Wirelessness: Radical Empiricism in Network Cultures

An account of the sensations associated with being entangled with wireless technologies that draws on the philosophical techniques of William James's radical empiricism.How has wirelessness―being connected to objects and infrastructures without knowing exactly how or where―become a key form of contemporary experience? Stretching across routers, smart phones, netbooks, cities, towers, Guangzhou workshops, service agreements, toys, and states, wireless technologies have brought with them sensations of change, proximity, movement, and divergence. In Wirelessness, Adrian Mackenzie draws on philosophical techniques from a century ago to make sense of this most contemporary postnetwork condition. The radical empiricism associated with the pragmatist philosopher William James, Mackenzie argues, offers fresh ways for matching the disordered flow of wireless networks, meshes, patches, and connections with felt sensations. For Mackenzie, entanglements with things, gadgets, infrastructures, and services―tendencies, fleeting nuances, and peripheral shades of often barely registered feeling that cannot be easily codified, symbolized, or quantified―mark the experience of wirelessness, and this links directly to James's expanded conception of experience. “Wirelessness” designates a tendency to make network connections in different times and places using these devices and services. Equally, it embodies a sensibility attuned to the proliferation of devices and services that carry information through radio signals. Above all, it means heightened awareness of ongoing change and movement associated with networks, infrastructures, location, and information. The experience of wirelessness spans several strands of media-technological change, and Mackenzie moves from wireless cities through signals, devices, networks, maps, and products, to the global belief in the expansion of wireless worlds.

Computers & Technology

MacKenzie, Adrian

Computer Science

Mit Pr

If machine learning transforms the nature of knowledge, does it also transform the practice of critical thought?
Machine learning―programming computers to learn from data―has spread across scientific disciplines, media, entertainment, and government. Medical research, autonomous vehicles, credit transaction processing, computer gaming, recommendation systems, finance, surveillance, and robotics use machine learning. Machine learning devices (sometimes understood as scientific models, sometimes as operational algorithms) anchor the field of data science. They have also become mundane mechanisms deeply embedded in a variety of systems and gadgets. In contexts from the everyday to the esoteric, machine learning is said to transform the nature of knowledge. In this book, Adrian Mackenzie investigates whether machine learning also transforms the practice of critical thinking.
Mackenzie focuses on machine learners―either humans and machines or human-machine relations―situated among settings, data, and devices. The settings range from fMRI to Facebook; the data anything from cat images to DNA sequences; the devices include neural networks, support vector machines, and decision trees. He examines specific learning algorithms―writing code and writing about code―and develops an archaeology of operations that, following Foucault, views machine learning as a form of knowledge production and a strategy of power. Exploring layers of abstraction, data infrastructures, coding practices, diagrams, mathematical formalisms, and the social organization of machine learning, Mackenzie traces the mostly invisible architecture of one of the central zones of contemporary technological cultures.
Mackenzie's account of machine learning locates places in which a sense of agency can take root. His archaeology of the operational formation of machine learning does not unearth the footprint of a strategic monolith but reveals the local tributaries of force that feed into the generalization and plurality of the field.

Machine Learners: Archaeology of a Data Practice

The MIT Press

How has wirelessness--being connected to objects and infrastructures without knowing exactly how or where-- become a key form of contemporary experience? Stretching across routers, smart phones, netbooks, cities, towers, Guangzhou workshops, service agreements, toys, and states, wireless technologies have brought with them sensations of change, proximity, movement, and divergence. In Wirelessness, Adrian Mackenzie draws on philosophical techniques from a century ago to make sense of this most contemporary postnetwork condition. The radical empiricism associated with the pragmatist philosopher William James, Mackenzie argues, offers fresh ways for matching the disordered flow of wireless networks, meshes, patches, and connections with felt sensations. For Mackenzie, entanglements with things, gadgets, infrastructures, and services--tendencies, fleeting nuances, and peripheral shades of often barely registered feeling that cannot be easily codified, symbolized, or quantified--mark the experience of wirelessness, and this links directly to James's expanded conception of experience. "Wirelessness" designates a tendency to make network connections in different times and places using these devices and services. Equally, it embodies a sensibility attuned to the proliferation of devices and services that carry information through radio signals. Above all, it means heightened awareness of ongoing change and movement associated with networks, infrastructures, location, and information.The experience of wirelessness spans several strands of media-technological change, and Mackenzie moves from wireless cities through signals, devices, networks, maps, and products, to the global belief in the expansion of wireless worlds.

