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Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

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Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is a media theorist and scholar whose work examines the political and cultural logics embedded in digital technologies. She holds the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University and has written on how software, networks, and digital culture produce and naturalize social categories.

Core ideas

  • Habitual new media: in Updating to Remain the Same (2016), Chun argues that new media operates through habit rather than novelty. Digital technologies promise constant updating, but this updating is itself a habit — a mechanism that sustains the present while appearing to move forward. The user is kept in a loop of refresh and repetition that feels like progress but reproduces existing structures.
  • Programmed visions: in Programmed Visions (2011), Chun traces how software functions as an ideology — something that works precisely because its operations are not examined. Code is treated as transparent and neutral, but its operations encode specific assumptions about causality, agency, and control.
  • Networks and discrimination: Chun examines how network technologies produce homophily — the tendency to connect with similar others — not as a natural human preference but as an effect of algorithmic sorting. The network does not reflect existing social categories; it actively produces and reinforces them.
  • Digital race: Chun’s work connects digital culture to the production of racial categories, arguing that the logic of categorization, sorting, and pattern recognition in computing shares structural features with the logic of racial classification.

Notable works

  • Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (2006)
  • Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (2011)
  • Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (2016)
  • Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition (2021)

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