Programmed visions : software and memory
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Programmed visions : software and memory
（Software studies）（The M.I.T. Press paperback series）
MIT Press, 2013, c2011
- : Pb
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Note
Includes index
"First MIT Press paperback edition, 2013" -- T.p. verso
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
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