ABSTRACT
If media determine our condition, they have never done so more obliquely. Today’s media, I want to suggest, have fundamentally changed the mode of their address to the world and to us. No longer predominately focused on operations of recording, storage, and transmission, media now operate as platforms for immediate, action-facilitating interconnection with and feedback from the environment. As I see it, this shift is in very large part a function of media’s dissemination into a ubiquitous and utterly indispensable element of daily life: with today’s digital devices and “smart” chips, media have achieved a condition of transparent ubiquity without historical precedent, and, I would suggest, have catalyzed a qualitative revolution in experience, an expansion of sensibility so substantial as to alter fundamentally its very power.
