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612-822-4611
Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization

Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization

Paperback

Series: Leonardo

General ComputersNetworking

ISBN10: 0262572338
ISBN13: 9780262572330
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: Feb 17 2006
Pages: 288
Weight: 1.16
Height: 0.66 Width: 6.96 Depth: 8.74
Language: English
How Control Exists after Decentralization

Is the Internet a vast arena of unrestricted communication and freely exchanged information or a regulated, highly structured virtual bureaucracy? In Protocol, Alexander Galloway argues that the founding principle of the Net is control, not freedom, and that the controlling power lies in the technical protocols that make network connections (and disconnections) possible. He does this by treating the computer as a textual medium that is based on a technological language, code. Code, he argues, can be subject to the same kind of cultural and literary analysis as any natural language; computer languages have their own syntax, grammar, communities, and cultures. Instead of relying on established theoretical approaches, Galloway finds a new way to write about digital media, drawing on his backgrounds in computer programming and critical theory. Discipline-hopping is a necessity when it comes to complicated socio-technical topics like protocol, he writes in the preface.

Also from

Galloway, Alexander R.

Also in

General Computers