ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book demonstrates how digital affordances enable new collaborations between the public and the experts and argues that algorithmic power now organizes, i.e., mediates, all human action and argues that algorithmic power now organizes, i.e., mediates, all human action. It discusses the techniques and apparatuses that comprise the mediality of risk expertise—radiation detectors, surveillance, electronic medical records, algorithmic cultures and big data. The book examines the US government’s preparedness programs in which imagined containment addresses all threats, giving rise to what Andrew Lakoff and Stephen Collier call “vital systems preparedness.” It analyzes the proliferating “computer ghost stories” in low-brow literary publications, avidly read by daily commuters on trains coming in to metropolitan areas. The book focuses radiation event of Chernobyl explores the interacting layers—a natural region, a territory, a system—that come together as a risk landscape.
