In Seeing and Writing by Jay David Bolter, the text focuses on the development of writing over the centuries from script and topography to digital writing. Bolter discusses how the alphabet and writing went from being more of a pictorial reading process to a mathematical and generalized process that mimics the old way of writing, but in a more efficient way.(Bolter 679-683)

                With new forms of media and technological advances, writing and reading has become more efficient and standard which makes it more accessible to the world and easier to disperse and read. Bolter reviews various types of visual writing and how they have advanced over time. Modern writing along with pictures and graphics combine both mathematics and literature in order to create a form of written expression that is easily understood and accepted by the modern world.(Bolter 688-689)

                Bolter explains the evolution of graphics and writing as a merger of technology and writing that mimics and improves that of traditional writing, whereas McPherson compares the evolution of new media and codes with cultural reform and movements. In Fragment One  of Race After the Internet, McPherson discusses the development of UNIX as operating system that “is widely understood to embody particular philosophies and cultures of computation.”(McPherson 22) In Fragment Two, McPherson references the 1950’s and 1960’s as being a turning point for both the UNIX and minorities throughout the world. The programming rules of the UNIX seem to mirror the laws enforcing segregation that call for different aspects of the program to be clear, defined and separated during its compilation which supports the words of Brian Kernighan which stated that “controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming”.(McPherson 26) The generalization of UNIX and its components is similar to the generalization of race and is “an approach which separates object from context, cause from effect”(McPherson 27). McPherson’s idea that the progress of programming and understanding the machines is comparable to the understanding of culture is very interesting. She argues that in order to improve new media we cannot generalize programs but rather learn to understand “how computational systems (especially but not only software) are developed and operate. (McPherson 34)