Programmed Visions

<b>A theoretical examination of the surprising emergence of software as a guiding metaphor for our neoliberal world.</b><p>New media thrives on cycles of obsolescence and renewal: from celebrations of cyber-everything to Y2K from the dot-com bust to the next big things--mobile mobs Web 3.0 cloud computing. In<i> Programmed Visions</i> Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that these cycles result in part from the ways in which new media encapsulates a logic of programmability. New media proliferates programmed visions which seek to shape and predict--even embody--a future based on past data. These programmed visions have also made computers based on metaphor metaphors for metaphor itself for a general logic of substitutability. </p><p>Chun argues that the clarity offered by software as metaphor should make us pause because software also engenders a profound sense of ignorance: who knows what lurks behind our smiling interfaces behind the 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 logical effects from genetics to the invisible hand of the market from ideology to culture.</p>