Where Computer Science and Cultural Studies Collide
Posted by tom | Jan 21, 2009Thought my friends computer science friends would find Where Computer Science and Cultural Studies Collide of interest. The article highlighted SoftWhere 2008, Grand Text Auto, MIT Press Platform Studies, Critical Code Studies, Codology, Game Studies. Below's a quote:
Most users have no more knowledge of what their computer or code is actually doing than most automobile owners have of their carburetor or catalytic converter. Nor is any such knowledge necessarily needed. But for academics, driven by an increasing emphasis on the materiality of new media — that is, the social, cultural, and economic factors driving technical innovation, essentially the inverse of an old-school technological determinism that posited technology as the governing force in human activity — no hardware component is too exotic, no acronym too esoteric to escape critical notice. Put another way, software studies and its kin are the collision of computer science and cultural studies. -- from Where Computer Science and Cultural Studies Collide by Matthew Kirschenbaum in The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 23, 2009.
PS. Another piece you might find of interest posted at the Emerging Scholars Blog, What is the ‘Rightful Place’ of Science?
