“These new books share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity.”
From Michiko Kakutani’s latest Times piece, “Texts Without Context,” in which she considers a number of recent books, mostly the ones that she finds to be “nuanced ruminations on some of the unreckoned consequences of technological change,” focusing on Farhad Manjoo’s True Enough and You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier — with whom the Rumpus is arranging an interview at present.
