The Medium Picture

Exactly the sort of contemporary cultural analysis to yield unnerving flashes of the future.

-- William Gibson * award-winning author of Neuromancer *

Like a skateboarder repurposing the utilitarian textures of the urban terrain for sport, Roy Christopher reclaims the content and technologies of the media environment as a landscape to be navigated and explored. The Medium Picture is both a highly personal yet revelatory chronicle of a decades-long encounter with mediated popular culture.

-- Douglas Rushkoff * documentarian and award-winning author of Coercion *

A synthesis of theory and thesis, research and personal recollection, The Medium Picture is a work of rangy intelligence and wandering curiosity. Thought-provoking and a pleasure to read.

-- Charles Yu * award-winning author of Interior Chinatown *

Immersed in the contemporary digital culture he grew up with as a teenager, Roy Christopher is old enough to recall vinyl, punk, and zines — social media before TikTok and smartphones. The Medium Picture deftly illuminates the connections between post-punk music critique, the increasing virtualization of culture, the history of formal media theory, the liminal zones of analog versus digital, pop versus high culture, capitalism versus anarchy. It’s the kind of book that makes you stop and think and scribble in the margins.

-- Howard Rheingold * author of The Virtual Community *

Brilliant, pathbreaking, palpable insights…Worthy of McLuhan.

-- Paul Levinson * author of The Silk Code *

If the medium is the message, then today’s mediascape is a constant digital missive, reminding us that we are trapped together in a seven-level underworld metaverse mall. Who better to help guide us through this neo-Dantesque pixel inferno than Roy Christopher—one part Virgil, one partDebord, and at least one part his mischievous and brilliant self.

-- Dominic Pettman * author of Infinite Distraction *

Through music, generational habits, pre- and post-internet cultures, and a multitude of ‘cognitive entanglements’, this book flows with grace across different scales of mediation and affect.

-- Jussi Parikka * author of Operational Imag