What, then, is the work of theory in the age of digital transformation? Digital theory offers us explanations, interpretations, and predictions which enables us to manage the process of technological change and its impact upon our social, cultural, economic, political, and personal lives. Digital theory provides a point of intersection between the languages and practices of science and engineering on the one hand and the arts and humanities on the other. Digital theory embraces the utopian imagination not as a way of predicting the future but as a way of envisioning meaningful change and keeping alive the fluidity which digital media has introduced into many aspects of our social and personal lives. Digital theory identifies historical antecedents for contemporary media developments and at the same time, defamilarizes older media and opens them to re-examination.

Similarly, the democratic and participatory ideals associated with "interactive technologies are not the product of the technologies but of our social and cultural interactions with them. Recognizing this distinction reminds us of the need to struggle to define technology’s future directions through social and political actions, not simply through our design principles.

the old paradigms of critical pessimism ultimately lead to political paralysis and fatalism, another way of seeing technological expansion as inevitable and irreversible. Critical pessimism offers us few models of viable change, focusing only on the strength of entrenched power and the failure of all strategies of resistance. At its most reductive, critical pessimism scapegoats the media for all the faults of the current social order rather than recognizing that digital media might offer new technical potentials for responding to the fragmentation of contemporary social life or the domestic isolation of our children, housewives, and the elderly. Digital theory matters politically because of its ability to envision alternatives, to imagine a better future. Cyberspace provides a place to experiment with alternative structures of government, new forms of social relations, which may, at least on the most grassroots of levels, allow us to temporarily escape, if not fully transform, unacceptable social conditions in our everyday lives.

In a period of prolonged change, digital theory is more than an academic exercise. Digital media impacts all aspects of western society, from education to politics, from business to the arts. Journalists, science fiction writers, ideologues, entrepreneurs, activists, classroom teachers, rock stars, Supreme Court judges, government regulators are both consumers and producers of digital theory. For many, theorizing restores predictability and stability to a world rocked by radical change, while for others, theory fuels change, directing the energies unleashed by the digital revolution towards altering the nature of political life or personal identity. Our fantasies and fears about change shape our theories (including supposedly disinterested academic theories) as much as our theories help master those fears and fulfill those fantasies.

Theory will be understood here as any attempt to make meaningful generalizations for interpreting or evaluating local experiences and practices.