UC Berkeley School of Information

Media have changed ideas about the self and society for centuries, from vernacular print in the Reformation to the 20th Century’s reference to life’s intense moments as being “like a movie.” What might happen as today’s media blur accelerates? It is not just that news, information and entertainment are in continual overlap, with print, audio and visual streams interchanging. The ideal is that no information is lost, and we are “always on,” in perpetual connection with continual feeds. In this talk I will discuss some of the major trends in their historic context, and sketch out the likely consequences.