Byron Hawk, David M. Rieder, Ollie O. Oviedo (eds.): Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools (2008)

Experts examine the ways digital tools affect social and cultural experience.

The essays in Small Tech investigate the cultural impact of digital tools and provide fresh perspectives on mobile technologies such as iPods, digital cameras, and PDAs and software functions like cut, copy, and paste and WYSIWYG. Together they advance new thinking about digital environments.

Contributors: Wendy Warren Austin, Jim Bizzocchi, Collin Gifford Brooke, Paul Cesarini, Veronique Chance, Johanna Drucker, Jenny Edbauer, Robert A. Emmons Jr., Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Richard Kahn, Douglas Kellner, Karla Saari Kitalong, Steve Mann, Lev Manovich, Adrian Miles, Jason Nolan, Julian Oliver, Mark Paterson, Isabel Pedersen, Michael Pennell, Joanna Castner Post, Teri Rueb, James J. Sosnoski, Lance Strate, Jason Swarts, Barry Wellman, Sean D. Williams, Jeremy Yuille.

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2008
ISBN 0816649782, 9780816649785
236 pages

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Bruce Sterling: Shaping Things (2005)

“‘Shaping Things is about created objects and the environment, which is to say, it’s about everything,’ writes Bruce Sterling in this addition to the Mediawork Pamphlet series. He adds, ‘Seen from sufficient distance, this is a small topic.’

Sterling offers a history of shaped things. We have moved from an age of artifacts, made by hand, through complex machines, to the current era of ‘gizmos.’ New forms of design and manufacture are appearing that lack historical precedent, he writes; but the production methods, using archaic forms of energy and materials that are finite and toxic, are not sustainable. The future will see a new kind of object—we have the primitive forms of them now in our pockets and briefcases: user-alterable, baroquely multi-featured, and programmable—that will be sustainable, enhanceable, and uniquely identifiable. Sterling coins the term ‘spime’ for them, these future manufactured objects with informational support so extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system. Spimes are designed on screens, fabricated by digital means, and precisely tracked through space and time. They are made of substances that can be folded back into the production stream of future spimes, challenging all of us to become involved in their production. Spimes are coming, says Sterling. We will need these objects in order to live; we won’t be able to surrender their advantages without awful consequences.”

Designed by Lorraine Wild
Publisher MIT Press, 2005
Mediaworks Pamphlets series
ISBN 026219533X, 9780262195331
149 pages

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