The Rise of Digital Multimedia Systems

Abstract

With this essay, I want to understand why interactive and relational media forms have become so ubiquitous so quickly. Comparing the nexus of cinema and nationalism with the contemporary dyad of digital media and transnationalism (or globalisation), we can ask whether digital multimedia systems have arisen to reflect and impel our contemporary psychic and social conditions. Because multimedia rarely gets ‘locked-off’, its component elements can always be pulled apart, sent back to their databases and then instantaneously rearranged into newly iterated federations. In this respect it is like our unstable contemporary lives, so buffeted with ever-altering values, opportunities, anxieties and obligations all upwelling because of globalisation, migration and multiculturalism.