After reading the two attached files, please answer the following questions. NO CITATION or OUTSIDE SOURCE. Part 1: Please reflect onthe piece by Tara McPherson, "US Operating Systems at Mid-Century:...

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After reading the two attached files, please answer the following questions. NO CITATION or OUTSIDE SOURCE.

Part 1: Please reflect onthe piece by Tara McPherson, "US Operating Systems at Mid-Century: The Intertwining of Race and UNIX," and consider the intersections between racial inequalities and the development of the UNIX operating system. What can we learn about the relationship between technology and the effects of racism by looking at this history?


Part 2: Please reflect the piece by Chun, "Race and/as Technology or How to Do Things with Race" and discuss some of the ways that technology itself has been a factor in the political history of colonialism and racism. Reflect also on how racism is a technique that is employed in a technological manner. What can we learn from this? Conclude with a question designed to open up further discussion.




Race after the Internet by Lisa Nakamura, Peter Chow-White (editors) (z-lib.org) 1 U.S. Operating Systems at Mid-Century The Intertwining of Race and UNIX TARA MCPHERSON University of Southern California I begin with two fragments cut from history, around about the 1960s. This essay will pursue the lines of connection between these two moments and argue that insisting on their entanglement is integral to any meaningful understanding of either of the terms this volume's title brings together: the internet and race. Additionally, I am interested in what we might learn from these historical examples about the very terrains of knowledge production in the post-World War II United States. The legacies of mid-century shifts in both our cultural understandings of race and in digital computation are still very much with us today, powerful operating systems that deeply influence how we know self, other and society. Fragment One In the early 1960s, computer scientists at MIT were working on Project MAC, an early set of experiments in Compatible Timesharing Systems for computing. In the summer of 1963, MIT hosted a group of leading computer scientists at the university to brainstorm about the future of computing. By 1965, MULTICS (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service), a mainframe timesharing operating system, was in use, with joint development by MIT, GE, and Bell Labs, a subsidiary of A TT. The project was funded by ARPA of the Defense Department for two million a year for eight years. MUL TICS introduced early ideas about modularity in hardware structure and software architecture. In 1969, Bell Labs stopped working on MUL TICS, and, that summer, one of their engineers, Ken Thompson, developed the beginning of UNIX. While there are clearly influences of MUL TICS on UNIX, the later system also moves away from the earlier one, pushing for increased modularity and for a simpler design able to run on cheaper computers. In simplest terms, UNIX is an early operating system for digital computers, one that has spawned many offshoots and clones. These include MAC OS X as well as LINUX, indicating the reach of UNIX over the past forty years. The 22 • Tara McPherson system also influenced non-UNIX operating systems like Windows NT and remains in use by many corporate IT divisions. UNIX was originally written in assembly language, but after Thompson's colleague, Dennis Ritchie, developed the C programming language in 1972, Thompson rewrote UNIX in that language. Basic text-formatting and editing features were added (i.e. early word processors). In 1974, Ritchie and Thompson published their work in the Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery, and UNIX began to pick up a good deal of steam. 1 UNIX can also be thought of as more than an operating system, as it also includes a number of utilities such as command line editors, APis (which, it is worth noting, existed long before our Google maps made them sexy), code libraries, etc. Furthermore, UNIX is widely understood to embody particular philosophies and cultures of computation, "operating systems" of a larger order that we will return to. Fragment Two Of course, for scholars of culture, of gender and of race, dates like 1965 and 1968 have other resonances. For many of us, 1965 might not recall MULTICS but instead the assassination of Malcolm X, the founding of the United Farm Workers, the burning of Watts, or the passage of the Voting Rights Act. The mid-1960s also saw the origins of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the launch of the National Organization for Women (NOW). The late 1960s mark the 1968 citywide walkouts of Latino youth in Los Angeles, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the Chicago Democratic convention with its police brutality, the Stonewall Riots, and the founding of the Black Panthers and the Young Lords. Beyond the geographies of the United States, we might also remember the Prague Spring of 1968, Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the Mexico Summer Olympics, the Tlatelolco Massacre, the execution of Che Guevara, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Six-Day War, or May '68 in Paris, itself a kind of origin story for some genealogies of film and media studies. On the African continent, thirty-two countries gained independence from colonial rulers. In the U.S., broad cultural shifts emerged across the decade, as identity politics took root and counter- cultural forces challenged traditional values. Resistance to the Vietnam War mounted as the decade wore on. Abroad, movements against colonialism and oppression were notably strong. The history just glossed as 'Fragment One' is well known to code junkies and computer geeks. Numerous websites archive oral histories, programming manuals, and technical specifications for MUL TICS, UNIX, and various mainframe and other hardware systems. Key players in the history, including Ken Thompson, Donald Ritchie and Doug Mcilroy, have a kind of geek-chic celebrity status, and differing versions of the histories of software and hardware development are hotly debated, including nitty-gritty details of what really ,. U.S. Operating Systems at Mid-Century • 23 counts as "a UNIX." In media studies, emerging work in "code studies" often resurrects