Friedrich Kittler 1943 - 2011 | in memoriam - obituaries - Nachrufe. For Friedrich Kittler, both technology and education should be open and free | Jussi Parikka. Friedrich Kittler was inspired by the pioneerinng computing done at Bletchley Park. Photograph: David Levene The German media theorist Friedrich Kittler, who died this month, got a farewell that one rarely sees heaped upon academics. In addition to much social media attention, all major German newspapers ran extensive obituaries with references to major philosophical figures of past centuries. In his lifetime, Kittler wrote eloquently about everything from modern physics and engineering to rock music (he was especially fond of Pink Floyd), yet one of the most interesting objects of his enthusiasm was Britain's history in computing and technical media. Kittler did not just write histories of media and computing, but argued that we need to understand old media in order to understand contemporary digital culture.
As adamantly as Kittler resisted the current narrowing of university courses, he resisted proprietary systems. Friedrich Kittler obituary. The eclectic German post-structuralist philosopher and media theorist Friedrich Kittler, who has died aged 68, once wrote: "We are the subjects of gadgets and instruments of mechanical data processing. " He was entirely serious. In his extraordinary book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986) he argued that "those early and seemingly harmless machines capable of storing and therefore separating sounds, sights and writing ushered in a technologising of information". Later technologies – the internet in particular – further extended technology's domination over us. He told one interviewer in 2006 that the internet hardly promotes human communication: "The development of the internet has more to do with human beings becoming a reflection of their technologies … after all, it is we who adapt to the machine.
The machine does not adapt to us. " Kittler, sometimes dubbed the "Derrida of the digital age", thus tapped into humanity's fear of being neutralised by its own tools. Zum Tod von Friedrich Kittler | leitmedium.de. Friedrich Kittler 1943 - 2011 | in memoriam - obituaries - Nachrufe | offene Ablage: nothing to hide | oAnth-miscellaneous.