The Arc and the machine is an important and timely book. It insists on the centrality of narrative to informational culture, and forces a re-appraisal of how information technology, read as a material cultural form, is understood in relation to the questions of innovation and transformation.

Caroline Bassett is Professor of Media and Communications at the School of Media Film and Music, University of Sussex, and Director of the Sussex Humanities Lab. She is the author of The Arc and the Machine (2007). Sarah Kember is Professor of New Technologies of Communication at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Director of Goldsmiths Press. She is the author of Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life (2003) and iMedia: The Gendering of Objects, Environments and Smart Materials (2016). Kate O'Riordan is Reader in Digital Media at the University of Sussex. Her research interests relate to cultural studies of emerging technologies, from the web in the 1990s to genome editing in 2014. She has authored and edited a number of books including Unreal Objects (Pluto, 2017) and The Genome Incorporated: Constructing Biodigital Identity (Routledge, 2016).

Introduction
1. Narrative machines
2. 'Beautiful Patterns of Bits': cybernetics, interfaces, new media
Part 1: The thing itself: technology and determination
Part 2: Contemporary technocultures
3. Those with whom the archive dwells
4. Annihilating all that's made? legends of virtual community
5. 'Just Because' stories: On Elephant