“The Digital Plenitude exposes the most troubling scarcities of our networked age: expertise, authority, credibility, and truth. Bolter offers a wise critique of an our age of unwisdom. Strongly recommended.”
Andrew Keen, author of How to Fix the Future
“Yet again, Jay David Bolter cogently explains our media-cultural situation. Bolter has been one of our foremost thinkers and scholars of new media, and with The Digital Plenitude, he retains that role while reaching beyond new media to the larger cultural situation. This book makes the relationship between digital media and the decline of elite culture its central story, and in an age when America's president is a former reality TV star, Bolter is here to remind us of the value of humanities research and, yes, elite expertise.”
Jessica Pressman, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University; author of Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media
“Deft, thorough, and persuasive, Jay Bolter's The Digital Plenitude explores the historical and cultural environment that helped incubate and evolve the unprecedented variety, complexity, and multiplicity of digital technology that surrounds and penetrates our lives today, while interweaving astute observations of the current political landscape in America. Bolter astutely articulates the translation of modernism in the twentieth century into popular modernism, and how digital technology has flourished but failed to foster a strong democracy or community-based decisions. The Digital Plenitude, providing a much-needed context for and clarification of the mesh of our contemporary technical and political reality, is urgent and timely.”
Charles Henry, President of The Council on Library and Information Resources
The Digital Plenitude: The Decline of Elite Culture and the Rise of New Media by Jay David Bolter is a book about exactly that: the decline of one thing and the rise of another. The author attacks nor defends either, and it's not even a matter of cause and effect, in his view, the more useful point being that the present multiplicity of options when it comes to media/art/culture is not a problem to be solved, but rather a concept to understand so that we may better navigate the changed world we still need to live in....Clearly-written, well-focused.
New York Journal of Books
The most thought-provoking sections of The Digital Plenitude explore how digital technology is reinventing art itself, birthing new forms....Bolter suggests we are witnessing the inception of a new cultural paradigm comparable to the advent of modernism in the early 20th century.
Frieze
Continues [Bolter's] deep thought about broad issues of millennial media. Starting with our current political moment, Bolter looks back at the megatrends that landed us here and ahead to where they're taking us next, including everything from McLuhan and modernism to sampling and remix.
Well-Read Bear
The Digital Plenitude is a comprehensive description of contemporary digital culture and many readers will find it relevant and extremely useful, while the unanswered questions require future research.
Modern Times Magazine
