In This Issue / Discover

Abstract

On the twentieth century's last day, I was transfixed by the spectacle unfolding on CNN as the new millennium dawned in each of the world's twenty-four time zones. I felt as if I were participating in each celebration, and I measured the passage of time not by the hour, but by the city: 7 a.m. was Kiribati; 11 a.m., Beijing; 6 p.m., Lagos; 7 p.m., London; and midnight, Times Square, when a crystal ball of light heralded the new century by dropping atop an illuminated sign for the Discover card, a fitting inauguration of what Ernesto Pujol calls the Shopping Century. As the scenes emanating from the screen integrated themselves into my day, I became newly conscious of television's power to merge bodies and images, the self and history, space and time into a seamless flow, an exhilarating new incarnation of perceptual consciousness. I then began to think that all the places I saw that day were the same place. I had walked through a portal into a raster of dancing pixels brought to me by my friends at Discover. And while I was content to be seduced into that electronic world, I couldn't explain why the journey also bothered me.