Programmed Visions: Software and Memory

di Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (Autore)

MIT Press Ltd, 2013

A theoretical examination of the surprising emergence of software as a guiding metaphor for our neoliberal world. New media thrives on cycles of obsolescence and renewal: from celebrations of cyber-everything to Y2K, from the dot-com bust to the next big things-mobile mobs, Web 3.0, cloud computing. In Programmed Visions, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that these cycles result in part from the ways in which new media encapsulates a logic of programmability. New media proliferates "programmed visions," which seek to shape and predict-even embody-a future based on past data. These programmed visions have also made computers, based on metaphor, metaphors for metaphor itself, for a general logic of substitutability. Chun argues that the clarity offered by software as metaphor should make us pause, because software also engenders a profound sense of ignorance: who knows what lurks behind our smiling interfaces, behind the objects we click and manipulate? The combination of what can be seen and not seen, known (knowable) and not known-its separation of interface from algorithm and software from hardware-makes it a powerful metaphor for everything we believe is invisible yet generates visible, logical effects, from genetics to the invisible hand of the market, from ideology to culture.

• Autore: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
• Editore: MIT Press Ltd
• Collana: Software Studies
• Anno: 2013
• Rilegatura: Paperback / softback
• Pagine: 254 p.
• Dimensioni: 229 x 178 mm
• Peso: 544 gr.
• EAN: 9780262518512

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