Cutting Code: Software and Sociality / Edition 1

by Adrian MacKenzie, Steve Jones

Overview

Software has often been marginalized in accounts of digital cultures and network societies. Although software is everywhere, it is hard to say what it actually is. Cutting Code: Software and Sociality is one of the first books to treat software seriously as a full-blown cultural process and as a subtly powerful material in contemporary communication. From deCSS to Java, from Linux to Extreme Programming, this book analyses software artworks, operating systems, commercial products, infrastructures, and programming practices. It explores social forms, identities, materialities, and power relations associated with software, and it asks how software provokes the re-thinking of production, consumption and distribution as entwined cultural processes. Cutting Code argues that analysis of code as a mosaic of algorithms, protocols, infrastructures, and programming conventions offers valuable insights into how contemporary social formations invent new kinds of personhood and new ways of acting.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820478234
Publisher:	Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
Publication date:	03/22/2006
Series:	Digital Formations , #30
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	5.91(w) x 8.86(h) x 0.02(d)

About the Author

Adrian Mackenzie researches and teaches in the Institute for Cultural Research, Lancaster University. He has degrees in science and philosophy, and received his Ph.D in philosophy from Sydney University. In addition to professional experience as a software developer, he is author of Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed (2002), and numerous scholarly articles.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Softwarily – Opening Code: Expression and Execution in Software – Algorithms: Sequence and Convolution – Kernel: Code in Time and Space – Java: Practical Virtuality – "Pits" and "Traders": Infrastructures in Software – Extreme Programming: Code as Prototype for Software – Conclusion – Notes – References – Index.

Editorial Reviews

"«Cutting Code» is a major study of code as a site for constructing, negotiating, and transforming social relations. Knowledgeable, comprehensive, and insightful, «Cutting Code» is an essential text for anyone interested in how software achieves agency and consequently how it organizes the behaviors of both machines and humans. As soon as I finished this book, I turned it over and began reading it a second time; its deep clarity and compelling power demanded nothing less." N. Katherine Hayles, John Charles Hillis Professor of Literature, University of California, Los Angeles and Author of «My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts»

From the Publisher