and takes up these histories. Within American, cultural and ethnic studies, the temporal touchstones of over racial justice, anti-war activism, and legal history are also widely and analyzed. Not surprisingly, these two fragments typically stand m parallel tracks, attracting the interest and attention of very different audiences located in the deeply siloed departments that categorize our universities. But Why? In short, I suggest that these two moments cut from time are deeply inter- .In fact, they co-constitute one another, comprising not independent of but, instead, related and useful lenses into the shifting epistemological registers driving U.S. and global culture in the 1960s and after. Both exist as operating systems of a sort, and we might understand them to be mutually reinforcing. This history of intertwining and mutual dependence is hard to tell. As we delve into the intricacies of UNIX and the data structures it embraces, race in America recedes far from our line of vision and inquiry. Likewise, detailed examinations into the shifting registers of race and racial visibility post -1950 do. not easily lend themselves to observations about the emergence of object- one.nted programming, personal computing, and encapsulation. Very few audiences who care about one lens have much patience or tolerance for the other. Early forays in new media theory in the late 1990s did not much help this problem. Theorists of new media often retreated into forms of analysis that Kinder has critiqued as "cyberstructuralist," intent on parsing media specificity and on theorizing the forms of new media, while disavowing twenty- y.ears. of race theory, feminism and other modes of overtly politiCized mqmry. Many who had worked hard to instill race as a central mode of analysis in film, literary, and media studies throughout the late twentieth century were disheartened and outraged (if not that surprised) to find new media theory so easily retreating into a comfortable formalism familiar from the early days of film theory. Early analyses of race and the digital often took two forms, a critique of representations in new media, i.e. on the surface of our screens, or debates about access to media, i.e., the digital divide. Such work rarely pushed toward the of form, phenomenology or computation that were so compelling and lively m the work of Lev Manovich, Mark Hansen, or Jay Bolter and Richard ?rusin. Important works emerged from both "camps," but the camps rarely mtersected. A few conferences attempted to force a collision between these areas but the going was tough. For instance, at the two Race and Digital Space colleagues and I organized in 2000 and 2002, the vast majority of participants 24 • Tara McPherson and speakers were engaged in work in the two modes mentioned above. The cyberstructuralists were not in attendance. But what if this very incompatibility is itself part and parcel of the organization of knowledge production that operating systems like UNIX helped to disseminate around the world? Might we ask if there is not something particular to the very forms of electronic culture that seems to encourage just such a movement, a movement that partitions race off from the specificity of media forms? Put differently, might we argue that the very structures of digital computation develop at least in part to cordon off race and to contain it? Further, might we come to understand that our own critical methodologies are the heirs to this epistemological shift? From early writings by Sherry Turkle and George Landow to more recent work by Alex Galloway, new media scholars have noted the parallels between the ways of knowing modeled in computer culture and the greatest hits of structuralism and post-structuralism. Critical race theorists and postcolonial scholars like Chela Sandoval and Gayatri Spivak have illustrated the structuring (if unacknowledged) role that race plays in the work of poststructuralists like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. We might bring these two arguments together, triangulating race, electronic culture, and post-structuralism, and, further, argue that race, particularly in the United States, is central to this undertaking, fundamentally shaping how we see and know as well as the technologies that underwrite or cement both vision and knowledge. Certain modes of racial visibility and knowing coincide or dovetail with specific ways of organizing data: if digital computing underwrites today's information economy and is the central technology of post-World War II America, these technologized ways of seeing/knowing took shape in a world also struggling with shifting knowledges about and representations of race. If, as Michael Omi and Howard Winant argue, racial formations serve as fundamental organizing principles of social relations in the United States, on both the macro and micro levels (1986/1989: 55), how might we understand the infusion of racial organizing principles into the technological organization of knowledge after World War II? Omi and Winant and other scholars have tracked the emergence of a "race- blind" rhetoric at mid-century,
Answered Same DayOct 25, 2021

Answer To: After reading the two attached files, please answer the following questions. NO CITATION or OUTSIDE...

Bodapati Sai Sri answered on Oct 26 2021
110 Votes
1. This essay will link the connection between key fragments of history into our Meaningful Understanding of the terms of this volume “Internet and Race”. Since early 1960’s Computer Scientists at Various Leading Universities have started working on projects Compatible Time sharing Systems .By 1965 , a new software MULTICS( Multiplexed Information and Computer Service) a time sharing operating system(OS) developed jointly by MIT and Bell Labs. In 1960 Ken Thompson an engineer from Bell Labs developed Unix OS. Unix OS is simple multi user , multi tasking stable system for digital computers. Since 1960’s Racial discrimination movements have take a new turn, with chain of events like Assassination of martin Luther king junior , Robert F. Kennedy and formation of organizations like American Indian Movement and National Organization of Women. Development of operating systems like Unix made the world to adapt to Information sharing society. One of the main rule of Unix is “Rule of Diversity”. Unix embraces multiple...
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