“Reload” develops a medium-specific analysis of new media from a phenomenological perspective, exploring “how the web constitutes itself in the unfolding of experience” (460). McPherson identifies three core sensations that characterize our engagement with online content: “volitional mobility,” being the sensation (illusory or not) of being able to “invoke and impact, in the instant” chunks of content drawn from spatially and temporally disparate databases; “scan and search,” being the mode of experiential sequencing that differentiates a web-based attention economy from that of the televisual “glance-and-gaze”; and “transformation,” which refers to the possibility (again, illusory or not) that, through personalization and customization, we can remake “information into a better reflection of the self” (465).

McPherson illustrates her arguments with examples from late 90s and early 2000s (“dot-com bubble”) web portals. While undoubtedly linked to the relatively siloed technologies and practices of an earlier era of web development, the arguments these examples support translate well into the present era of syndication, aggregation, and hypermobile customization enabled by diversity of interfaces and devices and the ubiquity of interoperable APIs. Indeed, the paper’s concluding remarks about the role of the web in situating users within a neo-Fordist economic regime are perhaps even more relevant to today’s massively-distributed corporate media landscape: if in the early 2000s, a user’s commitment to a particular web portal (My Yahoo!, for example) functioned in part as a means of incorporating that user into the process of enriching and evangelizing the Yahoo! database and brand, today’s users distribute their commitments across dozens of services (Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, Foursquare, Tumblr, etc), enriching the databases of not only individual service providers, but also of the aggregate. Such practices continue the movement toward a more decentralized arrangement of capital wherein “[rather] than being subjected to capital, the worker is now incorporated into capital, made to feel responsible for the corporation’s success” (468).