Chun, W.H.K. (2016) Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s Updating to Remain the Same offers a subtle theory of habitual new media, arguing that digital technologies become most powerful not when they appear radically new, but when their operations disappear into routine. Against narratives of disruption, virality and innovation, Chun shows that networked media organise users through repetition: searching, updating, sharing, friending, mapping, saving and deleting. The book’s core formula, Habit + Crisis = Update, captures how digital systems manufacture dependency by repeatedly presenting ordinary maintenance as urgent transformation. The case synthesis emerges in the preview’s opening materials: the preface describes new media as “wonderfully creepy” because they unsettle boundaries between publicity and privacy, surveillance and entertainment, intimacy and work, while the introduction shows how smartphones, search engines and social platforms structure everyday knowledge, memory and sociality precisely because they have become banal. The visual contrast on page 12, reworking the old internet dog cartoon into a metadata-surveillance scenario, condenses Chun’s historical argument: the internet has shifted from an imagined anonymous cyberspace to a regime of identification, prediction and exposure. Yet Chun resists simple technological determinism. Her concern is not merely surveillance, but the neoliberal production of the endlessly addressed YOU, a user made responsible for adaptation while institutions remain unchallenged. The conclusion is therefore critical and political: to inhabit networks differently, we must move beyond false promises of privacy-as-security and demand public rights to vulnerability, exposure and collective protection.