Civilization and its Disconnects: Publishing, Reading and Thinking in Early 21st Century

You need not be Heraclitus to observe that our world is in flux. And you needn’t be McLuhan to understand that our gadgets are necessarily altering our relation to the world.   Books and their readers are clearly being swept along in this current. In publishing, basic notions of text, copyright, editing and distribution are rapidly being revised. How this affects the common reader (if such a category even applies anymore) is uncomfortably unclear.  We’ve become remarkably adept at transmitting information. Crucially, can culture be conveyed along the same lines?