news & publications

4.19-20.2018

Monitoring, Modeling, and Memory: Knowledge for the Anthropocene Epoch, Climate Changed symposium, MIT

3.15.2018

The Glass Laboratory: Climate Knowledge Infrastructures in the Age of Hyper-transparency, STS Program, Cal Poly

2.15.2018

Cultures of Energy podcast on my work, Center for Energy & Environmental Research in the Human Sciences, Rice University

2.1.2018

Re-integrating Scholarly Infrastructures: the ambiguous role of data sharing platforms, Plantin, Lagoze, and Edwards, Big Data & Society (2018)

9.11-13.2017

Keynote: "Knowledge Infrastructures under Siege," conference on Governing by Prediction? Models, Data, and Algorithms in and for Governance, Musée des Arts et Métiers, Paris

Links

 

The Closed World

Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996

 

Rachel Carson Prize (Honorable Mention), Society for Social Studies of Science (1998)

 

The Closed World explores three histories — the history of American global power, the history of computing machines, and the history of subjectivity in science and culture — through the lens of the American political imagination. In the process, it reveals intimate links between the military projects of the Cold War, the evolution of digital computers, and the origins of cybernetics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence.

 

Reviews

The Closed World has been reviewed in Technology Review, Nature, Isis, Business Week, The Nation, American Historical Review, Computer-Mediated Communication, First Monday, Choice, The New Scientist, the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies, and many other publications. Reviews have appeared in Norwegian, German, French, and Greek. It has been translated into French (excerpt), German (excerpt), and Japanese (full book).

 

View full text

The Closed World may be viewed online as an ACLS History Ebook (requires login through a subscribing library.)