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Control and Freedom
Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
 Table of Contents and Sample Chapters
How has the Internet, a medium that thrives on control, been accepted as a medium of freedom? Why is freedom increasingly indistinguishable from paranoid control? In Control and Freedom, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun explores the current political and technological coupling of freedom with control by tracing the emergence of the Internet as a mass medium. The parallel (and paranoid) myths of the Internet as total freedom/total control, she says, stem from our reduction of political problems into technological ones.
Drawing on the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault and analyzing such phenomena as Webcams and face-recognition technology, Chun argues that the relationship between control and freedom in networked contact is experienced and negotiated through sexuality and race. She traces the desire for cyberspace to cyberpunk fiction and maps the transformation of public/private into open/closed. Analyzing "pornocracy," she contends that it was through cyberporn and the government's attempts to regulate it that the Internet became a marketplace of ideas and commodities. Chun describes the way Internet promoters conflated technological empowerment with racial empowerment and, through close examinations of William Gibson's Neuromancer and Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell, she analyzes the management of interactivity in narratives of cyberspace.
The Internet's potential for democracy stems not from illusory promises of individual empowerment, Chun argues, but rather from the ways in which it exposes us to others (and to other machines) in ways we cannot control. Using fiber optic networks—light coursing through glass tubes—as metaphor and reality, Control and Freedom engages the rich philosophical tradition of light as a figure for knowledge, clarification, surveillance, and discipline, in order to argue that fiber-optic networks physically instantiate, and thus shatter, enlightenment.
About the Author
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Associate Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature.
| "Wendy Chun's important new book explores one of the salient questions raised by networked computing: the paradox of furthering the directly opposed aims of surveillance and democracy, or, as her title puts it, control and freedom. Chun's interrogation of this paradox proceeds through the realms of erotica and race, themselves vexed issues. Anyone interested in new media would do well to read this book."
—Mark Poster, University of California, Irvine
"Control and Freedom is the most theoretically rich, deftly written, and historically grounded treatment of race in cyberspace to date. In this fine and enjoyable book, Chun traces the intermedial connections between online and offline representations of race and gender. This is a lucid, rigorous, and fascinating critical analysis of new media."
—Lisa Nakamura, Assistant Professor of Communication Arts and Visual Culture Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Control and Freedom makes a major contribution to our understanding of digital media and networked society. Chun offers up a refreshing and much-needed challenge to the core assumptions of Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media, moving beyond that book's insistent formalism toward a more contextualized understanding of the difference that a medium makes. Her book also breaks free of the tired old binary of techno-euphoria versus techno-phobia, challenging popular assumptions that the computer is either empowering and transparent or a relentless surveillance machine."
—Tara McPherson, University of Southern California
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