Review of Code/Space (2011)

My review of Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life, by Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge (2011, MIT Press), was published at Cultural Geographies.

Code is both a product and a process, both an expression for a system of capturing the world and a set of instructions for how to act. The authors of Code/Space argue to rethink dependency on code, beyond technological determinisms, to examine the effectiveness of everyday functions in absence of code. In this sense, failed code nonetheless produces a code/space: consider the space-times of waiting when digital systems fail at airport terminal check-in areas. Code/Space makes a distinction between the effects of technologies and the causes of technologies: the code that gives technologies their technicity or the ability to ‘make things happen’. This is not to say that the former is not (or cannot) be critical, but that an attention to software (code) reveals the heart of the issue: how code transduces space, in a process of resolving relational problems. [ . . . ]

Wilson, Matthew W. 2012. Review of Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life, by Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge. Cultural Geographies no. 19 (3):418-419. Available at: http://cgj.sagepub.com/content/19/3/418.full.pdf+html.