ABSTRACT
The concepts obsolescence and innovation demonstrate not only a complex relationship between contemporary consumer culture and temporality (in which the past is somehow produced by the future) but also an equal complexity at the heart of contemporary cultural criticism (in which our ways of reading and understanding appear to require constant upgrades in order to stay current). This chapter explores the lenticular logic of obsolescence and innovation, in which each concept is defined by and inseparable from the other, and the effects that logic might have on our understanding of digital media and of ourselves in the act of engaging with it.
