It hurts to give this a low score, but it started so high and then became so disappointing. Banks attractively outlines everything about his proposed "Digital Griot" magnificently in the first chapter, so much so that it sets your imagination on fire as you try to consider all the ways you could apply that kind of rhetoric and analyze so many works, and really, it's a testament to how loose the word "text" is. It is a culturally rich idea and it was the most brilliant part of the book.

And then the Mix and Remix chapter happen. At times exhausting, even outright excruciating at worst. Chapter 2 delves into a solipsistic view of why the author is involved with the field, and what's frustrating about these sections is that they have nothing to do with actually being a digital griot. For some reason we get a prequel to the impetus of the idea that is almost completely off-topic, and it stays that way for unforgivable amounts of time.

Chapter 4 does bring it back into relevance, and I'll admit that the previous two chapters were not completely absent of nuggets of wisdom. (And only that. And I am being charitable in saying they happen "occasionally".) The fifth chapter, "Fade", teeters on a borderline of relevance, which is what turned this from a 4, to a 3, to a 2 for me. I will be citing this book, because what is written well is written EXTREMELY well. But unlike the author, I will be editing out the long swaths of unrelated text that, while not bad, is completely irrelevant to the professed subject and thesis of the writing.