There is a piece of me in the fourth issue of Computational Culture, an interview with Jonathan Sterne about his book Mp3, The Meaning of a Format (Duke University Press, Durham/London, 2012). It is a real classic in its genre and reminded me of the times when I read Avital Ronnell on the telephone and Friedrich Kittler’s writings on radio, sound and the voice. In a sense it is about the old War on Standards. On the other hand it is about poetics in times of bandwith, storage and computational scarcity: a constituive element of digital media culture that we rapidly no longer comprehend what it was all about. Who cares about compression in a time of abudance? What’s the fuzz about this protestant techno culture? An ode to the technology that gave us Napster.

http://computationalculture.net/article/reflections-on-the-mp3-format