V-lad brings up a good point about the way that traditional print pubs process new media trends. It's all about nailing it down to key terms, no matter how absurd. Blogosphere anyone? Let's phenomenize this shit to pieces! I spent a good deal of time mumbling on paper about what new media can "do" or "say" or any other simplistic action verbs from your favorite first-year foreign language textbook (for me, "Ven Conmigo!"). I came up a little wanting for inspiration but with plenty of questions.
For example, I've been thinking about obsessions. Can obsessions happen in the same way today, when you can't even put a poster on your wall and sing to it like Rivers in the garage without someone flaming you on your myspace profile for your "gay" taste in music? Maybe you can more than ever, like print out your own shitty looking Peter Criss pinup and put your finesse moves on that sonofabitch as you rock out to the great tunes you taped off the radio (ahem--I mean downloaded on iTunes [you would have gotten them illegally but mom and dad didn't want to risk the lawsuit. "Sunk cost," they said and handed over the Visa]). But at least you made the poster, right? You were responsible for its creation, in spite of it being mediated through whatever Google Images came up with and Photoshop's online help documentation.
But anyway, the obsessions. Even after the teen years, you get distracted looking for the next great thing. To quote Fall Out Boy, "This Ain't a Scene, It's an Arms Race". All in all maybe I'm just dizzy. But I have found it rewarding to get deeply, deeply into stuff in my life, now and back then, and I'm going to keep trying it out.
Next time I'll suggest something.
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The orthodox answer to your question, which you hinted at, might be that technology makes obsessing easier but the question "what should I obsess about today/this week/this year?" harder. That is, we've got so much information and access to a huge panoply of cultures, we can take our pick and pursue something in a super intense way, the problem being the "dizzying-effect" of taking our pick.
On a more personal note, now that I'm doing graduate work, and my obsession with philosophy has in a sense been "externalized" by my commitment to 5+ years of study, this obsession has deepened, even just within the past month (its probably plateauing right about now).
I think this concept of externalization is worth exploring in connection with technology. We've externalized our obsession with writing and talking about media, etc. by creating this blog: we've launched this obsession into the world. And creating this blog was really fucking easy. If externalization makes an obsession psychologically more salient, and technology is making externalization easier, perhaps technology is good for obsessing?
While not directly related I feel similarly about my lack of TV for the past year of my life. Without TV I am not bombarded by culture/advertising/opinions or I am but noticably less...
Hence I feel I have begun to select my obsessions, or the kind of pop-ephemera-obsessions that TV tends to take the fun out of by oversaturation. Case in point Kanye v. 50 Cent. I payed attention to the hoopla via internets and magazines, I pulled for Kanye, I was unsurprised but a little glad that his record did significantly better. After one day of TV I probably would have tired of this showdown but I made it my insignificant, human-interest story of the week.
As a side note there was a funny NPR review of the albums which pointed out that people who believed the hype probably never listen to hip-hop and were scared someone might get shot about all this.
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