Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. “Crisis, crisis, crisis; or, the temporality of networks.” The nonhuman turn (2015): 139-166.

Wendy argues that crises are new media’s critical difference: its exception and its norm. Crises are central to making information valuable and to constructions of new media as empowering. This logic of crisis also links computers–understood as software and hardware machines. Software codes have not only reduced crises, they have also proliferated them. From Financial crises linked to complex software programs to supercomputer-dependent diagnoses and predictions of global climate change, from undetected computer viruses to bombings at securitized airports, we are increasingly called on both to trust coded systems and to be weary of them.

Crises and codes are complementary because they are both central to the emergence of what appears to be the antithesis of both automation and codes: user agency. (Notions that the internet places our freedom and security at risk are at the side of people saying it spawned new found democracy’s in that equals the political weight of people having their voices heard.)

“In new media, crisis has found its medium, and in crisis, new media has found its value”

Crises have been central to making the Internet a mass medium to end mass media: a mass personalized device. It does excel at the spreading of the good and the bad, its changed habits of enquiry and discussion to be online. It has both the good, the bad and the ugly all present with it. It offers participation, immediacy, sometimes the disgusting, uncensorship, bullying, humanitarian relief. It contains both the merits and demerits of us.