Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture (The Editors of Perseus Publishing 2002), Who Let the Blogs Out?: A Hyperconnected Peek at the World of Weblogs (Stone 2004), and Blog!: How the Newest Media Revolution is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture (Kline and Burstein 2005).
Another reliable indicator of the ubiquity of the digital discourse and its penetration into general public discussion can be glanced from the covers of Time magazine. A survey of covers of the magazine between 1980 and 2008 reveals more than forty covers featuring network technology and its human and nonhuman protagonists. (This list includes covers that refer specifically to digital technology and excludes covers that refer to technology and science in general, such as medical technology or space travel.) The significance of this survey is that network technology appears as the cover story in one of America’s most popular and influential weekly newsmagazines. In these issues, digital technology and its protagonists trump politicians and various social issues (such as school violence or sex) as the top general interest concern of the day. Three covers of special importance are those featuring Time’s “Man [and later, “Person”] of the Year.” The 1982 Man of the Year was the personal computer (PC). Andy Grove of Intel was man of the year for 1997. And the 2006 Person of the Year was “You,” that is, each and every individual user of network technology.
Wired Magazine as an Epitome of the Digital Discourse
To study the hypothetical construct of the digital discourse, I will delimit myself mostly to the analysis of a single, well-demarcated, and concrete articulation of the digital discourse that would serve as a case study: Wired magazine, one of the most consistent and crystallized articulations of the digital discourse. Published since 1993 with great success, Wired has issued more than 180 monthly issues thus far and has a current circulation of approximately seven hundred thousand (Darrell 2007). Wired grew out of, and indeed concurrently with, the dot-com bubble, the explosion of network technology and the Internet, and the emergence of the high-tech industry as a central engine in the economy and a powerful source of identity and culture. It is located, socially and geographically, at the heart of the revolution on which it purports to report: new technologies, new businesses, new people, and new media that make up the digital universe. Wired, in other words, is also part of that revolution. As the magazine’s founder puts it, Wired is “the mouthpiece of the digital revolution” (Wolf 2003, 52).
Contemporary Technology Discourse
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