Contents

Introduction 7
Arianna Borrelli and Helena Durnová

[ 1 ] Synthetic Machines and Practical Languages: Masking the Computer in the 1950s 27
Mark Priestley

[ 2 ] Practical and Theoretical Objectives of Early Machine Translation in the 1950–60s 61
Jacqueline Léon

[ 3 ] Big Machines for Big Science: The Beginnings of Scientific Computing at CERN 83
Arianna Borrelli

[ 4 ] The Influence of Organization and Methods on Early Business Computing 121
Elisabetta Mori

[ 5 ] The Division of Mental Labor in Computing Practices: Presuppositions, Advances, Biases 147
Marie-José Durand-Richard

[ 6 ] Mainframe Computer or Programmable Pocket Calculator? Calculation Tools and Practices of Computing in Medieval History (1960s–1980s) 193
Edgar Lejeune

[ 7 ] Computing Practices, Data-Based Design, and Knowledge Cultures During the Post-War Period 227
Nathalie Bredella

[ 8 ] Tense and Temporality: Computing and the Logic of Time 255
Troy Kaighin Astarte

Authors 281

The contributions to this volume trace such transports across Africa, Asia, and beyond.

“Technopharmacology hits a sore but absolutely crucial spot: the pharmacologization of media and the mediatization of pharmacology. A must-read in the chaotic post-pandemic world that big pharma and platform capital dominate.”

— Tiziana Terranova, University of Naples “L’Orientale”

“Technopharmacology explores the relation between media technologies and pharmaceutical agents — to overturn our understanding of both through compelling new perspectives.”

— Thomas Lamarre, University of Chicago

Fahrradutopien denkt vom Fahrrad aus und ergänzt dabei bestehende Ansätze zur Mobilitätsforschung um medienkulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven. Die Beiträge verbinden Medienwissenschaften und Forschungen zu Fahrradaktivismus mit der Liebe zum Radfahren. Fokussiert werden Fahrradfilme und -vlogs, Verkehr und Infrastrukturen, Virtuelle Realität und Fahrrad, Fahrradkollektive und Fahrradfeminismus.

“This timely collection reminds us how the latest forms of algorithmic management are extensions of the long history of industrialized labor. We can only understand the future of work when we contend with the patterns of the past and how they manifest around the world.”

— Kate Crawford, author of Atlas of AI

“This remarkable book critically probes hardware manufacturing practices and histories in the Asia Pacific, insisting media theory and management studies recompose in ways attentive to real-time labor regimes and the organizational force of global logistics.”

— Ned Rossiter, Western Sydney University

“This original book links up Toyotism, just-in-time management, and platform capitalism, all in one volume. I especially liked the main geographical foci of the chapters being on non-western countries: Japan, China, and Central and Eastern Europe.”

— Jack Linchuan Qiu, National University of Singapore

If connectivity brought us virtual communities, information superhighways, and participatory culture, disconnection comes with privacy tools, Faraday shields, and figures of the shy. This book explores non-usage and the “right to disconnect” from work and from the excessive demands of digital capitalism.

“This timely collection draws together a range of innovative formats to consider the opportunities for distance, agency, and control in an intimately networked world. Each perspective demonstrates the challenge of disconnection as a means to confront the power of networks while also offering tools for fundamentally rethinking relationality.”

— Melissa Gregg, Senior Principal Engineer, Intel

Aesthetic Experience of Metabolic Processes is part of the series Future Ecologies dedicated to rethink the multiple ecologies that flourish and struggle on Earth and beyond.

Earth and Beyond in Tumultuous Times is part of the series Future Ecologies dedicated to rethink the multiple ecologies that flourish and struggle on Earth and beyond.

Read the book online at pandemicmedia.meson.press.

“This engaging volume provides readers with a historically rich and media-scientific focused introduction to the philosophical problematic of acting at a distance.”

– Jeremy Packer, University of Toronto

“An inspiring volume that invites reflection on a crucial issue in our digital cultures: the materiality of transmission.”

– Dawid Kasprowicz, RWTH Aachen University

Comprising a wide range of case studies on the standards, practices, and politics of formats from scholars of photography, film, radio, television, and the Internet, Format Matters charts the many ways in which formats shape and are shaped by past and present media cultures. This volume represents the first sustained collaborative effort to advance the emerging field of format studies.

Organize encourages us to think about media as a noun and a verb. The media mediates as an apparatus for organizing people and things, patterning actual and possible relations. Connecting media theory with organization theory, this book deserves to be widely read.”

— Martin Parker, University of Bristol

“This volume assembles some of the very thinkers who track the terms ‘media’ and ‘organization’—how they migrate, cross paths, and even double each other in digital cultures.”

