Mori, M., 1970, The Uncanny Valley, Energy 7(4):33-35.
Perkowitz, S., 2004, Digital People: From Bionic Humans to Androids, Joseph Henry Press, Washington D.C.
Winner, L., 1988, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Beyond Engineering
Software Design as Bridge over the Culture/Technology Dichotomy
Bernhard Rieder and Mirko Tobias Schafer
Abstract In this chapter, we first consider the growing cultural significance of software as a motive for having a closer look at software production. We then show how networked computing has stimulated new practices of technical creation that question the traditional logic of engineering; open source software development serves as an example. Consequently, it is no longer feasible to separate the technological dimension from its cultural context. An integrated perspective could lead both humanities scholars and technologists to revaluate established dichotomies and refocus the debate on technological policies.
In his book “Le Geste et la Parole”, the paleontologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan sketched the evolution of Homo sapiens as leaving the domain of biological advancement to continue, with an accelerated pace, in the field of language and technology. While many of Leroi-Gourhan’s proposals have not aged well, his concept of humanity being shaped by a man-made web of objects and symbols -of machinery and discourse one might say - has been a powerful image in a time when the idea of the tool as neutral artifact is still an important paradigm. In the last decade there has been a resurgence of academic interest in technology, not purely as a means to an end but as a cultural force. Together with this shift in perspective on the role of technical artifacts in our high-tech collectives, we see, more specifically, an increased awareness of the “toolmaker” as the assumed locus of technical progress. Every age seems to have an epitomical figure of technical creation: the craftsman for the Middle Ages, the inventor in the Industrial Revolution, and the engineer in the 20th century. Late capitalism has introduced a new figure for the beginning of the 21st century: the designer as the toolmaker of the information age.
B. Rieder, Paris 8 University M. T. Schafer, Utrecht University
The last two decades have produced a plethora of literature on the new mode of creating technical objects: from product design to Web design, from industrial design to experience design, design is everywhere but no two definitions are the same. As a consequence, the term refers less to a clear-cut concept or methodology; rather it functions as a means of differentiation. Software design74 for example is not a well-defined practice: it is a way of saying that what is being done is somehow going beyond the well-defined practice of software engineering. Behind the term “design” actually lurks a multiplicity of quite different ways of creating, shaping, and maybe even using.
In industrial societies there remain few tasks that are not in one way or another dependent on computers. Our communication and information routines have shifted in a large part to a computer-based network infrastructure of globally connected computers, the metamedia (Kay and Goldberg, 1977) of our time. Classic electronic media like television and telephony are currently passing onto the universal protocol of TCP/IP,75 becoming yet another piece of software that runs on the Internet. Creative work, game play, social intercourse, information search and management, so many of the things we do in our everyday lives have become directly connected to digital tools and networks (Castells, 2000). We are steering towards a unified digital environment in which computer hardware and software define possibilities for action and conditions of expression.
Interest in technology within the humanities has historically been limited. When considered, technical artifacts have been assimilated into the industrial complex and treated as producers of capital rather than of meaning. But the dense entanglement between human and non-human we witness today increasingly calls for perspectives that zoom in at the micro-level and theorize not only the general aspects of how “society and culture” relate to “technology,” but first and foremost the increasingly hybrid everyday practices that are the content of human affairs.
In reference to de Certeau (1980), we can describe these practices as ways of doing that embed actions in a dense network of meaning, provide a rationale for why something is done, and sketch a proper way of doing it. There is a non-discursive dimension to such an art de faire, e.g., motor movement, objects, and spatial settings, and a strong discursive element, e.g., morals, laws, rules, and narratives. These two aspects are woven together by continuous action. Collins and Kusch (1998) have detailed how the atomic particles of practices, actions, can themselves be theorized as series or trees of micro-acts, coalescing motor movement and meaning. And Actor-Network-Theory has shown (Latour, 1999) that actions are not properties of individual agents, but of chains linking human and non-human “actants”, combining each ones “program of action” to form hybrid actors. If we understand practice as an embedding of action in time and habit, in these views, the discursive dimension of an art de faire cannot be severed from its non-discursive, mechanic counterpart.
When applying this view, we see that in general, and with ICT in accelerated and enlarged form, machines are responsible for always larger parts of the action trees or action chains, rendering actions intrinsically hybrid. As a consequence, our practices have become riddled with the work of machines, in many cases without us even noticing. Software - the prime interest of this chapter - now goes even deeper than “classic” technology because many of the tasks being delegated to logical machinery are semantic in nature. Among other things, algorithms now filter, structure, interpret, and visualize information in an automatic fashion, performing tasks previously reserved for humans.
From a practical standpoint, we can understand this process of hybridization along two axes: new actions and practices are becoming possible, e.g., drawing on a virtual canvas, video communication across oceans, and real-time data-mining, and existing actions and practices are done in new ways, e.g., different in form, style, speed, efficiency, difficulty, and range.
In this sense, software is responsible for extending, both quantitatively and qualitatively, the role that technology plays in the everyday practices that make up modern life. Culture and technology are intertwined at the micro-level, to the extent that even the analytical separation of the two becomes highly problematic (Latour, 1999). Is separation between a discursive and a non-discursive level still possible when computer programs analyze email, news bulletins, and scientific publications to decide which ones to bring to our attention and which ones silently to discard? When the visibility of an opinion becomes a question of algorithms,76 meaning is deeply embedded in the non-discursive: in the software itself. Technology is not only surrounded by discourse, it is discourse. Although we do not share Heidegger’s hostile stance toward technology, his understanding of the tool as an ontological agent, as a way of “Entbergen” (revealing), is still worth considering. In “Gestell” (enframing), the discursive and the non-discursive conflate; it is both object and logic - a diagram, in the terms of Foucault, but with the difference in nature between the two planes largely gone. The lesson we take from this is diametrically opposed to Heidegger’s position: involvement instead of withdrawal.
75
Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol are the communication protocols that unite all the different networks that make up the Internet.
76
The Slashdot communication platform (http://www.slashdot.org) for example uses an elaborate discussion system that includes a technological measure of symbolic capital and modulates the visibility of individual messages accordingly.