The Beginnings of Digital Culture - Digital Culture - page 18

the cinema, which relies exactly on the persistence of vision they
exploit, but also the coming of digital media, which would employ
similar techniques involving discrete elements.
The invention of the telegraph and photography, along with the
accompanying sense of the general dematerialization of signs, led to
anxiety about the relation between language and meaning. The early
nineteenth century saw a plethora of topics and magazine articles
about ciphers, secret writing, and cryptography, a phenomenon
Shawn James Rosenheim has identified as the beginnings of what he
calls 'the cryptographic imagination', which, for him, underpins
literary modernity. Perhaps the most visible cultural manifestation
of interest in the cryptological is the development of the detective
story. 24 This genre, which first emerged in the early nineteenth
century, concerns the decoding of cryptic signs, usually by a gifted
individual. Exemplary of the genre are the Sherlock Holmes stories
by Conan Doyle and the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's fiction in
7 Zoetrope, c . 1860 - one
of the earliest digital visual
technologies.