Digital forms are best illuminated by cultural criticism, which uses the tools of art and literary theory to make sense of the Internet’s glorious illusion: that the Internet is life. Because.

Cruise through the gargantuan sites – YouTube, Amazon, Yahoo! – and it’s as though modernism never existed. Twentieth-century print design never existed. European and Japanese design never existed. The Web’s aesthetic might be called late-stage Atlantic City or early-stage Mall of America.

As I sat alone at the computer hour after hour it seemed I was learning “computers.” In fact, I was learning culture.

As any American with children knows, our children have at least one bright, clear reason for being: to furnish subjects for digital photographs that can be corrected, cropped, captioned, organized, categorized, albumized, broadcast, turned into screen savers, and brandished on online social networks.

I wondered if all of us churchgoers were just exhausted by grief. For the dying priest and us, I thought, “God” always refused to become glorious, instead stubbornly remaining plain, a headache, a sorrowful knot of language.

I began to think that melancholy was a dialect that only some people knew-or could even hear-and in my conversations, I sought these people out.

If beauty is only skin deep, look really, really hard.

Tweets are not diseased rings of glitchy minds. They’re epigrams, aphorisms, maxims, dictums, taglines, captions, slogans, and adages. Some are art, some are commercial; these are forms with integrity.

We shouldn't confuse grief over the passing of our favorite technology with resentment because some digital alchemy failed to preserve analog experiences. Whether or not we admit it, the internet and its artifacts are not just like their cultural precedents. They're not even a rough translation -- or a strong misreading -- of those precedents.