— Keller Easterling, Yale University

“What emerges in this short book is a theory of media as that which remains. Mediating deep time with temporarily fossilized moments in our cultural history, the book’s multivoice narrative raises important questions about human responsibility for matter and other matters.”

— Joanna Zylinska, Goldsmiths, University of London

“This book spells out the ways in which past media and past practices continue to haunt and inflect our present social and technical arrangements.”

— Steven Shaviro, Wayne State University

“‘The machine’ proves that whoever said that the rise of data was going to cause the end of theory could not be more wrong. The new forms of digital automation of society, the question of the relationship with the animated machine, and the new cybernetics of ecosystemic governance provide rich instigation to philosophy, proving that machines can and do make us think new thoughts.”

— Tiziana Terranova, Naples Eastern University

“A significant contribution to the understanding and politics of the becoming of machines and techno-systems in the twentyfirst century.”

— Yuk Hui, author of On the Existence of Digital Objects

“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

“One of the great deficiencies of media theory has been an adequate account of markets. As new technologies evolve to secure the most recent gains in wealth accumulation, this collection shows what is at stake in overlooking or accepting the very first principles of capitalism.”

— Melissa Gregg, Research Director at Intel

“The technological media and infrastructures of markets and finance capitalism should be of utmost concern to cultural theory. In bringing together the critical history of economic thought and the media theory of money and markets, this book is a compelling and timely intervention.“

— Joseph Vogl, Humboldt University, Berlin / Princeton University

“Profound and provocative, this book demonstrates the enduring relevance of theory to contemporary digital dilemmas. Addressing platform capitalism, democratic decay, and the future of labor and play, the authors illuminate the alien intelligence of big data, pattern recognition, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.”

— Frank Pasquale, University of Maryland

“How are we to contend with the many forms of pattern discrimination in contemporary life? This book shows the complexity of the terrain and reminds us what is at stake.”

— Kate Crawford, AI Now Institute NYU

Im Spannungsfeld zwischen Profil und Profilierung nehmen die Beiträge aus Medienwissenschaft, Soziologie, Geschichtswissenschaft und Informatik die vielschichtigen Dimensionen dieses zentralen Phänomens der digitalen Medienkultur in den Blick: Wie verändern sich Bedeutung und Bewertung des Profil-Begriffs? Wie stehen Profile in Zusammenhang mit Subjektivierung und Machtkonstellationen? Welche Wechselwirkungen zwischen Profilen und Privatheit sind gegenwärtig relevant?

This book is also available in German.

Dieses Buch ist auch in englischer Sprache erhältlich.

Digital Activism in Asia marks a particular shift where these questions are no longer being refracted through the ICT4D logic, or the West’s attempts to save Asia from itself, but shaped by multiplicity, unevenness, and urgencies of digital sites and users in Asia.

This reader crowd-sources critical tools, concepts, analyses, and annotations, self-identified by a network of change makers in Asia as important in their own practices within their own contexts.

The Editors

Nishant Shah, Puthiya Purayil Sneha, and Sumandro Chattapadhyay.

A more powerful model would therefore organise the efforts of the electorate in a way that both generates those reasoned arguments, which, as Habermas quite correctly pointed out differ from mere opinions, and delivers them to the elected politicians in a manner they can neither refuse nor ignore. This is what the Citizen Lobby intends to do.

Contributors: Ned Rossiter, Jussi Parikka, Christoph Neubert, Liam Magee, Andrew Lison, Christopher M. Kelty, Anders Fagerjord, and Seth Erickson.

Despite their multifaceted nature, micro-decisions are a dimension of control and surveillance in the twenty-first century that has received little critical attention. They represent the smallest unit and the technical precondition of a contemporary network politics – and of our potential opposition to it. The current debates regarding net neutrality and Edward Snowden’s revelation of NSA surveillance are only the tip of the iceberg. What is at stake is nothing less than the future of the Internet as we know it.

This book is also available in German.

In ihrer vielschichtigen Gestalt bilden solche Mikroentscheidungen eine bislang nur marginal beachtete Dimension von Kontrolle und Überwachung im 21. Jahrhundert. Sie sind sowohl die kleinste Einheit als auch die technische Voraussetzung einer gegenwärtigen Politik digitaler Netzwerke – und des Widerstands gegen sie. Die aktuellen Debatten um Netzneutralität und Edward Snowdens Enthüllung der NSA-Überwachung bilden dabei lediglich die Spitze des Eisbergs. Auf dem Spiel steht nicht weniger als die Zukunft des Internets, wie wir es kennen.

Dieses Buch ist auch in englischer Sprache erhältlich.