INFRA-STRUCTURE is Politics.

‘New media’—we are told—exist at the bleeding edge of obsolescence. We thus forever try to catch up, updating to remain the same. But what do we miss in this constant push to the future? What are we (in)voluntarily giving up with “innovation”, in order to stimulate our brain juices? This blind rush flies in the inhuman face of anything stable and measured.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun suggests another approach, arguing that our media matter most when they seem not to matter at all—when they have moved from “new” to habitual. Hit tip to McLuhan. Through habits, Chun says, new media become embedded in our lives—indeed, we become our machines: we stream, update, capture, upload, link, save, trash, and troll.’

THE NOISE OF BEING || 25 February 2017

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Professor at Simon Fraser University, and author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT 2011), and Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT 2016).