies in particular, but also history and philosophy. This is an open secret: we all know implicitly that it has happened, but seem unwilling to acknowledge the consequences. We know that the words “art” and “culture” do not have the significance that they had a few decades ago. We can no longer assert with confidence that one form of art is better than another: that classical music is better than rap, that the novel is a better form of expression than the graphic novel, or that film is a more profound medium than video games. Or rather, if we assert such things, we can expect to be argued with or simply ignored.
The relationship between digital media and the decline of elite culture is the subject of this book. It is not a matter of cause and effect. Digital media did not by any means cause the decline of elite culture, which began before the computer had developed as a medium—that is, as a widely shared platform for expression and communication. But digital media now provide an ideal environment for our flattened, or perhaps we should say lumpy, 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.