Communication

Contemporary communication puts us not only in conversation with one another but also with our machinery. Inspired by this drastic shift, this volume uncovers new meanings of what it means “to communicate.”

Communication

Machine communication—to interact not just via but also with machines—has transformed contemporary communication. It puts us not just in conversation with one another but also with our current machinery. By analyzing the alienness of this computational communication, through a close reading of interfaces and a field study of software development, this volume uncovers what it means to “communicate” today.

“How are humans shaped by machine communication? Anyone wanting to think through this complex and crucial question
needs to read this book, which offers a strikingly innovative, multifaceted, and concentrated analysis of the problem of communication in our present moment.”

— Rita Raley, University of California, Santa Barbara

“Using diverse methodological approaches and points of interest, this book invites us to rethink what, if anything, the concept of communication can mean in a moment when neither embodied minds nor clearly demarcated individuals are the subjects of the drama.”

— John Durham Peters, Yale University

Publishing Year
2019
Language
English
Pages
136
Series
Print Edition Price
$ 18.00 RRP
License
CC BY-NC 4.0
ISBNs
978-1-5179-0647-4  (Print)
978-3-95796-146-4 (PDF)
DOI
10.14619/1464
Available as
Print (Paperback), PDF

The Authors

Paula Bialski is junior professor of digital sociality at Leuphana University Lüneburg. She is an ethnographer of new media in everyday life and the author of Becoming Intimately Mobile.

Paula Bialski's Author Profile

Finn Brunton is assistant professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University. He works on the history and theory of computing and digital media technologies. He is the author of Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet, Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest (with Helen Nissenbaum), and Digital Cash: A Cultural History.

Finn Brunton's Author Profile

Dr Mercedes Bunz is Senior Lecturer in Digital Society at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. She came to London in 2009 to work as the technology reporter of The Guardian. Her research explores how digital technology transforms knowledge and power. Her last book is Communication (meson press & University of Minnesota Press 2019), with Finn Brunton and Paula Bialski, which discusses how contemporary communication puts us not only in conversation with one another but also with our machinery. Before that, she published The Internet of Things (Polity 2018) written with Professor Graham Meikle.

Mercedes Bunz's Author Profile

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