The Cultural Logic of Computation

The Cultural Logic of Computation
Author: David Golumbia
Publsiher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2009-08-30
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9780674053885

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Advocates of computers make sweeping claims for their inherently transformative power: new and different from previous technologies, they are sure to resolve many of our existing social problems, and perhaps even to cause a positive political revolution. In The Cultural Logic of Computation, David Golumbia, who worked as a software designer for more than ten years, confronts this orthodoxy, arguing instead that computers are cultural “all the way down”—that there is no part of the apparent technological transformation that is not shaped by historical and cultural processes, or that escapes existing cultural politics. From the perspective of transnational corporations and governments, computers benefit existing power much more fully than they provide means to distribute or contest it. Despite this, our thinking about computers has developed into a nearly invisible ideology Golumbia dubs “computationalism”—an ideology that informs our thinking not just about computers, but about economic and social trends as sweeping as globalization. Driven by a programmer’s knowledge of computers as well as by a deep engagement with contemporary literary and cultural studies and poststructuralist theory, The Cultural Logic of Computation provides a needed corrective to the uncritical enthusiasm for computers common today in many parts of our culture.

The Cultural Logic of Computation

The Cultural Logic of Computation
Author: David Golumbia
Publsiher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2009-04-30
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9780674032927

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Golumbia, who worked as a software designer for more than ten years, argues that computers are cultural “all the way down”—that there is no part of the apparent technological transformation that is not shaped by historical and cultural processes, or that escapes existing cultural politics.

The Politics of Bitcoin

The Politics of Bitcoin
Author: David Golumbia
Publsiher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 107
Release: 2016-09-26
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9781452953816

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Since its introduction in 2009, Bitcoin has been widely promoted as a digital currency that will revolutionize everything from online commerce to the nation-state. Yet supporters of Bitcoin and its blockchain technology subscribe to a form of cyberlibertarianism that depends to a surprising extent on far-right political thought. The Politics of Bitcoin exposes how much of the economic and political thought on which this cryptocurrency is based emerges from ideas that travel the gamut, from Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises to Federal Reserve conspiracy theorists. Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

Control

Control
Author: Seb Franklin
Publsiher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2015-09-20
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 9780262331142

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An examination of digitality not simply as a technical substrate but also as the logical basis for reshaped concepts of labor, subjectivity, and collectivity. Is there a cultural logic of what we have come to call the information age? Have the technologies and techniques centered on the computer provided not only tools but also the metaphors through which we now understand the social and economic formation of our world? In Control, Seb Franklin addresses the conditions of knowledge that make the concept of the “information economy” possible while at the same time obscuring its deleterious effects on material social spaces. In so doing, Franklin traces three intertwined threads: the relationships among information, labor, and social management that emerged in the nineteenth century; the mid-twentieth-century diffusion of computational metaphors; and the appearance of informatic principles in certain contemporary socioeconomic and cultural practices. Drawing on critical theory, media theory, and the history of science, Franklin names control as the episteme grounding late capitalism. Beyond any specific device or set of technically mediated practices, digitality functions within this episteme as the logical basis for reshaped concepts of labor, subjectivity, and collectivity, as well as for the intensification of older modes of exclusion and dispossession. In tracking the pervasiveness of this logical mode into the present, Franklin locates the cultural traces of control across a diverse body of objects and practices, from cybernetics to economic theory and management styles, and from concepts of language and subjectivity to literary texts, films, and video games.

