"You Don't So Much Watch It As Download It": Conceptualizations of Digital Spectatorship

This article examines the ways in which public discourse conceived spectatorship of digital cinema in the United States in the late 1990s. Evaluations of digital technologies' (actual or imminent) implications for spectatorship varied greatly, particularly across the diverse industrial and aesthetic traditions associated with digital cinema at that time. These competing discourses, however, evidence a shared tendency to conceptualize digital spectatorship according to a historically specific notion of transmission that mobilizes the concepts of intersubjectivity, embodiment, and immediacy.