Programmed Visions Software and Memory

New media thrives on cycles of obsolescence and renewal: from celebrations ofcyber-everything to Y2K, from the dot-com bust to the next big things -- mobile mobs, Web 3.0, cloudcomputing. In Programmed Visions, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that these cyclesresult in part from the ways in which new media encapsulates a logic of programmability. New mediaproliferates "programmed visions," which seek to shape and predict -- even embody -- afuture based on past data. These programmed visions have also made computers, based on metaphor,metaphors for metaphor itself, for a general logic of substitutability. Chunargues that the clarity offered by software as metaphor should make us pause, because software alsoengenders a profound sense of ignorance: who knows what lurks behind our smiling interfaces, behindthe objects we click and manipulate? The 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, logicaleffects, from genetics to the invisible hand of the market, from ideology to culture.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, who has studied both systems design and English literature, is Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She is the author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics and Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, both published by the MIT Press.