Digital Shift

Digital Shift
Author: Jeff Scheible
Publsiher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 120
Release: 2015-03-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781452944371

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Emoticons matter. Equal signs do, too. This book takes them seriously and shows how and why they matter. Digital Shift explores the increasingly ubiquitous presence of punctuation and typographical marks in our lives⎯using them as reading lenses to consider a broad range of textual objects and practices across the digital age. Jeff Scheible argues that pronounced shifts in textual practices have occurred with the growing overlap of crucial spheres of language and visual culture, that is, as screen technologies have proliferated and come to form the interface of our everyday existence. Specifically, he demonstrates that punctuation and typographical marks have provided us with a rare opportunity to harness these shifts and make sense of our new media environments. He does so through key films and media phenomena of the twenty-first century, from the popular and familiar to the avant-garde and the obscure: the mass profile-picture change on Facebook to equal signs (by 2.7 million users on a single day in 2013, signaling support for gay marriage); the widely viewed hashtag skit in Jimmy Fallon’s Late Night show; Spike Jonze’s Adaptation; Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know; Ryan Trecartin’s Comma Boat; and more. Extending the dialogue about media and culture in the digital age in original directions, Digital Shift is a uniquely cross-disciplinary work that reveals the impact of punctuation on the politics of visual culture and everyday life in the digital age.

Digital Modernism

Digital Modernism
Author: Jessica Pressman
Publsiher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2014-02
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780199937103

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Electronic literature is still in its nascent stages, and so too is the field of literary criticism engaging it. While most critical studies of born-digital literature celebrate it as a postmodern art form with roots in contemporary technologies and social interactions, this book provides an alternative genealogy. Digital Modernism examines exemplary cases of electronic literature that renovate modernist texts and poetics as a means of critiquing contemporary culture. This study suggests that by referencing modernism, "digital modernism" reframes that earlier literary tradition around questions of media and technology. Grounding her argument in literary history, media studies, and the practice of close-reading, Jessica Pressman pairs modernist works by Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Bob Brown, with major digital works like William Poundstone's Project for the Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit}, Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries's Dakota, and Judd Morrissey's The Jew's Daughter. She demonstrates how the modernist movement of the 1920s and 1930s laid the groundwork for the innovations of electronic literature. Accordingly, Digital Modernism makes the case for considering these digital creations as "literature" and argues for the value of reading them carefully, closely, and within literary history. Moreover, this remarkable study details how and why one of the most maligned of literary spaces, the web -- one accused of fostering reading habits that destroy deep attention and devalue hermeneutic analysis -- is actually the place where serious literature stages its rebellion and renaissance. Even more importantly, perhaps, this book argues for the importance of literature, literary study, and close reading in our digital age.

My Mother Was a Computer

My Mother Was a Computer
Author: N. Katherine Hayles
Publsiher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2010-03-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780226321493

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We live in a world, according to N. Katherine Hayles, where new languages are constantly emerging, proliferating, and fading into obsolescence. These are languages of our own making: the programming languages written in code for the intelligent machines we call computers. Hayles's latest exploration provides an exciting new way of understanding the relations between code and language and considers how their interactions have affected creative, technological, and artistic practices. My Mother Was a Computer explores how the impact of code on everyday life has become comparable to that of speech and writing: language and code have grown more entangled, the lines that once separated humans from machines, analog from digital, and old technologies from new ones have become blurred. My Mother Was a Computer gives us the tools necessary to make sense of these complex relationships. Hayles argues that we live in an age of intermediation that challenges our ideas about language, subjectivity, literary objects, and textuality. This process of intermediation takes place where digital media interact with cultural practices associated with older media, and here Hayles sharply portrays such interactions: how code differs from speech; how electronic text differs from print; the effects of digital media on the idea of the self; the effects of digitality on printed books; our conceptions of computers as living beings; the possibility that human consciousness itself might be computational; and the subjective cosmology wherein humans see the universe through the lens of their own digital age. We are the children of computers in more than one sense, and no critic has done more than N. Katherine Hayles to explain how these technologies define us and our culture. Heady and provocative, My Mother Was a Computer will be judged as her best work yet.

Foundations of Computation

Foundations of Computation
Author: Carol Critchlow,David Eck
Publsiher: Unknown
Total Pages: 135
Release: 2011
Genre: Computer science
ISBN: OCLC:1148175537

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