The Mechanization of Meaning

One of the themes of Superbloom, my new book, is the recent, dramatic, and largely unheralded expansion of the role of machinery in media. If you think of media as a system for the distribution of speech, you can break it down into three basic roles or functions:

Message creation (the speech function)

Message selection (the editorial function)

Message transmission (the transport function)

From media’s origins in the ancient world up until the early morning hours of September 5, 2006, the way these f...