Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses

Description

Now in its second edition, Digital Contagions is the first book to offer a comprehensive and critical analysis of the culture and history of the computer virus. At a time when our networks arguably feel more insecure than ever, the book provides an overview of how our fears about networks are part of a more complex story of the development of digital culture. It writes a media archaeology of computer and network accidents that are endemic to the computational media ecology. Viruses, worms, and other software objects are not seen merely from the perspective of anti-virus research or practical security concerns, but as cultural and historical expressions that traverse a non-linear field from fiction to technical media, from net art to politics of software. Mapping the anomalies of network culture from the angles of security concerns, the biopolitics of computer systems, and the aspirations for artificial life in software, this second edition also pays attention to the emergence of recent issues of cybersecurity and new forms of digital insecurity. A new preface by Sean Cubitt is also provided. Cover Contents Acknowledgments Preface (Sean Cubitt) Introduction: The General Accident of Digital Network Culture Disease and Technology Media Theory Meets Computer Technology: Definitions, Concepts, and Sources Eventualization Section I: Fear Secured: From Bugs to Worms Prologue: On Order and Cleanliness Security in the Mainframe Era: From Creepers to Core Wars The Shift in Safety: The 1980s Fred Cohen and the Computer Virus Risk The Morris Worm: A Media Virus Viruses and the Antidotes: Coming to the 1990s Viral Capitalism and the Security Services Section II: Body: Biopolitics of Digital Systems Prologue: How Are Bodies Formed? Diagrams of Contagion The Order-Word of AIDS Excursus: Faciality Digital Immunology The Care of the Self: Responsible Computing The Psyche of the Virus Writer: Irresponsible Vandalism? Intermezzo: Viral Philosophy Section III: Life: Viral Ecologies Prologue: The Life of Information The Benevolent Viral Machine Cellular Automata and Simulated Ecologies Organisms of Distributed Networks Ecologies of Complexity and Networking Coupling and Media Ecology Afterword: An Accident Hard, Soft, Institutionalized Appendix: A Timeline of Computer Viruses and the Viral Assemblage Bibliography Index