ABSTRACT
In Pratchett’s vividly imagined world, strange things happen when large quantities of books are grouped together. Books bend space and time, warping the world around them as a result of the magical power they exert. When reading the discourse around large-scale digitisation, one could be forgiven for assuming that a similar bending of the rules of space-time was occurring in our world. The effects of digital media on our social, cultural and intellectual practices are profound, certainly, but this impact must be considered in relation to a wider discourse which exaggerates the impact of digital technologies. Evgeny Morozov has provocatively argued that this discourse has co-opted the term “Internet” to create an allencompassing technology which defies rational debate: “instead of debating the merits of individual technologies and crafting appropriate policies and regulations, we have all but surrendered to catchall terms like ‘the Internet’, which try to bypass any serious and empirical debate altogether” (2013). But the way in which internet technologies influence our social and intellectual structures is not an inevitable result of an overarching technology: indeed, I will argue in this chapter that the tendency to overstate the impact of large-scale digitisation is part of a wider trend towards building a mythology around new technology, and that the reality of technological adoption and impact is far more complex.
