New Media Final Papers

The last few months I’ve been particularly preoccupied with (school) work and the research for my MA thesis (on the software behind social networking sites – more about this later). I did however, finish a couple of classes for which I wrote two final papers that I’d like to share.

First off, the class New Media Research Seminar required for us to read ‘Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization’ by Alexander R. Galloway and ‘Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiberoptics’ by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. Both books were a very interesting read, although I must admit that ‘Protocol’ is more up my alley. For the final paper I’ve compared and contrasted these books, adding my own commentary and questions. I start off by summarizing and critiquing both books and finally take out a few of their main points for contrast and comparison.

Here’s the abstract:

This paper attempts to compare and contrast the main points of the books ‘Protocol:
How Control Exists After Decentralization’ by Alexander R. Galloway and ‘Control
and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics’ by Wendy Hui Kyong
Chun. By briefly discussing both ‘Protocol’ and ‘Control and Freedom’, I will map the
discourse in both books, thereby revealing the larger arguments of the authors.
I will then be able to compare and contrast them and finally come to a concluding
statement. The reviews of both books are not merely summaries: I will also address
unclear paragraphs and theories I came across and add to them with thoughts and
questions that came up while reading both texts.

The rest of the paper can be found here: Comparing and Contrasting ‘Protocol’ with ‘Control and Freedom’

The second paper was written for New Media Theories, a class that covered a lot of classical media texts and subjects such as Vannevar Bush’s ‘As We May Think’, Ivan Sutherland’s ‘Sketchpad’, Theodor Nelson’s ‘Xanadu’, Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ and so on. I chose to write about digital obsolescence and made a link with both Walter Benjamin’s historical ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ and Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s ‘Constituents of a Theory of the Media’.

Here’s the abstract:

With this paper I attempt to answer the question why digital preservation in new
media and new media art is as important as it is difficult. It considers the relation
between digital obsolescence and digital preservation, and looks into several
strategies to preserve digital information; with a particular focus on emulation. This
contemporary issue is first linked back to the historical works of Walter Benjamin’s
and Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s and their ideas on reproduction, thus providing an
overview of the importance of (mechanical and technological) reproducibility since its
advent.

And the rest can be found here: The Battle Against Digital Obsolescence:
Exploring Strategies of Digital Preservation in New Media and New Media Art

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