Abstract
This short book is part of a series called In Search of Media exploring the relationship between the limits, the conditions, the periods, the relations and the phrases of media. The aim of the series is ‘to understand the conditions (the “terms”) under which media is produced, as well as the ways in which media impacts and changes these terms’ (p. vii). The first five books in the series focus on the following keywords – communication, pattern discrimination, markets, remain and machine. The book by Finn Brunton, Mercedes Bunz and Paula Bialski focuses on machine communication – communication mediated digitally by machines. The authors argue that ‘looking not just at how we communicate with digital media but also at how digital devices and software communicate with us, to us, and to each other can more precisely outline the power (imagined or not) that computers and the people who take part in building our computers hold’ (p. ix). The book is split into an Introduction and three substantive chapters. Chapter 1, ‘Hello from Earth’, focuses on nonhuman communication by ‘showing the alienlike dialogue between technical entities’ (p. x). Brunton discusses a range of developments in this chapter – from early interaction design, tape recorders and timekeeping systems to automated trolling and projects of extraterrestrial communication. Chapter 2, ‘The Force of Communication’, poses the question: ‘How is digital technology addressing us’ (p. xii). Bunz draws upon Althusser’s theory of interpellation and similarly to Brunton’s approach in Chapter 1, she explores a range of case studies – from Apple’s iPad to Google’s Doodles. The final chapter, ‘Code Review as Communication: The Case of Corporate Software Developers’, ‘looks at the actual creation of digital infrastructure and machine communication through a code review system’ (p. x). This chapter is based on Bialski’s ethnographic work at a large corporate software company in Berlin. The volume poses a lot of food for thought and would definitely be of interest to both students and scholars of communication in the digital age.