Transcoding the Digital: How Metaphors Matter in New Media - Softcover

Boomen, Marianne Van Den

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9081857576 ISBN 13: 9789081857574

Publisher: Instituut voor Netwerkcultuur, 2014

Synopsis

Transcoding the Digital: How Metaphors Matter in New Media by Marianne van den Boomen is a material-semiotic inquiry into the constitutive role of metaphors in our daily encounters with computers and networks. While interface concepts such as desktop and windows are easily recognized as metaphors, this research shows how in fact all digital sign-tool-objects – ranging from icons and email to Facebook friends, from hyperlink and tweet to Pirate Bay – are digital-material metaphors. They frame and organize how we access the black boxes of software and machinery, which in turn organize and reconfigure society. The same holds for discourse metaphors such as virtual community, cyberspace, Web 2.0, and social network. Metaphors matter in digital praxis, literally. This study makes an intervention into the contemporary theory of metaphor by extending it with the notion of material metaphor, including a manifest for hacking digital-material metaphors.

Edition details

• Publisher: Instituut voor Netwerkcultuur
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9081857576
• ISBN 13: 9789081857574
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 220