What it means when media moves from the new to the habitual—when our bodies become archives of supposedly obsolescent media, streaming, updating, sharing, saving. New media—we are told—exist at the bleeding edge of obsolescence. We thus forever try to catch up, updating to remain the same. Meanwhile, analytic, creative, and commercial efforts focus exclusively on the next big thing: figuring out what will spread and who will spread it the fastest. But what do we miss in this constant push to the future? In Updating to Remain the Same, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun suggests another approach, arguing that our media matter most when they seem not to matter at all—when they have moved from “new” to habitual. Smart phones, for example, no longer amaze, but they increasingly structure and monitor our lives. Through habits, Chun says, new media become embedded in our lives—indeed, we become our machines: we stream, update, capture, upload, link, save, trash, and troll. Chun links habits to the rise of networks as the defining concept of our era. Networks have been central to the emergence of neoliberalism, replacing “society” with groupings of individuals and connectable “YOUS.” (For isn't “new media” actually “NYOU media”?) Habit is central to the inversion of privacy and publicity that drives neoliberalism and networks. Why do we view our networked devices as “personal” when they are so chatty and promiscuous? What would happen, Chun asks, if, rather than pushing for privacy that is no privacy, we demanded public rights—the right to be exposed, to take risks and to be in public and not be attacked?

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Jean Baudrillard in The Ecstasy of Communication argues "we no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication. And this ecstasy is obscene" because "in the raw and inexorable light of information" everything is "immediately transparent, visible, exposed." 2 Although extreme, Baudrillard's conflation of information (and thus computation) with transparency resonates widely in popular and scholarly circles, from fears over and propaganda behind national databases to examinations of "surveillance society." This conflation is remarkably at odds with the actual operations of computation: for computers to become transparency machines, the fact that they compute-that they generate text and images rather than merely represent or reproduce what exists elsewhere-must be forgotten. Even when attached to glass tubes, computers do not simply allow one to see what is on the other side but rather use glass to send and receive light pulses necessary to re-create the referent (if one exists). The current prominence of transparency in product design and political and scholarly discourse is a compensatory gesture. As our machines increasingly read and write without us, as our machines become more and more unreadable, so that seeing no longer guarantees knowing (if it ever did), we the so-called users are offered more to see, more to read. The computer-that most nonvisual and nontransparent device-has paradoxically fostered "visual culture" and "transparency."Software-or, to be precise, the curious separation of software from hardware-drives this compensatory gesture. Software perpetuates certain notions of seeing as knowing, of reading and readability that were supposed to have faded with the waning of indexicality. It does so by mimicking both ideology and ideology critique, by conflating executable with execution, program with process, order with action. 3

New media, like the computer technology on which it relies, races simultaneously towards the future and the past, towards what we might call the bleeding edge of obsolescence. Indeed, rather than asking, What is new media? we might want to ask what seem to be the more important questions: what was new media? and what will it be? To some extent the phenomenon stems from the modifier new: to call something new is to ensure that it will one day be old. The slipperiness of new media-the difficulty of engaging it in the present-is also linked to the speed of its dissemination. Neither the aging nor the speed of the digital, however, explains how or why it has become the new or why the yesterday and tomorrow of new media are often the same thing. Consider concepts such as social networking (MUDS to Second Life), or hot YouTube videos that are already old and old email messages forever circulated and rediscovered as new. This constant repetition, tied to an inhumanly precise and unrelenting clock, points to a factor more important than speed-a nonsimultaneousness of the new, which I argue sustains new media as such. Also key to the newness of the digital is a conflation of memory and storage that both underlies and undermines digital media's archival promise. Memory, with its constant degeneration, does not equal storage; although artificial memory has historically combined the transitory with the permanent, the passing with the stable, digital media complicates this relationship by making the permanent into an enduring ephemeral, creating unforeseen degenerative links between humans and machines. As I explain in more detail later, this conflation of memory with storage is not due to Final version published in Critical Inquiry 35 (Autumn 2008). 148-171. 1. After 9/11, the discourse of the internet as inherently good came under attack. Steven Levy, among other authors, who fought against the Communications Decency Act, suddenly "discovered" the dark side of the internet, writing, "modern technologies that add efficiency, power and wonder to our lives inevitably deliver the same benefits to evildoers. The Internet is no exception" (Steven Levy, "Tech's Double-Edged Sword," Newsweek [Nexis], 24 Sept. 2001). After the dotcom boom, criticality was also the buzz word in more academic circles. For instance, the Inter-Society for Electronic Arts 2004 symposium, one of the largest and longestrunning international digital art symposiums, emphasized themes such as critical interactivity and had a reflective focus. In contrast, the 2006 symposium emphasized themes such as "transvergence," arguing: "new ideas and possibilities never before considered become evident when diverse disciplines intersect" (Steve Dietz, "ZeroOne San Jose / ISEA2006 Themes," 01sj.org/content/view/188/30/). Hyperpolis 3.0, a small annual new-media conference, also emphasized "really useful media" for its 2006 conference, arguing that we already know too much about "media communications technologies as instruments of social control....about media discourses ...

This special issue poses the questions: to what degree are race and technology intertwined? Can race be considered a technology or a form of media-that is, not only a mechanism, but also a practical or industrial art? Could race be not simply an object of representation and portrayal, of knowledge or truth, but also a technique that one uses, even as one is used by it-a carefully crafted, historically inflected system of tools, mediation, or enframing that builds history and identity? "Race and/as technology" is a strange, and hopefully estranging, formulation, but its peculiarity does not stem from its conjoining of race and technology. There already exists an important body of scholarship that simply addresses race and technology in science and technology, media and visual culture, and African American and ethnic studies, ranging, just to give some examples, from analyses documenting the resurgence of race as a valid scientific category to those tracing the historically intersecting truth claims of phrenology and photography, from investigations uncovering the