Milburn, Colin (Advisor)
Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal (Author)
This dissertation offers a conceptual framework that thinks about the political and cultural logics of computational media technologies using the term ‘rendering.’ Incorporating the wide variety of ‘computings’ that we already live with today (human, analog, digital, quantum), it investigates the politico-economic, aesthetic, and sociotechnical entanglements in the discourses around computer architectures over the last 150 years or so. This project, thus, is a foray into the political world of computers: the inner world—the insides of the machine, its components, its circuits—and the outer world—the world in which computers are developed, manufactured, used, and worn out. Touching, borrowing from, and contributing to the multiple overlapping fields—media studies, science and technology studies, history (especially history of computing technologies), political economy, literary and cultural studies, computer science and engineering, and infrastructure, information, and communication studies, to name a few—this project seeks to outline the ways in which sociocultural systems get encoded into computational hardware and software. In a somewhat anatomical impulse, this project starts by breaking apart the computer and taking up some of its constituent units one by one to provide politico-cultural histories of the machinic. Together, at a scale, the stories here show how ideologies become hardware, how hardware in turn shapes ideological positions, and why computing should be redefined and contextualized within its politico-economic and sociocultural milieux.
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Book
Ryan, Johnny;
(2010)
A History of the Internet and the Digital Future
(/isis/citation/CBB001033356/)
Book
Lipsey, Richard G;
Carlaw, Kenneth;
Bekar, Clifford;
(2005)
Economic transformations: General purpose technologies and long-term economic growth
(/isis/citation/CBB001180076/)
Book
David Brandon;
Brooke, Alan;
(2019)
The railway haters: opposition to railways from the 19th to 21st centuries
(/isis/citation/CBB785677248/)
Chapter
Karin Zachmann;
(2012)
Past and Present Energy Societies: How Energy Connects Politics, Technologies and Cultures
(/isis/citation/CBB622750039/)
Book
Nina Möllers;
Karin Zachmann;
(2012)
Past and Present Energy Societies: How Energy Connects Politics, Technologies and Cultures
(/isis/citation/CBB304954810/)
Book
Thomas S. Mullaney;
Benjamin Peters;
Mar Hicks;
Kavita Philip;
(2021)
Your Computer Is on Fire
(/isis/citation/CBB159272535/)
Article
Hillman, Gracia;
(Summer 2007)
E-Voting and Democracy in America
(/isis/citation/CBB906903948/)
Book
Sarah Teasley;
(2022)
Designing Modern Japan
(/isis/citation/CBB783740883/)
Chapter
Marc Aidinoff;
(2022)
Centrists against the Center: The Jeffersonian Politics of a Decentralized Internet
(/isis/citation/CBB469789554/)
Book
Poster, Mark;
(2006)
Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines
(/isis/citation/CBB000950879/)
Book
Melosi, Martin V.;
(2013)
Atomic Age America
(/isis/citation/CBB001213741/)
Book
David J. Hess;
(2016)
Undone Science: Social Movements, Mobilized Publics, and Industrial Transitions
(/isis/citation/CBB272081586/)
Article
Buente, Wayne;
Robbin, Alice;
(2008)
Trends in Internet Information Behavior, 2000--2004
(/isis/citation/CBB001031228/)
Article
Wolpin, Stewart;
(Winter 2010)
Top Ten Trends in Consumer Electronics
(/isis/citation/CBB538671076/)
Book
Melosi, Martin V.;
(2011)
Precious Commodity: Providing Water for America's Cities
(/isis/citation/CBB001212518/)
Article
Warf, Barney;
(2007)
Oligopolization of Global Media and Telecommunications and Its Implications for Democracy
(/isis/citation/CBB001031206/)
Article
Robbin, Alice;
Buente, Wayne;
(2008)
Internet Information and Communication Behavior during a Political Moment: The Iraq War, March 2003
(/isis/citation/CBB001031222/)
Book
Brunton, Finn;
(2013)
Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet
(/isis/citation/CBB001211855/)
Book
Kane, Carolyn L.;
(2014)
Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code
(/isis/citation/CBB001422036/)
Article
Söderberg, Johan;
(2010)
Misuser Inventions and the Invention of the Misuser: Hackers, Crackers and Filesharers
(/isis/citation/CBB001034652/)
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