New Books in Technology

Paul R. Josephson‘s new book explores everyday technologies – fish sticks, sports bras, sugar, bananas, aluminum cans, potatoes, fructose, and more – as technological systems that embody vast social, political, cultural histories within relatively small packages. Fish Sticks, Sports Bras, and Aluminum Cans: The Politics of Everyday Technologies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) traces some major themes through a series of fascinating and engagingly written case studies. As readers explore the chapters, we learn that fish sticks (the “ocean’s hot dog”) were created less as a result of consumer demand, and more as a result of over-production thanks to new technologies related to fishing, refrigeration, materials science, the postwar kitchen, and more. We learn about the invention of the sports bra as a story of “reverse gender engineering” that involved the transformation of jock straps. We learn of the colonial and postcolonial histories – of slavery, exploitation, technological innovation – staring back at us every time we look at a banana or an aluminum can. We learn to see French fries and high fructose corn syrup as “self-augmenting technologies.” We learn that there’s nothing strictly “natural” about natural disasters. And we are offered a glimpse into the use of large-scale technologies as symbols of state power in Russia. The book concludes with two more stories – of books and bicycles – that leave us with important lessons to take away from the book after we put it down. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

When we consider the television, we think not only about how it’s used, but also it’s impact on culture. The television, tv, telly, or tube, became popular in the West in the late 1940s and early 1950s and was seen as a form of entertainment and enjoyment for the family. Other “technology” that assists with leisure include things like rubber-soled shoes, books, and other digital devices. In their new book, Enjoying Machines (MIT 2015), Barry Brown and Oskar Juhlin, both scholars in the Stockholm University Mobile Life VINN Excellence Center, the success of a particular technology can be measured by how well it creates pleasure. The authors argue that pleasure “is fundamentally social in nature,” and that to understand how technology supports leisure it is important to “produce a more sophisticated definition” of enjoyment. To do this Brown and Juhlin embark on an ethnographic investigation of technology and enjoyment that combines the sociological study of activity and the study of human-machine interaction. Over the course of their examination, the authors are careful to consider both the positives – enjoyment – and negatives – addiction- in relation to devices. Ultimately, Enjoying Machines offers a model of enjoyment useful for better understanding how to design useful machines. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

The genre of “platform studies” offers both researchers and readers more than an examination of the technical machinations of a computing system. Instead, the family of methodologies presents a humanist exploration of digital media from the perspective of the platform itself. That is, this approach contemplates the social, economic and cultural influence and significance of the technology. Although more formally identified by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort in 2007 at the Digital Arts and Cultures Conference, the decades old platform studies discipline affords an understanding of the material manifestations of culture and creative work produced by computing systems. In his new book, I Am Error: The Nintendo Family Computer Entertainment System Platform (MIT Press, 2015), Nathan Altice, a digital media creator and scholar, studies the NES system and the Family Computer, it’s precursor. More than considering the NES as a single entity, the author investigates the platform as a “network of objects and texts,” that go beyond a “stable configuration of hardware and software.” In this way, Altice dives deep to unearth the code and design decisions that shape the creative affordances of the NES, how users choose to play using the platform, and how the system was received outside of Japan. The NES’s cultural reception is foundational for grasping a key theme throughout the book, that of “translation.” For Altice, translation produces errors – “new meanings, new expressions, new bodies, and new objects.” That is, the flaws in hardware and software, including the translation of language from Japanese to English, are not necessarily negative objects to be overcome. Instead, these bugs in the machine add to the performance of the games and the platform, and have very real social, economic, and cultural consequences. I Am Error is one book in the Platform Studies series from MIT Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Megan Prelinger‘s beautiful new book brings together the histories of technology and visuality to ask the question, “What cultural history of electronics can be extrapolated from a close look at the associated graphic art?” Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age (W. W. Norton, 2015) treats the commercial and advertising art of the mid-twentieth century as an archive to explore the social and cultural engagement with electronics technologies during a particularly vibrant moment for the American graphic commercial arts. Incorporating text and image as sources to be read, Prelinger’s book moves from the beginnings of FM technology and vacuum tubes, to televisions and quartz crystals, to transistors and circuit boards, to digital computing and into space. Of special interest is the attention Prelinger pays to to the importance of graphic designers and staff artists at major labs and research centers. The book models an innovative and inspiring way to read graphic images as historical documents, and the story is a pleasure to read for specialists and non-experts alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

