What do "raves" have to do with eighteenth-century Romanticism, or the latest communication technologies with historical ideas about language, media, and culture?

Today's culture dazzles us with technological marvels and media spectacles. While we find them entertaining, just as often they are troubling -- they seem to contradict common sense, eliciting such questions as What is real? or What is reality? and What is language? or What does language do? These questions, once confined to scholars, have become everyone's concern. Some of the best answers might be found in an...