While you read this on your computer screen, you are aware of all the other things you are not reading, have yet to read, have decided not to read. Rather than conserve its tradition, media expends itself endlessly. Media runs nonstop, in all directions, whether anyone's listening or watching or not. And even when somebody does listen or watch, not everything available through media can be heard or seen, since there is never just one program or piece of information but many, an entire range of sites and channels and outlets broadcasting simultaneously. So that paying attention to one means not paying attention to any other. Against the static spatiality of the museum or the library, media pits temporal flow; and against the centripetal and self-preserving pull of tradition there is media's centrifugal counterforce, the lateral spread of its bandwidth, a motor mouth that talks too much at once, the continuous, excessive dispersing and exhausting of its news and entertainments.