Abstract:
For Vilém Flusser, philosopher of technology, the advent of photography heralded the return of the image from its subjection to the linearity of written language. Here we extend his concept of the “techno-image” (successor of the pre-historical hand-drawn image and the historical printed word), to consider the digital image-text that today dominates reading and writing [Flusser 2004, 40]. When Flusser ponders this technological revolution in the “Future of Writing,” he concludes that old school reader-writers – like us – are unable to fathom the world into which we have been thrust because we are chained to a “historical consciousness” based on the sequential, progressive logic of syntax and the sentence [Flusser 2004, 63]. We take this supposed inability to come to terms with what Lisa Samuels has called the “digitas” – “civitas, digital acts, habitus, and the digits we call our fingers” [Samuels 2008, 1] – as our point of departure. Our question: Can we reader-writers think the digitas, or are we doomed to perform its functions in an “automati[c]” or “robotiz[ed]” fashion [Flusser 1999, 52], so that, if anything, the digitas now “thinks” us?