If machine learning transforms the nature of knowledge, does it also transform the practice of critical thought? Machine learning--programming computers to learn from data--has spread across scientific disciplines, media, entertainment, and government. Medical research, autonomous vehicles, credit transaction processing, computer gaming, recommendation systems, finance, surveillance, and robotics use machine learning. Machine learning devices (sometimes understood as scientific models, sometimes as operational algorithms) anchor the field of data science. They have also become mundane mechanisms deeply embedded in a variety of systems and gadgets. In contexts from the everyday to the esoteric, machine learning is said to transform the nature of knowledge. In this book, Adrian Mackenzie investigates whether machine learning also transforms the practice of critical thinking. Mackenzie focuses on machine learners--either humans and machines or human-machine relations--situated among settings, data, and devices. The settings range from fMRI to Facebook; the data anything from cat images to DNA sequences; the devices include neural networks, support vector machines, and decision trees. He examines specific learning algorithms--writing code and writing about code--and develops an archaeology of operations that, following Foucault, views machine learning as a form of knowledge production and a strategy of power. Exploring layers of abstraction, data infrastructures, coding practices, diagrams, mathematical formalisms, and the social organization of machine learning, Mackenzie traces the mostly invisible architecture of one of the central zones of contemporary technological cultures. Mackenzie's account of machine learning locates places in which a sense of agency can take root. His archaeology of the operational formation of machine learning does not unearth the footprint of a strategic monolith but reveals the local tributaries of force that feed into the generalization and plurality of the field.

Software has often been marginalized in accounts of digital cultures and network societies. Although software is everywhere, it is hard to say what it actually is. Cutting Code: Software and Sociality is one of the first books to treat software seriously as a full-blown cultural process and as a subtly powerful material in contemporary communication. From deCSS to Java, from Linux to Extreme Programming, this book analyses software artworks, operating systems, commercial products, infrastructures, and programming practices. It explores social forms, identities, materialities, and power relations associated with software, and it asks how software provokes the re-thinking of production, consumption and distribution as entwined cultural processes. Cutting Code argues that analysis of code as a mosaic of algorithms, protocols, infrastructures, and programming conventions offers valuable insights into how contemporary social formations invent new kinds of personhood and new ways of acting.

Cutting Code: Software and Sociality (Digital Formations)

Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers

Transductions explores the nature of technological speed and how technology becomes part of living bodies.Drawing on deconstruction and corporeal theory, Transductions re-examines the borders between bodies and machines, between what counts as social and what counts as technological. Using examples which include online computer games, military supercomputers, genomic databases, performance art and the global positioning system, Mackenzie critiques the widely accepted notion that technology speeds everything up, arguing instead that there are only ever differences in speed.>

Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed (Technologies: Studies in Culture & Theory)

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Bloomsbury Academic

Transductions explores the nature of technological speed and how technology becomes part of living bodies.Drawing on deconstruction and corporeal theory, Transductions re-examines the borders between bodies and machines, between what counts as social and what counts as technological. Using examples which include online computer games, military supercomputers, genomic databases, performance art and the global positioning system, Mackenzie critiques the widely accepted notion that technology speeds everything up, arguing instead that there are only ever differences in speed.&gt;

Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed (Technologies: Studies in Culture & Theory Series)

What do the patented data structures embedded deep in the code of an online computer game or the massively complicated architecture of the latest supercomputer used to simulate nuclear explosions have to do with culture, life or meaning? Why does technology attract such wildly differing responses - from fervour to boredom to distrust?
 Transductions explores these questions by drawing on science and technology studies, contemporary critical theory and corporeal theory. An exploration of complex technologies such as online computer games, genomic databases and the global positioning system reveals how the borders between bodies and machines, between what counts as social and what counts as technical, are no less diverse and complicated than culture itself. Indeed, they constitute a crucial dimension of contemporary culture. Through a critical analysis of the widely accepted notion that technology speeds everything up, Transductions argues that there are only ever differences in speed. The question for us now is how can such differences be represented?
 Transductions was originally part of the Technologies: Studies in Culture and Theory series.

Social Sciences

Continuum

As individuals increasingly seek ways of accessing, understanding and sharing data about their own bodies, this book offers a critique of the popular claim that 'more information' equates to 'better health'. In a study that redefines the public, academic and policy related debates around health, bodies, information and data, the authors consider the ways in which the phenomenon of self-diagnosis has created alternative worlds of knowledge and practises which are often at odds with professional medical advice. With a focus on data that concerns significant life changes, this book explores the potential challenges related to people's changing relationships with traditional health systems as access to, and control over, data shifts.

Living Data: Making Sense of Health Biosensing

Roberts, Celia

Mort, Maggie

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Policy Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by MacKenzie, Adrian. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by MacKenzie, Adrian

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by MacKenzie, Adrian. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Wirelessness: Radical Empiricism in Network Cultures

Machine Learners: Archaeology of a Data Practice

Wirelessness: Radical Empiricism in Network Cultures

Machine Learners: Archaeology of a Data Practice

Cutting Code: Software and Sociality (Digital Formations)

Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed (Technologies: Studies in Culture & Theory)

Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed (Technologies: Studies in Culture & Theory Series)

Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed (Technologies: Studies in Culture & Theory)

Living Data: Making Sense of Health Biosensing