The Centre for Science Studies at Lancaster University is pleased to invite
colleagues to join the latest in our ‘Talking STS’ series, in which two
colleagues – one from Lancaster, one from a different institution –
discuss
an issue of shared concern.
This hybrid research seminar will focus on the forms of relationality and
sensi(a)bility that go into maintaining software infrastructures. It
includes contributions from Paula Bialski (Associate Professor of Digital
Sociology, University of St. Gallen) and Carolyn Pedwell (Professor in
Digital Media, Lancaster University). The event will be chaired by Joe
Deville.
The discussion will take place on Tuesday February 11th, 13:00-14:00 GMT /
14:00-15:00 CET. Any and all colleagues, from Lancaster and elsewhere, are
welcome.
Carolyn will draw on research from her British Academy Mid-Career
Fellowship, ‘Speculative Machines and Us: Intuition, AI, and the Making of
Computational Cultures’. Paula will draw in part on work that has informed
her recently published book, published by Princeton University Press,
Middle Tech: Software Work and the Culture of Good Enough.
Human ghosts in the machine: On the history and present of sociality in
software systems
Unless a programmer is working in a brand-new start-up, software developers
don’t develop code from scratch. Software projects, especially in older
ageing corporations, are built on years and years of work created by other
developers. These developers, while building our everyday infrastructures,
not only have to make sense of their own code but also so-called “legacy
code” – old lines of code that were written by other developers that
keeps
existing in the code stack.
This event looks at the past and the present of working with media systems
and the relational and sensory understanding of software. Developers not
only live in a culture of sense-making or “figuring stuff out” in
relation
to their current colleagues’ practices but also in relation to years of
other developers’ code, or “ghosts” of coders who left the company, yet
their creative output lives on in the present. Computing systems also
depend on and (re)produce various modes of common sense that entangle
historical and emergent cultural, socio-political, economic, and ecological
‘truths’ about how the world works.
Software is an “object subject to continuous change and lived with over
time as it evolves” (Cohn 2019, 423), one that does not sit still “long
enough to be easily assigned to conventional explanatory categories”
(Mackenzie 2006, 18). It is therefore crucial that we understand the
complex forms of relationality and sensi(a)bility that go into maintaining
our software infrastructures, understanding software as a relational object
made up of different worldly ontologies and creative voices of coders who
are forced to interact with one another as their software system evolves.
Computational common sense, in turn, is a recursively mediated set of
relations and a pertinent site of both sociotechnical discovery and
“political struggle” (Gramsci, 1971).
Event details
