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Digitality is used to mean the condition of living in a digital culture, derived from Esther Dyson's book Being Digital in analogy with modernity and post-modernity.
Aspects of digitality include near continuous contact with other people through cellphones, near instantaneous look up of information through the world wide web, the third wave information storage where any fragment in a text can be searched and used for catagorization, such as through search engine Google, and communicating through weblogs and email. Some of the negative aspects of digitality include computer viruses, loss of anonymity and spam.
In the 1990's scholarship of the effects of interactivity with information began to be written and published, particularly focused on the immediacy and ubiquity of digital communications, the interactivity and participatory nature of digital media, and the role of "shallow" information searches. While in the tradition of Postmodernism in that they presume a decisive role for media in the formation of personality, culture and social order, they differ fundamentally from the analog critical theory, in that the audience has the ability to do more than create a personal idiolectic text, but instead is able to create new texts which reinforce the behavior of other participants.
(See also Media theory, Deconstruction, Postmodernism, Internet, Information age, Critical theory, Postmodernity, Modernity, Television)
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