Wendy Chun – Programmed Visions
It seems impossible for us to know the global picture of new media. Due to the invisibility, ubiquity and alleged power of new media, know the extent, content, and effects of new media seems impossible.
So people started to look into what seems to be common to all new media objects and moments: software in order to have an understanding/ try to have an overview of new media.
Software is a visibly invisible or invisibly visible essence.
It is the invisible whole that generates the sensuous parts. To know software has become a form of enlightenment.
Based on metaphor, the software has become a metaphor for the mind, for culture, for ideology, for biology, and for the economy. s a universal imitator/machine, it encapsulates a logic of general substitutability: a logic of ordering and creative, animating disordering. Computers become a metaphor. Software engenders a sense of profound ignorance because of its clarity. We usually don’t know what’s behind our interface. But as a metaphor for metaphor, new media actually has more power. This ambiguous is building a new way to our increasingly complex world.
Matthew Fuller – How to be a Geek (book, pp. 12-14, and optionally pp. 63-71)
Writing about software is to try to draw outdoor conditions that are particular to the way in which computational systems. Computer science has become a fundamental cultural and political. We should treat this as a serious individual culture/ field of study instead of an integral field of other disciplines. Geeks are a group of people who have certain characteristics, they build a huge part in our contemporary life. Geeks created the internet and fight over its meaning. Contemporary technology is not simply an extension of a man. It’s stuffed the way of interpreting the world into a logical abstraction way. Study software requires us to combine computer science part with cultural theories.
Geert Lovink – Sad by Design (podcast w/ Douglas Rushkoff, 60m)
It seems that surveillance capitalism has become the fundamental element of studying new media. Technology will be our evolutionary successor. The speaker talked about a lot of things. Europe is expected to become a force to “fight against” the surveillance capitalism since it does not have it’s own silicon Vally and strict government controls like China. The change is unlikely to come from technology tycoons inside the industry.
Soren Pold – New ways of hiding: towards metainterface realism (article)
Metainterface is a new interface paradigm. It makes the interface more abstract and ubiquitous. There are two ways of hiding, hide behind the simplified user interface and hide in the internal worlds. Interface draws on an engineering tradition to make itself disappear in transparency. It under both our willingness( the agreement) yet out of our willingness(we don’t know what exactly they are).