ABSTRACT
Notwithstanding radio, the photocopy, desktop publishing, and the fax, the twentieth century can indeed be characterized as the century of the screen. It has been that all along. It started with the silent silver screen, competing with novels and plays for the narrative audience. Radio didn’t hit its first full stride in entertainment and news until the 1930s, and by then, the screens of talking motion pictures were already also in high gear. By the 1950s, television had in effect subsumed motion pictures and radio on its new kind of screen-and although radio, as we also saw, amply thrived in the aftermath, television has no doubt been since then the medium of ratification for our culture. The advent of computers brought to the convocation yet another screen, one that displays text authored by its users, and text by other authors, interconnected worldwide with the radically new capacities, possibilities, and implications we have been exploring in the past four chapters. But the computer screen also brought forth a new kind of image, the icon, and then another, in the virtual reality cartoonish graphic, and now a battery of more “traditional” images, such as we’re accustomed to seeing on television. These are the stars of this chapter.
