Overview
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.
Full Product Details
Author: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (Professor, Brown University) ,
Matthew Fuller (David Gee Reader in Digital Media, Goldsmiths College, University of London) ,
Lev Manovich (City University of New York) ,
Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, University of California Santa Cruz)
Publisher: MIT Press Ltd
Imprint: MIT Press
Dimensions:
Width: 17.80cm
, Height: 1.10cm
, Length: 22.90cm
Weight: 0.567kg
ISBN: 9780262015424
ISBN 10: 0262015420
Pages: 256
Publication Date: 29 April 2011
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Awaiting stock
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Reviews
Programmed Visions is an entirely fresh and original piece of scholarship--lyrically written, uncompromisingly rigorous, and full of surprising and provocative insights. Chun demonstrates convincingly that programmability is an 'ideological belief, ' and in so doing challenges received ideas about digital media's supposedly objective relation to truth, noncontingency, and operability. This book is of tremendous importance to gender studies, digital media studies, history, and science and technology studies. --Lisa Nakamura, Asian American Studies Program and Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Author Information
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, who has studied both systems design and English literature, is Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She is the author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT Press, 2006, 2008).
