Conclusion

Abstract

As I finished this text over the second half of 2013, I was reminded of the immense speed at which contemporary digital change takes place. Just as I felt I was starting to get a solid idea about how a robot historian might start to contextualize the cinematic and/or digital cultural interfaces being presented, a new event or movie would shift that dynamic. Edward Snowden’s revelation of how deep and global the NSA’s surveillant capacities and impulses demands more expansion beyond its brief mention in chapter 5. Too, following Facebook’s public stock offer in 2012 (Gelles, “Facebook’s IPO Value: $104B; Higher-than-Expected Starting Price”), Twitter released an IPO of their own (Rusli et al., “Twitter IPO Plan: Contrast Facebook”), forcing me to reconsider my thoughts on The Social Network (chapter 8) and begin to analyze, in more depth, the commodification of privacy and personal information on the Internet touched on in chapter 5. All the while, I felt that Internet-enabled hardware advances, like the releases of Google Glass’s developer kits (“Google unveils app development kit for Glass”) and the Oculus Rift (Prebble, “Virtual reality? Yes, and a world of wonder thanks to the Oculus Rift”), not to mention the looming (normalizing of) wearable computing exampled initially by smart watches (“Watch this space; Wearable computing”) and the launch of the next generation of video game consoles (the Xbox One; Seitz, “Microsoft releases Xbox One in grand fashion”) and the Playstation 4 (Poulisse, “Playstation 4 release kicks off console wars”), warranted more commentary as (possible) diegetic prototypes of the Internet.