In her book How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles argues that one of the major consequences of digitization is that we, as an informational culture, no longer focus as much on the distinction between presence and absence (“being there,” or not “being there”) as we do on the difference between pattern and randomness. In other words, “finding something new” (being there, being at dinner, getting the source to say something we didn’t know before) may not always be as important as finding the pattern in what is there already.
