How Tech Redefined the Experience of Culture
Video games and social media require human users to enter into a procedural loop known as flow
Beginning in the late 1960s, a new group of technologists (including Douglas Engelbart’s team at Stanford, Alan Kay and others at Xerox PARC, and later Steve Jobs and his colleagues at Apple) set about to redefine the computer as a medium for representation and communication. By developing the personal computer, the graphic user interface, 3D computer graphics, local- and wide-area networking, they helped to provide millions of users with a digital platform for reading, writing, and eventually aural and visual communication.
These technologists had a modernist conception of what a medium is and of their capacity to engineer culture, but in fact they were designing the platform for media culture at the end of modernism. The digital media they helped create now support an enormous, heterogeneous world of media forms, makers, and users, a world with as many centers as there are communities, and more communities than anyone can know.
If the printed book and the library were suited to define hierarchy and cultural order, networked digital media are suited to foster multiplicity and competing orders. The internet and the World Wide Web provide an ideal environment for…