John Durham Peters‘ wonderful new book is a brilliant and beautifully-written consideration of natural environments as subjects for media studies. Accessible and informative for a broad readership. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (University of Chicago Press, 2015) is structured as a series of meditations on and explorations of water, fire, air, earth, and ether media. After a chapter that sets out some of the foundational ideas shaping the book and charts an intellectual landscape for rethinking media, each of the following chapters offers a carefully curated series of studies of particulars – dolphin jaws, candles, towers, watches, clouds, feet, bells, weathermen, Google, and more – as a means of examining the significance of infrastructure, forgetting, technicity, and other modes of understanding media. Peters asks us to come with a fresh perspective to notions that we otherwise take for granted, and the result is a thoughtful and inspiring account that brings together media studies, theology, philosophy, and the natural sciences in thoroughly compelling ways. Among other things, the book is a call for a “greener media studies” that “appreciates our long natural history of shaping and being shaped by our habitats as a process of mediation.” What if, Peters asks, we took nature instead of the mind as the “epitome of meaning”? What are the stakes of doing so? The result is among the most exciting and enjoyable books that I’ve read in some time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

By now it is incontrovertible that new technology has had an effect on how regular people get information. Whether in the form of an online newspaper or a Google search, new technology has allowed individuals to access masses of information faster than ever before. What, then, has been the effect of digital tools on research practices? In their new book Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities (MIT Press, 2015), Eric T. Meyer, Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, and Ralph Schroeder, Professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, explore how digital tools have transformed research. To do this, Meyer and Schroeder use case studies to examine how new technology has, and continues to, change research in various fields, and what this means for the future of e-research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

At New Books in Psychoanalysis, interviews are conducted using Skype. As the program is audio rather than video based, it never occurred to me to use the camera on my computer to see on the screen the person I was speaking to. Rather, I kept my ear turned acutely towards the authors, hanging on their every word while privately perusing my list of questions. I have joked with many interviewees that for all I know they are in their pajamas or naked. Truth be told, I have had no interest in seeing the authors during the interview. There was and is something about having the experience that the listener has on hearing, rather than seeing, the interview that may play a role in creating a certain kind of intensity and intimacy. So it was not lost on me that for this particular interview with Gillian Isaacs Russell about a book that looks straightforwardly at the impact of technology on the therapeutic relationship, that we would not be making eye contact. Though we could, I requested that we not do so. And anyway, of course, if you have used it, eye contact is actually impossible on Skype. We can see each other but we cannot lock orbs. Our interview, as you will hear, is full of the same kinds of problems that one might have when working with a patient over the ether. At one point there is a bizarre reverb and everything Isaacs Russell says comes out in triplicate. We did not lose the connection though this has happened to me on several occasions while playing my interlocutory part. And of course we both had our anxieties about the capacity of the technology to connect us and to keep us connected but do bear in mind that we are not analyst and patient. Our relationship is layered with much less meaning or significance than that of the analytic couple. If the technology disconnected us, we would not wonder if it was something that one of us said. No one would have hurt feelings. We could keep it impersonal. In Screen Relations: The Limits of Computer-Mediated Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (Karnac, 2015), Isaacs Russell asks a key question of psychoanalysts: what might be lost in working this way? The interview explores reasons why analysts have jumped in to use Skype and explores what the implications might be of the loss of two bodies in a room together. Her thinking is clear and the ideas she pits forth I found haunting. The age old question of what makes a treatment psychoanalysis came to mind when reading this book as I wondered if you can’t smell the patient, if there is not the risk of touch that is not acted upon, if there is not the walk out the door when the session is over, is essential grist for the mill irreparably lost? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

What do we know about the individuals who make comments on online news stories, blogs, videos and other media? What kind of people take the time to post all manner of information and context to material created by others? Joseph M. Reagle, assistant professor of communication studies at Northeastern University and a faculty associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, examines these online pontificators and provocateurs in his new book Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web (MIT Press, 2015). Reagle categorizes the different kinds of comments, thereby organizing the different kinds of commenters into groups. In addition, Reagle considers both the function and value of comments in society. Just listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Jessica Baldwin-Philippi is the author of Using Technology, Building Democracy: Digital Campaigning and the Construction of Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2015). She is an assistant professor of new media at Fordham University. Baldwin-Philippi’s book fits into a larger Oxford series on Digital Politics which has been featured on the podcast in the past. She uses an ethnographic approach focused on understanding how political campaigns in 2010 had incorporated various technologies. She also collects original data on specific digital strategies, especially social media. But the book is not just about technology; Baldwin-Philippi tries to understand how campaigns shape citizenship and democracy through the tools they use. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

Tom Jackson‘s Chilled: How Refrigeration Changed the World and Might Do So Again (Bloomsbury, 2015) is a completely engrossing look into the history and technology of refrigeration.  This book reads like an expanded chapter of James Burke’s classic book Connections.Refrigeration is not only one of the most important foundation stones of our technological society, it’s also one that we take for granted. It’s hard to say which is more interesting; the realization that people were aware of a cooling method almost two millennia before the birth of Christ, the history of refrigeration from the Middle Ages to the present, or the possibilities for refrigeration technology in the world of the future. Chilledis a fascinating look into one of the most amazing and important technologies that man has ever developed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology