Fresh writing from Manovich:

Search engines, recommendation systems, mapping applications, blog tools, 

auction tools, instant messaging clients, and, of course, platforms which 

allow others to write new software – iOS, Android, Facebook, Windows, 

Lunix, – are in the center of the global economy, culture, social life, and, 

increasingly, politics. And this “cultural software” – cultural in a sense that it 

is directly used by hundreds of millions of people and that it carries “atoms” 

of culture (media and information, as well as human interactions around 

these media and information) – is only the visible part of a much larger 

software universe.