SM5325 Chap.7 From Freedom to Control: New Media and Networks
From Freedom to Control: New Media and Networks
Where the week sits
Week 8 opens the course's third section, on analogue and digital, old and new, and postdigital media. The lecture introduces Wendy Hui Kyong Chun as Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University, and her two readings anchor the week, with Alexander Galloway's retrospective on Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media as additional reading.
The guiding questions ask how the illusion of freedom in networks masks structures of algorithmic control, and how code comes to be treated as a fetish, even a kind of modern sorcery.
Control-freedom
Chun starts from how networks actually work.
Fibre-optic systems do not allow us to see; the image on a screen is generated, and every interaction constantly sends packets that are opened, broadcast and redirected beyond the user's knowledge. Networks are therefore public by design, and users are produced by using them. Popular accounts of the internet cover this exposure with stories in which the net could be made safe if bad people or content were removed.
Chun names the resulting structure control-freedom: using while being used, with freedom delivered as and through control.
Paranoia, recognition and an alternative idea of freedom
Chun connects control-freedom to a generalised paranoia in which stored data can be searched after any event for warning signs, and to technologies such as face recognition that were marketed as neutral while matching faces against existing archives.
She also studies early webcam sites, where being watched was sought as a form of recognition.
Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy, she argues that freedom exceeds control rather than complementing it, that it comes with no guarantees, and that democracy should be built on shared vulnerability rather than on the promise of safety.
Sourcery and the new media principles
In her second reading Chun questions the tendency to treat software, and source code in particular, as the essence of new media.
Code must be compiled and executed in specific conditions before it does anything, so it is only a source after the fact; she calls it a re-source. Treating code as a transparent cause is a kind of fetishism, and the all-powerful user is its other face.
Galloway's essay revisits Manovich's five principles, numeric representation, modularity, automation, variability and transcoding, reads them as aesthetic descriptions rather than laws, and highlights the claim that cinema was the first new media.
How the chapter is built
The chapter is organised around four comfortable beliefs about networks and code, each set against what the readings argue, and ends by rewriting a privacy claim as control-freedom.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Networks as public by design
- 02
Agoraphobic stories about the internet
- 03
Control-freedom: using while being used
- 04
Paranoia, profiling and recognition
- 05
Freedom as exceeding control
- 06
Sourcery and code as fetish
- 07
Code as re-source
- 08
Manovich's principles revisited by Galloway
Worked example · free
Test a platform promise against control-freedom
- 3Identify how the advertisement equates freedom with control and safety.
- 2Explain what remains exposed beneath the safety tools.
- 3State Chun's alternative idea of freedom and what it would ask.
Key terms
- Control-freedom
- Chun's term for freedom delivered as and through control, a structure of using while being used.
- Agoraphobic Stories
- Accounts that imagine the internet could be made safe by removing bad content or people, hiding fear of an open public.
- Sourcery
- Chun's name for treating source code as the essence and cause of what software does.
- Re-source
- Code understood as becoming a source only after compilation and execution have made it effective.
- Transcoding
- One of Manovich's five principles: the exchange between computational logic and cultural forms.
- Fetish
- An object treated as the cause of effects it does not produce alone, which knowing better does not dispel.
From Freedom to Control: New Media and Networks FAQ
What does Chun mean by control-freedom?
A structure in which freedom is offered as and through control, so that users are free to the extent that they can manage their exposure. Because networks constantly transmit data beyond users' knowledge, this freedom is always partial, and it is sold through fear of an open public. Chun names it to show how promises of freedom and technologies of control arrive together rather than as opposites.
Why is code called a fetish?
Because it is treated as the sole cause of what software does, when in fact code has to be compiled and executed through hardware, timing and human use before it has any effect. Chun calls this sourcery and argues that code is better understood as a re-source, whose authority is read back into it from what the running system does. Knowing how code works does not dispel the fetish.
How does Galloway's essay fit this week?
It revisits Manovich's influential account of new media, including the five principles of numeric representation, modularity, automation, variability and transcoding, and argues that they describe aesthetic properties rather than universal laws. Galloway also highlights Manovich's claim that cinema was the first new media, which links this week back to remediation in Chapter 1.
Assessment move
Open the privacy or safety settings of an app you use and list what each option controls and what it leaves untouched. Then write two sentences: one describing the freedom the settings promise and one describing the exposure that remains. That pair of sentences is the clearest way to show you understand control-freedom.
