Evil Media (MIT Press)
Matthew Fuller
Language: English
Pages: 248
ISBN: 0262017857
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Evil Media develops a philosophy of media power that extends the concept of media beyond its tried and trusted use in the games of meaning, symbolism, and truth. It addresses the gray zones in which media exist as corporate work systems, algorithms and data structures, twenty-first century self-improvement manuals, and pharmaceutical techniques. Evil Media invites the reader to explore and understand the abstract infrastructure of the present day. From search engines to flirting strategies, from the value of institutional stupidity to the malicious minutiae of databases, this book shows how the devil is in the details.
The title takes the imperative "Don't be evil" and asks, what would be done any differently in contemporary computational and networked media were that maxim reversed.
Media here are about much more and much less than symbols, stories, information, or communication: media do things. They incite and provoke, twist and bend, leak and manage. In a series of provocative stratagems designed to be used, Evil Media sets its reader an ethical challenge: either remain a transparent intermediary in the networks and chains of communicative power or become oneself an active, transformative medium.
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Don’t Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: New Riders, 2005). 27. The idea of “implicatures” in language use is associated with the work of H. P. Grice on the pragmatic maxims of conversation. See “Logic and Conversation,” in Studies in the Way of Words, ed. H.P. Grice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 28. Cf. chap. 5 of Harry Collins, Artificial Experts: Social Knowledge and Intelligent Machines (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 62–71. 29.
Affordances of media and mediation. The counsel it offers is regrettably not a set of recipes for success, even if we have a liking for the algorithmic or phantasmic tendencies of certain publications in the broad field of media operations.66 Here again the approach takes something of its inspiration from Machiavelli, whose name has, in the Western political tradition, become a byword for naked advocacy of the values of deception. And yet, as the most studious of recent commentaries have.
Herself. The massive success of diazepam (from the family of benzodiazepines)—the most widely prescribed drug in the United States between 1962 and 1981, according to some sources—is exemplary in this regard.54 While the curative effects of such a substance might blur the difference between a symptom and a cause, the molecule has no real need for secrecy, guilt, or shame. Look how quickly user groups set themselves up on the Internet—doctor–patient confidentiality doesn’t enter into the equation.
Content” (which, in Friedman’s libidinally inflected turn of phrase, we now “shoot” around the office)4 occludes the relations of force that workflow expresses, as well as the more material forms of working activity, giving the impression that work has become a sort of spontaneous emission of an indeterminate flow,5 it highlights a significant point: the routinization of work within a formalized set of digital patterns Technicalities 107 depends on a whole weft of technologies, techniques,.
Critical scruples to one side for a moment and try a little harder to appreciate the nature of the work of Productivity 141 the middle, the medium. For although the middle manager is often reviled, not just at work but in culture and society more generally, a strangely active and more or less surreptitious transformational aspect inheres to being in the middle. Naturally, when posing as an emissary or acting as a representative, and for different reasons, it is better to appear as a.