Peter Krapp: Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture (2011)

Brings to light the critical role of noise and error in the creative potential of digital culture.

To err is human; to err in digital culture is design. In the glitches, inefficiencies, and errors that ergonomics and usability engineering strive to surmount, Peter Krapp identifies creative reservoirs of computer-mediated interaction. Throughout new media cultures, he traces a resistance to the heritage of motion studies, ergonomics, and efficiency, showing how creativity is stirred within the networks of digital culture.

Noise Channels offers a fresh look at hypertext and tactical media, tunes into laptop music, and situates the emergent forms of computer gaming and machinima in media history. Krapp analyzes text, image, sound, virtual spaces, and gestures in noisy channels of computer-mediated communication that seek to embrace—rather than overcome—the limitations and misfires of computing. Equally at home with online literature, the visual tactics of hacktivism, the recuperation of glitches in sound art, electronica, and videogames, or machinima as an emerging media practice, he explores distinctions between noise and information, and how games pivot on errors at the human–computer interface.

Grounding the digital humanities in the conditions of possibility of computing culture, Krapp puts forth his insight on the critical role of information in the creative process.

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2011
Volume 37 van Electronic Mediations
ISBN 0816676240, 9780816676248
216 pages

publisher
google books

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Luciano Floridi: Philosophy and Computing: An Introduction (1999)

“Philosophy and Computing explores each of the following areas of technology: the digital revolution; the computer; the Internet and the Web; CD-ROMs and Mulitmedia; databases, textbases, and hypertexts; Artificial Intelligence; the future of computing.

Luciano Floridi shows us how the relationship between philosophy and computing provokes a wide range of philosophical questions: is there a philosophy of information? What can be achieved by a classic computer? How can we define complexity? What are the limits of quantam computers? Is the Internet an intellectual space or a polluted environment? What is the paradox in the Strong Artificial Intlligence program?”

Publisher Routledge, 1999
ISBN 0415180252, 9780415180252
242 pages

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I Read Where I Am: Exploring New Information Cultures (2011)

“”I Read Where I Am” contains visionary texts about the future of reading and the status of the word. We read at any time and anywhere. We read from screens, we read out on the streets, we read in the office but we spend less and less time reading a book at home on the couch. We are, or are becoming, a different type of reader. Reading is becoming a different experience. Different from what it once was.

We have access to almost all information at any given time. We carry complete libraries in our pockets. Books have become part of the multi-media world, the can be shared between platforms.

Do all these extra possibilities add value or are they a mere distraction? We read the text as much as we read the interface. With similar ease, we read newspaper articles as well as search engines, databases, and navigational structures. Texts and images become interchangeable, creating new forms of information. Differences in content and between readers require different shapes and experiences. The question remains: which shape will it take and what experience does one want?

To answer to all these (and other) questions, we have asked people from different backgrounds, to think about these issues in the light of these changes. “I Read Where I Am” is a varied collection of 82 observations, inspirations, and critical notes by journalists, designers, researchers, politicians, philosophers, and many others.” (from book launch announcement)

Concept: Graphic Design Museum/Institute of Network Cultures
Editors: Mieke Gerritzen, Geert Lovink, Minke Kampman
Editorial assistance: Morgan Currie
Translation Dutch-English: Jonathan Ellis
Design: LUST
Production: Valiz
Publisher: Valiz with Graphic Design Museum, May 2011
ISBN 978-90-78088-55-4

authors
via The Unbound Book conference

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