The digital era promises, as did many other technological developments before it, the transformation of society: with the computer, we can transcend time, space, and politics-as-usual. In The Digital Sublime, Vincent Mosco goes beyond the usual stories of technological breakthrough and economic meltdown to explore the myths constructed around the new digital technology and why we feel compelled to believe in them. He tells us that what kept enthusiastic investors in the dotcom era bidding up stocks even after the crash had begun was not willful ignorance of the laws of economics but belief in the myth that cyberspace was opening up a new world.Myths are not just falsehoods that can be disproved, Mosco points out, but stories that lift us out of the banality of everyday life into the possibility of the sublime. He argues that if we take what we know about cyberspace and situate it within what we know about culture -- specifically the central post-Cold War myths of the end of history, geography, and politics -- we will add to our knowledge about the digital world; we need to see it "with both eyes" -- that is, to understand it both culturally and materially.

This book is, in part, a response to the extraordinary boom-and-bust cycle. But it aims to provide more than just a set of answers to the question “What happened?” Though that question must play a large role in any current book about cyberspace, the goal of this effort is to deepen and extend what we know about cyberspace by situating it within what we know about culture, and specifically about mythology, about central myths of our time, about the history of communication media, and about the political economy of computer communication. The book is not meant to question those who would maintain that communication and information technologies are powerful instruments of social change; they are, and it is important to demonstrate carefully how they contribute to social change and how they retard it (Kogut 2003; Woolgar 2002). In fact, I will argue that it is when technologies such as the telephone and the computer cease to be sublime icons of mythology and enter the prosaic world of banality—when they lose their role as sources of utopian visions—that they become important forces for social and economic change.