These are the good people who make newspapers, magazines, the doctrines of law, the offices of regulation and the rules of finance. They live by the book, by the authority derived from authors, and are centered at the power points of New York City and Washington. The foundation of this culture is ultimately housed in texts. They are all on the same page, so to speak. Movie screens, TV screens, computer screens, Game Boy screens, telephone screens, pager screens and Day-Glo megapixel screens we can only imagine today, plastered on every surface.
Screen culture is a world of constant flux, of endless sound bites, quick cuts and half-baked ideas.
It is a flow of gossip tidbits, news headlines and floating first impressions. Code displayed on a screen is endlessly tweakable by users, while law is not. Yet code can shape behavior as much as, if not more than, law. On a screen, words move, meld into pictures, change color and perhaps even meaning. Sometimes there are no words at all, only pictures or diagrams or glyphs that may be deciphered into multiple meanings.