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Author: Jussi Parikka
ISBN : 0820488372
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Digital Contagions is the first book to offer a comprehensive and critical analysis of the culture and history of the computer virus phenomenon. The book maps the anomalies of network culture from the angles of security concerns, the biopolitics of digital systems, and the aspirations for artificial life in software. The genealogy of network culture is approached from the standpoint of accidents that are endemic to the digital media ecology. Viruses, worms, and other software objects are not, then, seen merely from the perspective of anti-virus research or practical security concerns, but as cultural and historical expressions that traverse a non-linear field from fiction to technical media, from net art to politics of software. Jussi Parikka mobilizes an extensive array of source materials and intertwines them with an inventive new materialist cultural analysis. Digital Contagions draws from the cultural theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Friedrich Kittler, and Paul Virilio, among others, and offers novel insights into historical media analysis.
Books with free ebook downloads available Free Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (Digital Formations) [Paperback]
- Series: Digital Formations (Book 44)
- Paperback: 327 pages
- Publisher: Peter Lang International Academic Publishers (June 12, 2007)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0820488372
- ISBN-13: 978-0820488370
- Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 8.7 inches
- Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Free Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses
One could be forgiven for assuming that a book with the title "Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses" would be of sole interest to those sniggering hornrimmed programmers who harbor an erudite loathing of Bill Gates and an affection for the Viennese witch-doctor. Actually, it is a rather game and enthralling look, via a media-ecological approach, into the acutely frightening, yet hysterically glittering, networked world in which we now reside. A world where the distinct individual is pitted against - and thoroughly processed by - post-human semi-autonomous software programs which often ferment anomalous feelings of being eaten alive by some great indifferent artificiality that apparently functions semi-independently as a natural being.
Though no J. G. Ballard or William S. Burroughs, Jussi Parikka nevertheless sucks us into a fantastic black tour-de-force narrative of virulence and the cultural history of computer viruses (*), followed by innumerable inquisitive innuendoes concerning the ramifications for a creative and aesthetic, if post-human, future. Digital Contagions is impregnated with fear and suspicion, but we almost immediately sense that it also contains an undeniable affirmative nobility of purpose; which is to save the media cultural condition - and the brimful push of technological modernization in general - from catastrophically killing itself off.
This admirable embryonic redemption is achieved by a vaccination-like turning of tables, as Parikka convincingly demonstrates that computer viruses (semi-autonomous machinic/vampiric pieces of code) are not antithetical to contemporary digital culture, but rather essential traits of the techno-cultural logic itself.