ABSTRACT
One of the central issues that emerges when discussing accelerating information and communication technologies (ICTs) is the problem of the amount of information. The anxious tone of such commentary is not surprising. Many in the first world (and elsewhere) have experienced the traumas of ‘infoglut’ – the shock at opening our email in the morning and seeing the number of messages awaiting our attention, the panic of trying to keep up with the unfolding of a 24/7 news cycle, the paralysis of trying to choose from amongst a million search results. To maintain that accelerating ICTs and media have a distorting, controlling, or capturing effect on human perception and cognition is to assume that human perception and cognition are, at root, objective, neutral, and autonomous. It is subtractive in that, of the vast amount of potential information in the world, of the countless ‘images’ that might be ‘presented’ to the mind, our perceptual faculties only pick out certain ones.
