• Using a range of examples from contemporary popular culture, this article argues that our increasing engagement with the world as data, through digital technology, involves new vocabulary, gestures, conventions and conceptual models: new ways of seeing, acting and thinking. Drawing on the theory that 1920s cinema offered, in Walter Benjamin’s phrase, a ‘kind of training’ for the new modes of operation required by the modernist city, it suggests that contemporary popular narratives are currently serving a similar purpose, training us in the uses of digital technology and emphasizing the social mastery that results from understanding the world as data, and learning to read it, navigate it and manipulate it. •
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