ABSTRACT
Self-reflection in media offers insights into how a culture sees itself; that is why it matters. As a dominant trope in modern visual culture, at moments of transition, emerging or transforming screen media often self-reflect on the virtual mobility that the new media enable for its users. More specifically, in the following I will argue that today’s media’s self-reflections insist that navigation is effectively the primary paradigm driving digital screen media. This primacy of navigation entails more fundamental positions regarding the relations between our culture’s predominant modes of address: narrative and spectacle. Both modes are centered on sense-making: from making sense as bringing logic, making understandable, and bringing about (or privileging) meaning, to mobilizing the sensory domain of attraction and affect.
