How do “human” prejudices reemerge in algorithmic cultures allegedly devised to be blind to them?
How do “human” prejudices reemerge in algorithmic cultures allegedly devised to be blind to them? To answer this question, this book investigates a fundamental axiom in computer science: pattern discrimination. By imposing identity on input data, in order to filter—that is, to discriminate—signals from noise, patterns become a highly political issue. Algorithmic identity politics reinstate old forms of social segregation, such as class, race, and gender, through defaults and paradigmatic assumptions about the homophilic nature of connection.
Instead of providing a more “objective” basis of decision making, machine-learning algorithms deepen bias and further inscribe inequality into media. Yet pattern discrimination is an essential part of human—and nonhuman—cognition. Bringing together media thinkers and artists from the United States and Germany, this volume asks the urgent questions: How can we discriminate without being discriminatory? How can we filter information out of data without reinserting racist, sexist, and classist beliefs? How can we queer homophilic tendencies within digital cultures?

Pattern Discrimination (In Search of Media)

Computers & Technology

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong

Apprich, Clemens

Cramer, Florian

STEYERL, HITO

Computer Science

Meson Press

A media theory of markets Markets abound in media--but a media theory of markets is still emerging. Anthropology offers media archaeologies of markets, and the sociology of markets and finance unravels how contemporary financial markets have witnessed a media technological arms race. Building on such work, this volume brings together key thinkers of economic studies with German media theory, describes the central role of the media specificity of markets in new detail and inflects them in three distinct ways. Nik-Khah and Mirowski show how the denigration of human cognition and the concomitant faith in computation prevalent in contemporary market-design practices rely on neoliberal conceptions of information in markets. Schrú6ter confronts the asymmetries and abstractions that characterize money as a medium and explores the absence of money in media.&nbsp;Beverungen&nbsp;situates these inflections and gathers further elements for a politically and historically attuned media theory of markets concerned with contemporary phenomena such as high-frequency trading and cryptocurrencies.

Markets (In Search of Media)

Business & Money

Schröter, Jens

Mirowski, Philip

Nik-Khah, Edward

Beverungen, Armin

Economics

<div> Engaging with remains and remainders of media cultures As new, as current, as now--this is primarily our understanding of technologies and their mediating of our social constructions. But past media and past practices continue to haunt and inflect our present social and technical arrangements. To trace this haunting, two performance theorists and a media theorist engage in this volume with remains and remainders of media cultures through the lenses of theatre and performance studies and of media archaeology. They address the temporalities and materialities of remain(s), the production of obsolescence in relation to the live body, and considerations of cultural memory as well as of infrastructure and the natural history of media culture. </div>

Remain (In Search of Media)

Politics & Social Sciences

Schneider, Rebecca

Parikka, Jussi

Jucan, Ioana B.

Social Sciences

<div> On the social consequences of machines Automation, animation, and ecosystems are terms of central media-philosophical concern in today's society of humans and machines. This volume describes the social consequences of machines as a mediating concept for the animation of life and automation of technology. Bernard Stiegler's automatic society illustrates how digital media networks establish a new proletariat of knowledge workers. Gertrud Koch offers the animation of the technical to account for the pathological relations that arise between people and their devices. And Thomas Pringle synthesizes how automation and animation explain the history of intellectual exchanges that led to the hybrid concept of the ecosystem, a term that blends computer and natural science. All three contributions analyse how categories of life and technology become mixed in governmental policies, economic exploitation and pathologies of everyday life thereby both curiously and critically advancing the term that underlies those new developments: 'machine.'&nbsp; </div>

Machine (In Search of Media)

Stiegler, Bernard

Koch, Gertrud

Pringle, Thomas

How digital networks and services bring the issues of archives out of the realm of institutions and into the lives of everyday users
 Archives have become a nexus in the wake of the digital turn. Electronic files, search engines, video sites, and media player libraries make the concepts of “archival” and “retrieval” practically synonymous with the experience of interconnected computing. Archives today are the center of much attention but few agendas. Can archives inform the redistribution of power and resources when the concept of the public library as an institution makes knowledge and culture accessible to all members of society regardless of social or economic status? This book sets out to show that archives need our active support and continuing engagement. 
This volume offers three distinct perspectives on the present status of archives that are at once in disagreement and solidarity with each other, from contributors whose backgrounds cut across the theory–practice divide. Is the increasing digital storage of knowledge pushing us toward a turning point in its democratization? Can archives fulfill their paradoxical potential as utopian sites in which the analog and the digital, the past and future, and remembrance and forgetting commingle? Is there a downside to the present-day impulse toward total preservation?

Archives (In Search of Media)

Lison, Andrew

How are human actions shaped by the materiality of media?&nbsp; Contemporary media leads us more than ever to an 'acting at a distance,' an acting entangled with the materiality of communication and the mediality of transmission. This book explores this crucial phenomenon thereby introducing urgent questions of human interaction, the binding and breaking of time and space, and the entanglement of the material and the immaterial.&nbsp; Three vivid inquiries deal with histories and theories of mediality and materiality: John Durham Peters looks at episodes of simultaneity and synchronization. Christina Vagt discusses the agency of computer models against the backdrop of aesthetic theories by Henri Bergson and Hans Blumenberg, and Florian Sprenger discusses early electrical transmissions through copper wire and the temporality of instantaneity.&nbsp;

Action at a Distance (In Search of Media)

Peters, John Durham

Sprenger, Florian

Vagt, Christina

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