ABSTRACT
In this first chapter, we provide a contextual overview of the history of the media that gives an account of the various ways in which they have each, in a uniquely singular fashion, modulated the virtual. We begin with speech and oral culture and consider the transition to writing and the advent of the scribal mind. We then focus on the technological reappearance of the image, and explore the ways in which, together with speech and writing, they combine to constitute what we consider the new digital culture. Vilém Flusser’s notion of the technical image together with Bernard Stiegler’s understanding of the transition from analog to digital technology, both help us explore the transformations of the virtual involved in its various mediatic modulations.
