But the written word and the essay thrive.
Industrial culture lives in Euclidian space and follows Newtonian mechanics.
It is an effort to irradiate chaos and produce predictable uniformity of product. All the other poor bastards of less fortunate generations are locked up in locations, events, and identities. As a means of orienting themselves in a reality matrix. Even some people who use the World Wide Web on a daily basis may not fully get it. But there are those of us who know the god, Unix , and can prey using command line mantras.