Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Simon Fraser University'sCanada 150 Research Chair in New Media in SFU School of Communication. Previously, she was Professor and Chair of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Her theoretical and critical approach to digital media draws from her training in both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature. She is the author of a trilogy that includes Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, and Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics. Her research spans the fields of digital media, new media, software studies, comparative media studies, critical race studies, and critical theory.
Chun's work has both set and questioned the terms of theory and criticism in new and digital media studies. In 2004, she co-edited Old Media, New Media: A History and Theory Reader with Thomas Keenan. Chun's introduction to the book is skeptical of the phrase "new media" and the emerging area of study it named, starting in the early 1990s. In "On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge", Chun links the emergence of software to shifts in labor that replaced the feminized function of the "computer" in science labs with the electronic computer. In the 1940s, early computers such as the ENIAC were largely programmed by women, under the direction of primarily male managers. As programming was professionalized, this work, that had been viewed as clerical, "sought to become an engineering and academic field in its own right”. The professionalization of programming grew as successive layers of code distanced programmers from machine language, eventually allowing for software to exist separate from the programmer as a commodity that could travel between machines. Women's work as the first computer programmers was, by contrast, closer to the physical machine, and potentially more difficult. Chun's first book, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics deconstructs the promises by which the early Internet, "one of the most compromising media to date", was sold as an empowering technology of freedom. It explores how freedom has become inextricable from control and how this conflation undermines the democratic potential of the Internet. The book draws on a wide variety of texts—U.S. Court decisions on cyberporn, hardware specifications, software interfaces, cyberpunk novels—to examine how digital technologies remap forms of social control and produce new experiences of race and sexuality. Her second book, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, Chun argues that cycles of obsolescence and renewal are byproducts of new media's logic of "programmability." It asks how computers have become organizing metaphors for understanding our neoliberal, networked moment. "The methodology developed in Control and Freedom," writes Seb Franklin for The English Association's The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, "in which archives of critical theory and the history of technology meet close analyses of software and hardware rooted in Chun's training as a systems design engineer, is refined and extended in Programmed Visions, providing a basis for detailed inquiry into the ways in which software and governmentality are historically and logically intertwined." Writes Casey Collan in her review of Programmed Visions for Rhizome, "'programmability,' the logic of computers, has come to reach beyond screens into both the systems of government and economics and the metaphors we use to make sense of the world. 'Without ,' writes Chun, 'there would be no government, no corporations, no schools, no global marketplace, or, at the very least, they would be difficult to operate...Computers, understood as networked software and hardware machines, are—or perhaps more precisely set the grounds for—neoliberal governmental technologies...not simply through the problems they make it possible to both pose and solve, but also through their very logos, their embodiment of logic.'" In Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media, Chun argues that "our media matter most when they seem not to matter at all". When they are no longer new but habitual, they become automatic and unconscious. "Creepy" instruments of social habituation they are nonetheless also sold as deeply personal, marking the distinction between public and private, memory and storage, individual action and social control.
