Theorist Wendy Chun, whose work melds systems design engineering and English literature, will discuss her forthcoming book Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT Press). Chun argues that our technologies matter most not when they are new but when they have become obsolete—when they have moved from the bleeding edge to the realm of the everyday, when our use of them has become habitual. Habits are automatic—they “remain by disappearing from consciousness”—but also voluntary and even creative: we are constantly encouraged to seek better habits, better patterns. Habits make us like our peers, demarcating social class; they are also deeply personal. Chun explores how the slow, “creepy” accretion of habits—both conscious and unconscious—relate to distinctions between public and private, memory and storage, individual actions and social systems.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Professor and Chair of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media. She is author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006), and Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT 2011). She is co-editor (with Tara McPherson and Patrick Jagoda) of a special issue of American Literature entitled New Media and American Literature , co-editor (with Lynne Joyrich) of a special issue of Camera Obscura entitled Race and/as Technology and co-editor (with Anna Fisher and Thomas Keenan) of New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, 2nd edition (forthcoming Routledge, 2015). She is the Velux Visiting Professor of Management, Politics and Philosophy at the Copenhagen Business School; she has been the Wayne Morse Chair for Law and Politics at the University of Oregon, Visiting Professor at Leuphana University (Luneburg, Germany), Visiting Associate Professor in the History of Science Department at Harvard, of which she is currently an Associate. She has been a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and a Wriston Fellow at Brown. Her forthcoming monograph is entitled Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media ( forthcoming MIT 2016).

This keynote is part of the event: "What Is Digital Studies?" A conference about the new interdisciplinary Program in Digital Studies at the University of Michigan

April 15, 2016
11:30 AM- 7:00 PM
Gallery, Hatcher Library

http://lsa.umich.edu/digitalstudies/news-events/all-events.detail.html/28142-2666180.html