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December 2016 Vol. 54 No. 4


MIT Press


The following review appeared in the December 2016 issue of CHOICE. The review is for your internal use only. Please review our Permission and Reprints Guidelines or email permissions@ala-choice.org.

Humanities
Communication

54-1566
HM851
2015-39932 MARC
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Updating to remain the same: habitual new media. MIT, 2016. 246p bibl index ISBN 9780262034494, $32.00; ISBN 9780262333771 ebook, contact publisher for price.

Chun offers a thoughtful volume that reflects the author’s background in systems design and English literature. Her analysis is comprehensive and eloquent. The book is divided into two parts: “Imagined Networks, Global Connections” and “Privately Public: The Internet’s Perverse Subjects.” What this reader found most compelling were the interludes between chapters on subjects that ranged from KONY 2012, online protest organizing at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, young undocumented immigrants outing themselves online, and the posting of footage of a gang rape of a teenage girl in Ohio to the response to “phantom vibrations” experienced by cell phone users and cyberbullying. The author explains in the conclusion to her book, “What matters most is what and how things linger. Rather than focus on the new and the fading—the bleeding edge of obsolescence—[this book] has examined what remains, and how … in imagined networks, connections are habits.” Recommended for students, scholars, and anyone interested in “N(YOU) media.”

--K. Sorensen, Bentley University

Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.