Cutting Code (Digital Formations) [Paperback]

Adrian Mackenzie (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 22, 2006 | Series: Digital Formations (Book 30)

Software has often been left in the margins of 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, the book analyses software artworks, operating systems, commercial products, infrastructures and programming practices. It explores social forms, identities, materialities and power relations associated with software. It asks how software provokes 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.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

"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.

[I]Cutting Code[/I] 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

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, and numerous scholarly articles.

Product Details

• Paperback: 215 pages
• Publisher: Peter Lang Publishing (March 22, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0820478237
• ISBN-13: 978-0820478234
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,414,012 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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