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Mediations: From the Coffee House to the Internet Café 111

bespoke recommendations allow consumers to criss-cross all manner
of counter-intuitive thresholds. They cater precisely for the gay, right-
wing fan of Star Trek, soccer and Dogme movies. The point is not
to uncritically celebrate this, for the menu may be eclectic but also
depressingly safe, formulaic and superficial. The rise of an algorithmic

surveillance culture may achieve new heights of reification: it may
be more Weberian, systematised, depersonalised and opaque than
anything that has gone before it. But the point is to acknowledge
that even at the corporatised end of the spectrum, digital culture is
woven from threads that can lead in suprising directions and does not
necessarily engender an explosion of hermetically sealed ‘sphericules’.
Something more complex and contradictory is at stake.
With the rise of digital culture, we witness the emergence of
many cultural forms and genres that, for want of a better phrase,
leave threads hanging. Peter Lunenfeld has spoken of the ‘culture
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of unfinish’ that permeates the digital mediascape. This is a useful
way of grasping how digital media texts are almost always ‘works
in progress’. This is manifested in many different ways. In a simple
sense, digital texts such as web sites, blogs, discussion forums and

so on, admit of continual reworking and modification (and not just
by an original ‘author’) in ways that were scarcely imaginable in the
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analogue era. Hypertext enthusiasts have seen digital media as

another nail in the coffin of the ‘author’, whose obituary had already
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been written by Roland Barthes. This is an unnecessarily reductive
and ethnographically remote formulation: the digital mediascape
has of course multiplied the opportunities for citizens to partake in
self-conscious ‘authorship’; and it is also increasingly populated by
digital texts (DVDs, time-based audio-visual media, etc.) that are not
amenable to or intended for such reworking over time by the original
producers, let alone by others. Digital culture does not signal the end
of a cultural concern with authorship, control, intellectual property
and textual boundaries; in problematising them, it has actually raised

their profile. But even digital texts that embody notions of authorship
and permanence frequently speak to the ‘culture of unfi nish’: there
are connections with other texts to be followed, there are different
pathways through a text to experiment with, there are different
environments and platforms to access the text through, there are
comments to be posted, and so on. The most stark example from the
point of view of our discussion might be an online news article on
a particular issue that carries links to a government report cited in
the article, a range of further related articles, and a discussion forum

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