A longform read on how the absorption of the Internet into our daily lives has shared our politics, via a comparison of the dynamics in an Analog City with old media and a Digital City with new media. The section on the Perpetual Now resonates most with me:
Digital communities emerge in shared time rather than in shared space; simultaneity is the coin of the realm. The Digital City orders the lives of its citizens in keeping with a perpetual present disassociated from both past and future, heightening a tendency already present in electronic mass media like television… Under the guise of pervasive documentation, the architecture of digital platforms sanctions forgetting, while preoccupying us with instantaneity. It is not currently this era or this year, but rather this day or even this hour. To live on social media is to be sucked into a hyper-extended present, upon which the past only occasionally impinges.
We have touched upon this when we discussed the endless News Cycle in Part 3 of the series on 21st Century Media. Whenever the discussion arises about whether a certain political scandal in the US will determine the outcome of the upcoming 2020 election, of whether the [mis]handling of a situation in India will determine whether this government is re-elected, it is now obvious to me that elections will be determined by what the dominant topic of that week, perhaps month, is. We are now at a point where government can lurch through crisis after crisis, outrage after outrage, but be elected because of a sufficiently divisive or sufficiently unifying piece of shared media experience at election time.