Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination advances a decisive challenge to the seductive myth that digital texts are weightless, unstable, and immaterial. Rather than treating electronic writing as a purely screen-based phenomenon, Kirschenbaum insists that digital objects possess a complex material ontology, distributed across physical storage media, logical structures, and conceptual interfaces. His distinction between forensic materiality and formal materiality is especially important: the former concerns the singular traces left by inscription on media such as hard drives and disks, while the latter names the procedural organisation of data through software environments and computational systems. This argument transforms new media studies by relocating attention from the visible screen to the hidden mechanisms of storage, recovery, erasure, and transmission. For example, the Department of Defense’s concern with data remanence demonstrates that digital information can remain stubbornly persistent even after deletion, contradicting academic accounts that emphasise ephemerality. Kirschenbaum’s case studies, including Mystery House, Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, and William Gibson’s Agrippa, show that electronic texts are not abstract events but historically situated artefacts shaped by hardware, software, protocols, and social practices. The book therefore proposes a forensic imagination: a critical method attentive to traces, versions, inscriptions, and preservation. Its conclusion is clear: digital culture can only be understood when its apparent immateriality is re-read through the durable, fragile, and historically specific mechanisms that sustain it.