“Wendy Chun lecture. New media exist as the bleeding edge of obsolescence. They are exciting when they are demonstrated, boring by the time they arrive. If a product does what it promises, it disappoints. We are forever trying to catch up, updating simply to remain the same, bored, overwhelmed and anxious all at the same time. In response to this rapid time scale, much analytic effort has concentrated on anticipating or creating the future, the next big thing: from algorithms that sift through vast amounts of data to suggest future purchases to scholarly analyses focused on the impact of technologies that do not yet exist. But is this really the best approach? What is elided by this constant move to the future, which dismisses the present as already past? Habitual New Media counters this trend by revealing that our media matter most when they seem not to matter at all, that is, when they’ve moved from the new to the habitual. The pressing question is not: “what will be the next big thing?” but “why and how do things remain, especially when they seem no longer to remain at all?”