ABSTRACT
From the 1990s onwards digitization has increasingly shaped the collective imagination of contemporary societies. Digital media have become one of the main obsessions of our time: getting online, sharing "likes" on social network pages, exchanging e-mails, text messages and WhatsApp messages are just some of the infinite array of routine activities that have become part of the daily lives of billions of people. Digital media, with their transformative power and metaphorical force, require explaining and defining because the more the authors go in depth, the more they discover that the meaning of digital is a medley of somewhat ephemeral and constantly evolving ideas. The history of digital media has received limited attention because new media are an apparently recent phenomenon—even if the term has been used since the 1960s and 1970s in reference to satellites, video cameras and other, at the time, new communication technologies.
