Thinking Software Today I want to talk about the importance of software/code and why we need to study it: 1. Software/Code 2. The softwarization of the university Apple Siri Thinking Software 3. Knowledge in the Digital Age code and the university in the digital age Dr . David M . Berry Swansea University d.m.berry@swansea.ac.uk Friday, 17 February 12 1 Friday, 17 February 12 2 Thinking Software • Whilst we are dead to the world at night, networks of machines silently and repetitively exchange data. • They monitor, control and assess the world using Software/Code electronic sensors, updating lists and databases, calculating and recalculating their models to produce reports, predictions and warnings. • To do this requires millions, if not, billions of lines of computer code, many thousands of hours of work, and constant maintenance and technical support to keep it all running. Friday, 17 February 12 3 Friday, 17 February 12 4
Thinking Software Thinking Software • The avionics system in the F-22 Raptor, the current U.S. Air Force frontline jet fighter, consists of about 1.7 • Software enables the fourth- generation jet fighters, million lines of software code. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, has about 5.7 million lines of code to operate its like the Eurofighter Typhoon or the F16 Fighting onboard systems. And Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner Falcon, to be more effective fighter aircraft because requires about 6.5 million lines of software code just to they are deliberately designed to be aerodynamically operate its avionics and onboard support systems. unstable, a ‘relaxed stability’ design. • A premium-class automobile probably contains close to • They can only be flown through the support of 100 million lines of software code. This software computers and software that manages their fly-by- executes on 70 to 100 microprocessor-based electronic wire systems; as ‘F-16 pilots say, “You don’t fly an F-16; control units (ECUs) networked throughout the car it flies you”, refer[ing] to the seemingly magical (developed at $10 per line of code, Charette 2009). oversight of the electronic system’ Friday, 17 February 12 5 Friday, 17 February 12 6 Thinking Software Thinking Software • These technical systems control and organise networks that increasingly permeate our society, whether financial, As Adrian Mackenzie (2003) perceptively argues: telecommunications, roads, food, energy, logistics, defence, code runs deep in the increasingly informatically water, legal or governmental. regulated infrastructures and built environments we • The amount of data that is now recorded and collated by move through and inhabit. Code participates heavily these technical devices is astronomical. in contemporary economic, cultural, political, • For example, ‘Wal-Mart, a retail giant, handles more than 1 military and govermental domains. It million customer transactions every hour, feeding databases modulates relations within collective life. It estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes – the equivalent of organises and disrupts relations of power. 167 times the books in America’s Library of Congress’ and It alters the conditions of perception, Facebook, a social-networking web- site, has collected 40 commodification and representation billion photos in its databases from the individual uploading (Mackenzie 2003: 3). of its users Friday, 17 February 12 7 Friday, 17 February 12 8
Thinking Software Thinking Software • Search engines scour the web and deal with massive • (1) software allows the delegation of mental amounts of data to provide search results in seconds to users, with Google alone handling 35,000 search processes of high sophistication into computational queries every second systems. This instils a greater degree of agency into the technical devices than could have been possible • Of course, we have always relied upon the background with mechanical systems activity of a number of bureaucratic processes for • (2) networked software, in particular, encourages a assigning, sorting, sending, and receiving information communicative environment of rapidly changing that have enabled modern society to function. feedback mechanisms that tie humans and non- • But the specific difference introduced by software/ humans together into new aggregates. These code is that it not only increases the speed and undertake incredible calculative feats, and mobilise volume of these processes, it also introduces some and develop ideas at a much higher intensity in a real- novel dimensions: time stream. Friday, 17 February 12 9 Friday, 17 February 12 10 Thinking Software Thinking Software • Computers allows us to live in a society that • (3) there is a greater use of embedded and quasi- increasingly depends on information and knowledge. visible technologies, leading to a rapid growth in More accurately, we might describe it as a society that is more dependent on the computation of the amount of quantification that is taking place in information, a computational knowledge society. society. Indeed, software is increasingly quantifying and measuring our social and everyday lives. • Today, people rarely use the raw data, but consume it • By capturing, in millions of different ways, the way in processed form, relying on computers to aggregate or simplify the results for them. we live, speak, act and think on mobile phones, • These computers run software that is spun like webs, CCTV cameras, websites, etc. computational devices are able to count these activities. This turns invisibly around us, organising, controlling, monitoring life into quantifiable metrics that are now visible and processing. As Weiner (1994: xv) says ‘the growing and amenable for computation and processing. use of software... represents a social experiment’. Friday, 17 February 12 11 Friday, 17 February 12 12
Thinking Software Thinking Software • My aim here, is not to outline a ‘technological As Matthew Fuller explains, we need to: sublime’, rather it is to begin the theoretical and Show the stuff of software in some of the many ways that it exists, in which it is experienced and thought through, empirical project of developing ‘cognitive and to show, by the interplay of concrete examples and maps’ (Jameson 1990). multiple kinds of accounts, the condition of possibility • For the university this might imply a ‘reconfiguration’ that software establishes (Fuller 2008: 1). of the disciplinary and methodological approaches ‘in a sense, all intellectual work is now “software study”, in that software provides its media and we have taken for granted. its context... [yet] there are very few places • It also has implications for pedagogy in terms of what where the specific nature, the materiality, of we teach and how we teach. software is studied except as a matter of engineering’ (2006). Friday, 17 February 12 13 Friday, 17 February 12 14 Thinking Software Thinking Software • And... software wants to know all about us, even if we • As software increasingly structures the haven’t been paying much attention to it... contemporary world, curiously, it also withdraws, • software technologies are recording huge amounts of and becomes harder and harder for us to focus on data about individuals and groups: as it is embedded, hidden, off-shored or merely • (1) quantitative data, such as dataflows, times and forgotten about. dates, information, prices, purchases and preferences, • The challenge is to bring software back into etc.; visibility so that we can pay attention to both what • (2) ... but also qualitative feelings and experiences. it is (ontology), where it has come from (through These software avidities are demonstrated when Twitter media archaeology and genealogy) but also what it asks the user: ‘What’s happening?’, Facebook asks: is doing (through a form of mechanology), so we can understand this ‘dynamic of organized inorganic ‘What’s on your mind?’, and the new Google+ inquires: ‘Share what’s new’. matter’ Friday, 17 February 12 15 Friday, 17 February 12 16
Recommend
More recommend
