Programmed Visions - Software and Memory (Paperback)

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.

General

Imprint:	MIT Press
Country of origin:	United States
Series:	Software Studies
Release date:	2013
First published:	2011
Authors:	Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (Professor)
Dimensions:	229 x 178 x 11mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - Trade
Pages:	254
ISBN-13:	978-0-262-51851-2
Categories:	Books > Science & Mathematics > Science: general issues > Impact of science & technology on society Books > Computing & IT > Computer programming > Software engineering Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Communication studies > Information theory > General
LSN:	0-262-51851-1
Barcode:	9780262518512

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