Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Hardcover)

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 Programmed Visions, 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. Chun approaches the concept of programmability through the surprising materialization of software as a "thing" in its own right, tracing the hardening of programming into software and of memory into storage. She 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 less we know, the more we are shown. This paradox, Chun argues, does not diminish new media's power, but rather grounds computing's appeal. Its 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.

新媒體蓬勃發展，不斷循環著過時和更新的週期：從對網絡一切的慶祝活動到Y2K，從互聯網泡沫破裂到下一個大事件——移動群眾、Web 3.0、雲計算。在《程式化視野》一書中，鄭慧強(Wendy Hui Kyong Chun)認為，這些循環部分是由於新媒體包含了一種可編程邏輯。新媒體大量生產「程式化視野」，試圖基於過去的數據來塑造、預測甚至體現未來。這些程式化視野還使得計算機成為了一種基於隱喻的隱喻，成為了隱喻本身的隱喻，成為了可替換性的一般邏輯。鄭慧強通過軟件作為一種獨立的「事物」的意外具現化，追溯了編程變得硬化成軟件，記憶變成存儲的過程。她認為，軟件作為隱喻所提供的清晰度應該使我們停下來思考，因為軟件也引發了一種深刻的無知感：誰知道在我們微笑的界面背後，我們點擊和操作的物體背後潛藏著什麼？我們知道得越少，我們被展示的就越多。鄭慧強認為，這種矛盾並不減弱新媒體的力量，而是使計算的吸引力根深蒂固。它將可見和不可見、已知（可知）和未知分離開來——將界面與算法、軟件與硬件分離開來——使其成為一個強大的隱喻，用於解釋我們相信是看不見的但產生可見的邏輯效應的一切，從基因到市場的看不見的手，從意識形態到文化。