Media Technologies: Essays on communication, materiality and society

Fred Turner's summary of several essays

people understand digital culture in terms of bits      (manovich, henry Jenkins, lawrence Lessig   bits can be copied infinitely without loss to the original )

The Relevance of Algorithms    Tarleton Gillespie
Gillespie points out that scholars, pundits, and everyday users tend to take a certain pleasure in the fact that algorithms act on their own, as pieces of science and technology, ad so seem to stand outside and even beyond ordinary politics.
In the digital era, .. it involves interrogating algorithms--- first by denying that they are apolitical, and second, by seeking out the ideals they encode and the communities that benefit from those ideals.

Making Media Work          Greg Downey
But Downey reminds us, these new regimes of production have been built and continue to function on the back of an industrial infrastructure --- an infrastructure that continues to depend on and replicate the class hierarchies of the industrial era.
In short, Downey reminds us that despite two decades of claims to the contrary, information technology does not free us from the politics of labor as we knew them in the 19th century. They shift them, reconfigure them a bit, but they hardly do away with class, with the overworking of some bodies for the profit of others, and with the fact that factories, social or mechanical, never run without workers.

(Downey    closed captioning: subtitling, stenography, and the digital convergence of text with television, 2008       Telegraph Messenger Boys: labor, technology, and geography, 1850-1950)


Repairing Repair    Steven J. Jackson
Jackson advocates that we adopt what he calls "broken world thinking."