Anna Everett, John Thornton Caldwell (eds.): New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality (2003)

The mushroom-like growth of new media technologies is radically challenging traditional media outlets. The proliferation of technologies like DVDs, MP3s and the Internet has freed the public from what we used to understand as “mass media.” In the face of such seismic shifts and ruptures, the theoretical and pedagogical foundations of film and TV studies are being shaken to their core. New Media demands a necessary rethinking of the field. Writing from a range of disciplines and perspectives, the scholars here outline new theses and conceptual frameworks capable of engaging the numerous facets of emergent digital technology.

Publisher Routledge, 2003
AFI Film Readers series
ISBN 041593995X, 9780415939959
274 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-31)

N. Katherine Hayles: My Mother Was a Computer. Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (2005)

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: las anguage 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.

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2005
ISBN 0226321479, 9780226321479
290 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-24)

Eugene Thacker: Biomedia (2004)

As biotechnology defines the new millennium, genetic codes and computer codes increasingly merge-life understood as data, flesh rendered programmable. Where this trend will take us, and what it might mean, is what concerns Eugene Thacker in this timely book, a penetrating look into the intersection of molecular biology and computer science in our day and its likely ramifications for the future.

Integrating approaches from science and media studies, Biomedia is a critical analysis of research fields that explore relationships between biologies and technologies, between genetic and computer “codes.” In doing so, the book looks beyond the familiar examples of cloning, genetic engineering, and gene therapy-fields based on the centrality of DNA or genes-to emerging fields in which “life” is often understood as “information.” Focusing especially on interactions between genetic and computer codes, or between “life” and “information,” Thacker shows how each kind of “body” produced-from biochip to DNA computer-demonstrates how molecular biology and computer science are interwoven to provide unique means of understanding and controlling living matter.

Throughout, Thacker provides in-depth accounts of theoretical issues implicit in biotechnical artifacts-issues that arise in the fields of bioinformatics, proteomics, systems biology, and biocomputing. Research in biotechnology, Biomedia suggests, flouts our assumptions about the division between biological and technological systems. New ways of thinking about this division are needed if we are to understand the cultural, social, and philosophical dimensions of such research, and this book marks a significant advance in the coming intellectual revolution.

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2004
ISBN 0816643520, 9780816643523
226 pages

Key terms: bioinformatics, bioMEMS, nanomedicine, DNA computer, bioethics, systems biology, nanotechnology, base pair, molecular biology, biotechnology, biocomputing, DNA chip, systems theory, posthuman, autopoiesis, bio-ethics, proteomics, programmable matter, wet lab, Bertalanffy

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2013-3-16)