Walter Isaacson: Steve Jobs (2011)

Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.

Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written nor even the right to read it before it was published. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted.

Driven by demons, Jobs could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and products were interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.

Publisher Simon & Schuster, 2011
ISBN 1451648553, 9781451648553
656 pages

review (Evgeny Morozov, The New Republic)
review (Sam Leith, Guardian)
review (Janet Maslin, The New York Times)
review (Adam Satariano and Peter Burrows, Bloomberg)
review (Huffington Post)

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Wendy Hui Kyong Chun: Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (2011)

“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 approaches the concept of programmability through the surprising materialization of software as a “thing” in its own right, tracing the hardening of programming into software and of memory into storage. She 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 less we know, the more we are shown. This paradox, Chun argues, does not diminish new media’s power, but rather grounds computing’s appeal. Its 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.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2011
Software Studies series
ISBN 0262015420, 9780262015424
239 pages

Reviews: Jentery Sayers (Computational Culture, 2011), McKenzie Wark (Public Seminar, 2015).

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Fibreculture journal, 18: trans (2011)

“It is now perhaps a commonplace that digital, networked and informational media are extremely transient. They diversify in form and function at a dizzying rate. At the same time, they transit and fuse “social” and “natural” differences in a manner which reconfigures all the worlds involved. It is also perhaps a commonplace to suggest that some established powers have found it difficult to come to grips with this (although this is perhaps beginning to change). For many, from seriously challenged newspaper proprietors to established media disciplines, it might be time to pause for breath, if only for a moment—to regroup and adapt established practices and ideas, to count the survivors from among the old media worlds of just a few years ago.

While occasionally sympathetic, issue 18 of the Fibreculture Journal questions this approach. If we pause for breath, it is to take in the new air. This issue draws on the accelerated evolutions of media forms and processes, the microrevolutions in the social (and even the natural sciences) that dynamic media foster, even the way in which “new” media lead us to reconsider the diversity of “old” media species. Summed up simply here under the sign/event of the “trans,” this issue catalyzes new concepts, accounts of and suggestions for new practices for working with all these processes.”

Articles:
Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders: Other Ways Of Knowing: Embodied Investigations of the Unstable, Slippery and Incomplete
John Tinnell: Transversalising the Ecological Turn: Four Components of Felix Guattari’s Ecosophical Perspective
Vince Dziekan: Anxious Atmospheres, and the Transdisciplinary Practice of United Visual Artists
Kristoffer Gansing: The Transversal Generic: Media-Archaeology and Network Culture
Christoph Brunner and Jonas Fritsch: Interactive Environments as Fields of Transduction
Troy Rhoades: From Representation to Sensation: The Transduction of Images in John F. Simon Jr.’s ‘Every Icon’
Michael Dieter: The Becoming Environmental of Power: Tactical Media After Control
Simon Mills: Concrete Software: Simondon’s mechanology and the techno-social
Fenwick McKelvey: A Programmable Platform? Drupal, Modularity, and the Future of the Web

Edited by Andrew Murphie, Adrian Mackenzie and Mitchell Whitelaw
Publisher Fibreculture Publications/The Open Humanities Press, Sydney, Australia, October 2011
ISSN 1449-1443

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