Error: Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media Cultures

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Divided into three sections, Error brings together established critics and emerging voices to offer a significant contribution to the field of new media studies. In the first section, "Hack," contributors explore the ways in which errors, glitches, and failure provide opportunities for critical and aesthetic intervention within new media practices. In the second section, "Game," they examine how errors allow for intentional and accidental co-opting of rules and protocols toward unintended ends. The final section, "Jam," considers the role of error as both an inherent "counterstrategy" and a mode of tactical resistance within a network society. By offering a timely and novel exploration into the ways in which error and noise "slip through" in systems dominated by principles of efficiency and control, this collection provides a unique take on the ways in which information theory and new media technologies inform cultural practice.

Reviews

If you have had enough of the logic of maximum performance, organized by process management and promoting maximum predictability and minimum error, this brilliant collection of essays is the book for you. Doubling the history of control through a genealogy of error, this collection maps the possibility of asystematic resistance in cybernetic networks, challenging the reader to imagine the liberating potential of going astray. Giving in to the pull of the unintended and the unforeseen, the glitch aesthetic of jams and hacks, errors and noise outlined in this book provides a possible model of flight from the terror of efficiency that haunts network societies.

Tiziana Terranova, associate professor in the Sociology of Communications at the Dipartimento di Studi Americani, Culturali e Linguistici, Universita degli Studi di Napoli 'L'Orientale'

Author Bio

Mark Nunes is Chair of the Department of English, Technical Communication, and Media Arts at Southern Polytechnic State University. He is the author of Cyberspaces of Everyday Life (Minnesota, 2006). He is also author of several articles on networked social space, including "Ephemeral Cities: Postmodern Urbanism and the Production of Online Space" in Virtual Globalizations (Routledge, 2001) and "Baudrillard in Cyberspace: Internet, Virtuality, and Postmodernity" in Style (1995).