This book explores the rhetoric and reality of digital visual culture. It argues that contemporary media is characterised by unique real-time forms that demand qualitatively distinct viewing relations. An ambitious work of historical and theoretical research, the phenomenon of media participation is considered in relation to defining characteristics of digital capitalism, and its prevailing modes of performative individualisation. The book explores a series of media genres (the news, reality entertainment reality television, computer games, and media art) to argue that what is at stake in the contemporary media sphere is nothing less than our relation to mortality and otherness. A genuine incursion into vital and ongoing conditions of cultural convergence, this book will appeal to media and cultural theorists as well as art historians, and students of visual culture.