Jonathan Sterne: MP3: The Meaning of a Format (2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · codec, compression, filesharing, history of technology, information theory, listening, mp3, noise, piracy, psychoacoustics, recording, silence, sound recording, technology
“MP3: The Meaning of a Format recounts the hundred-year history of the world’s most common format for recorded audio. Understanding the historical meaning of the MP3 format entails rethinking the place of digital technologies in the larger universe of twentieth-century communication history, from hearing research conducted by the telephone industry in the 1910s, through the mid-century development of perceptual coding (the technology underlying the MP3), to the format’s promiscuous social life since the mid 1990s.
MP3s are products of compression, a process that removes sounds unlikely to be heard from recordings. Although media history is often characterized as a progression toward greater definition, fidelity, and truthfulness, MP3: The Meaning of a Format illuminates the crucial role of compression in the development of modern media and sound culture. Taking the history of compression as his point of departure, Jonathan Sterne investigates the relationships among sound, silence, sense, and noise; the commodity status of recorded sound and the economic role of piracy; and the importance of standards in the governance of our emerging media culture. He demonstrates that formats, standards, and infrastructures—and the need for content to fit inside them—are every bit as central to communication as the boxes we call “media.””
Publisher Duke University Press, Durham, NC, September 2012
Sign, Storage, Transmission series
ISBN 0822352877, 9780822352877
341 pages
Reviews: Robert Barry (review31), Hillegonda Rietveld (Times Higher Education), Hua Hsu (Slate).
Interview with the author: Eric Harvey (Pitchfork).
PDF (updated on 2021-4-9)
Comment (0)Jodi Dean: The Communist Horizon (2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · capitalism, communicative capitalism, communism, melancholia, neoliberalism, occupy movement, politics, proletariat, technology
“Rising thinker on the resurgence of the communist idea.
In this new title in Verso’s Pocket Communism series, Jodi Dean unshackles the communist ideal from the failures of the Soviet Union. In an age when the malfeasance of international banking has alerted exploited populations the world over to the unsustainability of an economic system predicated on perpetual growth, it is time the left ended its melancholic accommodation with capitalism.
In the new capitalism of networked information technologies, our very ability to communicate is exploited, but revolution is still possible if we organize on the basis of our common and collective desires. Examining the experience of the Occupy movement, Dean argues that such spontaneity can’t develop into a revolution and it needs to constitute itself as a party.
An innovative work of pressing relevance, The Communist Horizon offers nothing less than a manifesto for a new collective politics.”
Publisher Verso Books, London, 2012
Pocket Communism series
ISBN 1844679543, 9781844679546
256 pages
Author’s lecture (video, 79 min)
Interview with author (New Left Project)
Reviews: Samuel Grove (review31).
PDF (updated on 2020-5-31)
Comment (0)Donald MacKenzie: Knowing Machines: Essays on Technical Change (1996)
Filed under book | Tags: · economics, machine, nuclear weapons, sociology, sociology of technology, tacit knowledge, technology
Ranging from broad inquiries into the roles of economics and sociology in the explanation of technological change to an argument for the possibility of “uninventing” nuclear weapons, this selection of Donald MacKenzie’s essays provides a solid introduction to the style and substance of the sociology of technology.
Two conceptual essays are followed by seven empirical essays focusing on the laser gyroscopes that are central to modern aircraft navigation technology, supercomputers (with a particular emphasis on their use in the design of nuclear weapons), the application of mathematical proof in the design of computer systems, computer-related accidental deaths, and the nature of the knowledge that is needed to design a nuclear bomb. Two of the articles won major prizes on their original journal publication. A substantial new introduction outlines the common themes underlying this body of work and places them in the context of recent debates in technology studies.
Publisher MIT Press, 1996
Inside Technology series
ISBN 0262133156, 9780262133159
338 pages
review (Brian Martin, Metascience)
Comment (0)