7 - “Like all new technologies, the Internet appears to represent the world more faithfully than the technologies that preceded it. [Really? She must mean media technologies.] And the Internet is an extraordinarily seductive representation of the world. We've never seen a work of art like it.” 8 - “is this book's central contention: that the Internet is a massive and collaborative work of realist art. Moreover it's so beguiling a realist showpiece, and so readily confused with reality, that books about it call themselves books about "business, " politics," or "science"-the reigning bywords for reality. That's a mistake. Digital forms are best illuminated by cultural criticism, which uses the tools of art and literary theory to make sense of the Internet's glorious illusion: that the Internet is life. Because of course the Internet is not life. In fact it is a highly artificial regime, with tight rules and rituals that organize its text, music, and images. That's why the Internet becomes more deeply meaningful and moving when "read" as an aesthetic object than lived or reported on as firsthand human experience. That human experience is art, where art is considered closer to a game than to a deception. Our proxies in this game are our avatars: the sum total of all the profile pictures, message-board communiqués, Snapchat videos, and all other artifacts of text, image, and sound that we add to the Internet and attach to our various handles. The game itself, an artwork, is without doubt what video gamers call an MMORPG: a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Digital life, in its current extremely visual, social, portable, and global incarnation, rewards certain virtues. They're not the ones many of us grew up with. Engagement, emotional expres-sion, liberalism, tolerance, self-knowledge, irony: these values of the 1970s, refined while I was in college and then in graduate school in the 1990s, lost a great deal of urgency after the” 9 - “Online video isn't a <i>new</i> art form, I discovered, like punk music or color-field painting in their time, starting in a time and place and slowly burgeoning. Instead the art of the Internet and its rules came into view all at once and fully formed.” 10 - New values favored by the internet 25 - Bruce Sterling: “Poor folk love their cell phones.” Online connections are “liabilities that we pretend our assets.” “We can’t afford privacy” so we pretend the toxic environment is a happy one. “Connectivity is poverty.” 34 - “You are playing the house when you play the Web, and the house is better at reading you than you are at reading it.” 67 - “Like schools that abolish recess, the Internet often seems to deny its citizens R&R-spaces (white space, line breaks) for response, intake, and contemplation.” 137ff - YouTube not ever designed to be a web version of old media. It was a platform in need of content and the content chosen was video. 140 - Mind blown. Citing conversation with Jon Katzman Jr. No interest in “telling great stories.” “The great-man producers of our own time, Katzman explained, were no longer the raconteurs of stage and screen, permitting viewers the fantasy that they were John Wayne or Cate Blanchett. Rather the new great-man producers were creating platforms that would permit others the fantasy of auteurism. A memory flashed before me: my brother and I as kids, arranging figures in front of our dad's stop-motion movie camera, imagining we were not Luke Skywalker but George Lucas. These platforms would allow other people to tell stories, great or otherwise. If you owned YouTube, the storytellers were the audience, the consumers. The storyteller was no longer controlling things. The great-man storyteller was, in fact, the new chump, the new sucker, the one who would pay. Telling stories was no longer producing; it was consuming-bandwidth, technology, platform space, code. And the storyteller was the consumer who would eat what you fed him and pay for more. If the storyteller used to be feeding consumers stories, now it was the man with the system who was feeding storytellers bandwidth.” I’m caught somewhere between sorrow and rage. Rage that he would suggest such a thing; sorrow that he was completely right. 145 - YT as social media. Called it. 152 - Quoting Jean Cocteau: “Film will only become an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.” 187 - “Technology and science share very little methodology, practice, or even assumptions.” 208 - Walter Benjamin’s “aura” [machines cannot create objects with aura; can they have aura themselves?] She ends with religion, of all things, her kindle stuffed with Marilynne Robinson’s writing.