In addition, copying is intimately entwined with communication as a central mode of action of network culture. Such sociotechnological innovations as nineteenth-century magnetic recording, the modem (1958), the c-cassette (1962), the CD-disc (1965), the Ethernet local network (1973), and Napster (1999) and subsequent file-sharing networks can be read from the viewpoint of the social order words, “copy” and “distribution.” The act of copying includes in a virtual sphere the idea of the copy being shared and distributed. What happens in copying is first the identification or framing of the object to be copied, followed by the reproduction of a similar object whose mode of existance is predicated upon its being distributed. There is no point in making copies without distributing them. Copying is not merely reproducing the same as discrete objects, but coding cultural products into discrete data and communicating such coded copies across networks: seeding and culturing.
Parikka, Jussi. “Copy.” In Software Studies. A Lexicon, edited by Matthew Fuller, 70–78. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
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