.
Jussi Parikka: Digital Contagions. A Media Archaeology of Computer
Viruses. (New York: Peter Lang, 2007).
Digital Contagions is the first book to offer a comprehensive and
critical analysis of the culture and history of the computer virus
phenomenon. The book maps the anomalies of network culture from the
angles of security concerns, the biopolitics of digital systems, and
the aspirations for artificial life in software. The genealogy of
network culture is approached from the standpoint of accidents that are
endemic to the digital media ecology. Viruses, worms, and other
software objects are not, then, seen merely from the perspective of
anti-virus research or practical security concerns, but as cultural and
historical expressions that traverse a non-linear field from fiction to
technical media, from net art to politics of software. Jussi Parikka
mobilizes an extensive array of source materials and intertwines them
with an inventive new materialist cultural analysis. Digital Contagions
draws from the cultural theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,
Friedrich Kittler, and Paul Virilio, among others, and offers novel
insights into historical media analysis.