Sherry Turkle: The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, 20th ed. (1984/2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · artificial intelligence, computing, hacker culture, machine, media culture, psychology, software, things, video games
“In The Second Self, Sherry Turkle looks at the computer not as a “tool,” but as part of our social and psychological lives; she looks beyond how we use computer games and spreadsheets to explore how the computer affects our awareness of ourselves, of one another, and of our relationship with the world. “Technology,” she writes, “catalyzes changes not only in what we do but in how we think.” First published in 1984, The Second Self is still essential reading as a primer in the psychology of computation. This twentieth anniversary edition allows us to reconsider two decades of computer culture—to (re)experience what was and is most novel in our new media culture and to view our own contemporary relationship with technology with fresh eyes. Turkle frames this classic work with a new introduction, a new epilogue, and extensive notes added to the original text.
Turkle talks to children, college students, engineers, AI scientists, hackers, and personal computer owners—people confronting machines that seem to think and at the same time suggest a new way for us to think—about human thought, emotion, memory, and understanding. Her interviews reveal that we experience computers as being on the border between inanimate and animate, as both an extension of the self and part of the external world. Their special place betwixt and between traditional categories is part of what makes them compelling and evocative. (In the introduction to this edition, Turkle quotes a PDA user as saying, “When my Palm crashed, it was like a death. I thought I had lost my mind.”) Why we think of the workings of a machine in psychological terms—how this happens, and what it means for all of us—is the ever more timely subject of The Second Self.”
Keywords: personal computer, Speak and Spell, video games, hacker culture, artificial intelligence, Software Wars, Pac-Man, Marvin Minsky, Merlin, Seymour Papert, tic-tac-toe, Dungeons and Dragons, sprite, Tinkertoys, Sherry Turkle, Joseph Weizenbaum, home computer, computer program, pinball, Space Invaders
Publisher MIT Press, 2005
ISBN 0262701111, 9780262701112
372 pages
PDF (updated on 2014-9-15)
Comments (3)Matthew Fuller (ed.): Software Studies: A Lexicon (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · algorithm, code, computing, ethnocomputing, interactivity, interface, programming, software, software art, software studies
“This collection of short expository, critical, and speculative texts offers a field guide to the cultural, political, social, and aesthetic impact of software. Computing and digital media are essential to the way we work and live, and much has been said about their influence. But the very material of software has often been left invisible. In Software Studies, computer scientists, artists, designers, cultural theorists, programmers, and others from a range of disciplines each take on a key topic in the understanding of software and the work that surrounds it. These include algorithms; logical structures; ways of thinking and doing that leak out of the domain of logic and into everyday life; the value and aesthetic judgments built into computing; programming’s own subcultures; and the tightly formulated building blocks that work to make, name, multiply, control, and interweave reality.
The growing importance of software requires a new kind of cultural theory that can understand the politics of pixels or the poetry of a loop and engage in the microanalysis of everyday digital objects. The contributors to Software Studies are both literate in computing (and involved in some way in the production of software) and active in making and theorizing culture. Software Studies offers not only studies of software but proposes an agenda for a discipline that sees software as an object of study from new perspectives.”
Contributors: Alison Adam, Wilfried Hou Je Bek, Morten Breinbjerg, Ted Byfield, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Geoff Cox, Florian Cramer, Cecile Crutzen, Marco Deseriis, Ron Eglash, Matthew Fuller, Andrew Goffey, Steve Goodman, Olga Goriunova, Graham Harwood, Friedrich Kittler, Erna Kotkamp, Joasia Krysa, Adrian Mackenzie, Lev Manovich, Michael Mateas, Nick Montfort, Michael Murtaugh, Jussi Parikka, Soren Pold, Derek Robinson, Warren Sack, Grzesiek Sedek, Alexei Shulgin, Matti Tedre, Adrian Ward, Richard Wright, Simon Yuill.
Publisher The MIT Press, 2008
ISBN 0262062747, 9780262062749
334 pages
PDF (updated on 2015-7-9)
Comment (0)Lev Manovich: Software Takes Command (2008–)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, computing, design, history of computing, media, media design, media theory, software, software studies
“Software has replaced a diverse array of physical, mechanical, and electronic technologies used before 21st century to create, store, distribute and interact with cultural artifacts. It has become our interface to the world, to others, to our memory and our imagination – a universal language through which the world speaks, and a universal engine on which the world runs. What electricity and combustion engine were to the early 20th century, software is to the early 21st century. Offering the the first theoretical and historical account of software for media authoring and its effects on the practice and the very concept of ‘media,’ the author of The Language of New Media (2001) develops his own theory for this rapidly-growing, always-changing field.
What was the thinking and motivations of people who in the 1960 and 1970s created concepts and practical techniques that underlie contemporary media software such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Maya, Final Cut and After Effects? How do their interfaces and tools shape the visual aesthetics of contemporary media and design? What happens to the idea of a ‘medium’ after previously media-specific tools have been simulated and extended in software? Is it still meaningful to talk about different mediums at all? Lev Manovich answers these questions and supports his theoretical arguments by detailed analysis of key media applications such as Photoshop and After Effects, popular web services such as Google Earth, and the projects in motion graphics, interactive environments, graphic design and architecture.”
First version self-published in 2008
Publisher Bloomsbury, July 2013
International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics series, 5
Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License
ISBN 1623567459, 9781623567453
xi+357 pages
Reviews: McKenzie Wark (Public Seminar, 2015), Alessandro Ludovico (Neural, 2014), Jussi Parikka (Cultural Politics, 2014), Patrick Davison (International Journal of Communication, 2014), Yanni Alexander Loukissas (Journal of Design History, 2014), Brock Craft (Popular Communication, 2014), Warren Buckland (New Review of Film and Television Studies, 2014), Martin E. Roth (Asiascape, 2014), Manuel Portela (MatLit, 2013), Alan Bilansky (Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2019).
Interviews: Michael Connor (Rhizome, 2013), Illya Szilak (HuffPost, 2017).
PDF (2 MB, added on 2019-8-23)
EPUB (7 MB, added on 2019-8-23)
Issuu (added on 2013-9-1)