Programmed Visions

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
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 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.