New Media

specific audiences speaking any language and taking an undifferentiated interest in any culture. No language or literature can come to us from the inalterable past, and nothing is foreign. Anyone who has learned to recognize the sense of literature in the old way must get annoyed to see inquisitive students "googling" an author's professional and biographical details, or to see painstaking forensic researchers clambering all over the code of a born digital literary work that has appeared only yesterday but has likely been rendered obsolescent by changes overnight in format. The sole requirement of new media is that it must be, perpetually, new; that is, it exists within that region of media that always wants to be new (Heckman): to be timely, to be turning up on the top page of search engines.

Hence we study, not the development of a common language among a multitude of potentially communicating minds but rather layers on layers of superseded code, as if these supports to communication were among the heaped up art treasures in a gallery.

They are only traces in silicon, these codes that we expend so much energy mastering, over and again with each upgrade or market failure. But unlike earlier traces in sand, in erased and reused parchments, or for that matter in the self-renewing circuits of memory in a human brain, the traces encoded in new media never disappear. This principle, which comes as a surprise to anyone who has "lost" the contents of a hard-drive, is the foundation of a forensic criticism (Kirschenbaum). In new media, the past is never written over, and hence no feeling for the past (or for our own present vulnerabilities) can develop. Not in the way that the history of one's own city, for example, can become for us the history of ourselves. We understand the walls, the turreted gate, the dictate of the city council, and the folk festival as if these were pages in an illustrated diary of our youth. We rediscover in the formative age of our cities all the force, purpose, passion, set opinion, foolishness, and bad habits of our own youth. We say to ourselves, here we