Hayles – My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts

Hayles, Katherine.  My Mother Was a Computer:  Digital Subjects and Literary Texts.  University of Chicago Press,  2005.  Print.  (Excerpts) Part I:  Making – Language and Code Prologue: Computing Kin The “postbiological” – the idea that the human consciousness could be disembodied and placed into computers/machines.  Hayles argued against this idea in How We Became Posthuman. H. notes that the original conflict between... Read More

Selections from Bolter & Grusin – Remediation: Understanding New Media

Bolter, J. David , and Richard Grusin. Remediation Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1999. Print. Preface What is remediation?  RG coined the term in a meeting in May 1996, describing it as “a way to complicate the notion of ‘repurposing’” that relied on the double logic of immediacy and hypermediacy (more on that later) (viii). Introduction: The Double Logic of Remediation What is this... Read More

Bolter – Critical Theory and the Challenge of New Media

Bolter, Jay David. “Critical Theory and the Challenge of New Media.” Eloquent Images:  Word and Image in the Age of New Media. Eds. Hocks, Mary E. and Michelle R. Kendrick. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. 19-36. Print. B. begins by noting that over the course of the 20th century we have become a far more visual culture.  This includes the imagization of words themselves into visual objects that move beyond the limits of syntactical... Read More

Brooke – Lingua Fracta – Ch. 1 “Interface”

Lingua Fracta:  Towards a Rhetoric of New Media Collin Gifford Brooke Chapter One:  Interface Wow.  A lot of stuff in this chapter.  I’ll be brief, but I don’t want to miss much! Brooke begins by sketching how an electronic essay entitled “Hypertext is Dead,” published in Kairos acted as not only a single text object, but also as something more – a new media text. A main claim of Brooke’s work:  “I believe that,... Read More