Digital textuality, writing and new media

Over recent decades digital media and computing have dramatically reshaped the way people across the world communicate and relate to each other. They have triggered a revolution whose social impact is arguably greater than that of any other innovation in the history of technologies of communication. Over 60 percent of the world's population will, according to a recent Ericsson Mobility Report, be online by 2018 (Keen 2015b, 12). "The world has been redrawn," claims Andrew Keen, "as a distributed network" (2015b, 12). Further, it is not only humans who are caught up in the global web of digital connectivity but also an exponentially expanding number of "intelligent" devices in what is known as "the Internet of Things." Like people, machines are 'talking' to one another, participating in the global data-fest" or in Keen's view, an "electronic panopticon"" that produces and circulates information about our world and ourselves in a never-ending stream everywhere, all the time (2015b, 174). It is astonishing how quickly this world transforming phenomenon has been accepted as normal and routine. 20th-century critics such as Walter Benjamin (1973, 224: 225) believed that photography, followed closely by moving film, introduced technological innovations that were so profound that they changed the way people see. Little more than half a century after he made this observation, Internet technologies are driving further transformations, influencing the way we remember, perceive ourselves, and engage with each other and the world.