This series of reports on the Software Fun (Funware) symposium held on November 27, 2010 at Baltan Laboratories were commissioned by Baltan and MU.
At the beginning of his talk Wilfried Hou Je Bek admits he is struggling with the idea of software and fun. He starts his talk with passages from William Burroughs, who was once in touch with a mysterious computer from Venus named Control:
[...] in Fulham Road Willy Deiches and Brenda Dunks, two would-be one-were computer operators with IBM who now function of their own (,) have perfected a scrapbook system from newspaper cuttings for predictions and assessments along the lines of Wm’s scrapbooks, but with a built-in 24-hour mathematics of their coordinate points for greater accuracy. They also claimed to be in touch with Control in Venus through IBM Seattle. Questions may be put to Control at 12 shillings a time (it used to be free) and the answers are interesting. Wm has sent in a whole lot and we are waiting for these answers … (Anthony Balch to BG, November 4 1968)…
We do not know much about Control but you could send questions to Control in London. The address belonged to two former employees of IBM, who would write neatly written answers for 12 shilling accompanied with an invoice. They were methodical people. Burroughs said Control was not a computer but a news snippet system. Hou Je Bek notes that if the computer is a social construction, why can’t it be from venus? He expands on his notion of the computer as a social construction with a metaphorical inquiry into software and fun.
Software is fun in the same way as exploring the Amazon rainforest is fun. It’s exciting, you hope to discover something and you take the bugs for granted. Bugs serve a purpose, for example mosquitoes keep us humans out. The bugs serve as a deforrest prevention. In the computer the bug is a good thing, if you would code and it would just work programmers would be able to do bad things.
The Amazonian mythology is about production (the processes of reproduction) and the shadow of the crash (the wrong action can bring down the entire world). It looks at the forest from within and distinctions between man and nature don’t exist. You are part of nature. The world exists of layers and the layers don’t mix. They do, however, interact. This interaction causes disturbences in the balances of the layers. The shaman can fix the illness by traveling the layers. Hou Je Bek states that the shaman should be replaced with the programmer. He describes how the shaman is a misunderstood concept, often associated with the new age softies. However, the power to heal is also the power to kill. If you can fix a computer, you can also kill it.
Monday at work by slworking2
When talking about software layers, we can see the rainforrest as a piece of software. Hou Je Bek observes: “who’s to say what’s a computer and laugh about it?” He coins The end of computationalism (based on the end of physics): We should not look at the computer as a fixed “in” but we have to take the programmer and the user into account when thinking about the computer. Software is a social construct and we get lost in the technicalities.
This series of reports on the Software Fun (Funware) symposium held on November 27, 2010 at Baltan Laboratories were commissioned by Baltan and MU.
Part 2 in a short series on the Software and Fun (Funware) symposium at Baltan Labs. Wendy Chun and Andrew Lison talked about the slippery boundary between fun and obsession in programming. The boundary is crossed when it’s so fun that it’s not fun anymore. Fun is a battlefield, a (pleasurable) struggle that has everything to do with Tiziana Terranova’s notion of Free Labor. The difference between programmers and users is gradually eroding: programmers have become more empowered and disempowered. It has become fun. Making programming more democratic has led to the dissemination of programmers.
Joseph Weizenbaum described the programmer as God: “The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is responsible. Universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be created in the form of computer programs.” Source code is doing as it says as the computer programmer is a creator of universes. Programming cannot know the final path of its program. Chun describes hackers as compulsive gamblers. Both hackers and gamblers entail megalomania and do it for a pleasurable drive of reassurance. Programmers strive for power instead of truth: knowledge is never enough because bugs always appear. Weizenbaum describes the work of these highly driven or “compulsive” programmers in Science and the Compulsive Programmer
bright, young men of disheveled appearance, often with sunken glowing eyes, can be seen sitting at computer consoles, their arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers, already poised to strike, at the buttons and keys on which their attention seems to be as riveted as a gambler’s on the rolling dice. When not so transfixed, they often sit at tables strewn with computer printouts over which they pore like possessed students of a cabalistic text. They work until they nearly drop, twenty, thirty hours at a time. Their food, if they arrange it, is brought to them: coffee, Cokes, sandwiches. If possible, they sleep on cots near the computer. But only for a few hours—then back to the console or the printouts. Their rumpled clothes, their unwashed and unshaven faces, and their uncombed hair all testify that they are oblivious to their bodies and to the world in which they move. They exist, at least when so engaged, only through and for the computers. These are computer bums, compulsive programmers. (Weizenbaum 1976)1
It is a battle between programmer and computer: It’s so fun, it’s not.
Mediamatic RFID Hacker's Camp at PICNIC07
In Linux Thorvald’s autobiography Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary he tries to explain his fascination with programming which seems like a tedious/boring act to the outsider:
Part of the initial excitement in programming is easy to explain: just the fact that when you tell the computer to do something, it will do it. Unerringly. Forever. Without a complaint. And that’s interesting in itself. But blind obedience on its own, while initially fascinating, obviously does not make for a very likeable companion. What makes programming so engaging is that, while you can make the computer do what you want, you have to figure out how. (Torvalds 2002: 73) 2
It is the experience of limitation of one’s power in the system. Fun is very bad programming. This may be seen in The International Obfuscated C Code Contest which arose out of trying to fix some very broken code (see FAQ). The contest disempowers while insisting on a greater degree of knowledge. It is a refusal of good programming but it also embraces the rules. To write the most obfuscated piece of code one must adhere to the rules which emphasize good programing.
This series of reports on the Software Fun (Funware) symposium held on November 27, 2010 at Baltan Laboratories were commissioned by Baltan and MU.
The Software Fun (Funware) symposium held on November 27, 2010 at Baltan Laboratories is part of a larger series of activities. The symposium was organized to present papers in progress on the topic of software and fun, which will eventually be published in a book on Funware. The papers explore the theme of software and fun through theoretical approaches, while the accompanying exhibition in MU explores the topic of funware through artworks.
Michael Murtaugh – Do (Not) Repeat Yourself
Murtaugh provides an ethnographical account of the world of programming with witty examples from the Wiki pages hosted by Ward Cunningham. The Informal History Of Programming Ideas wiki page was created in 1996 and provides “an incomplete and casually written history of programming ideas.” The title of Murtaugh’s talk ‘Do (Not) Repeat Yourself’ refers to the idea that almost all programmers hate duplication because it “can lead to maintenance nightmares, poor factoring, and logical contradictions.” Thus, it is strongly advised to avoid duplication and repetition which is echoed in the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle which states that “Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.” Duplication can occur in architecture, requirements, code, or documentation. Duplication or repetition is considered a bad practice that produces bad code. Such code can inflict Code Smell: “a hint that something might be wrong.”
Michael Murtaugh
The DRY software design principle is one of the coding standards in a book titled Extreme Programming on rethinking programming practices for managers, customers and programmers. DRY is revived in the idea that ”the standard should call for the least amount of work possible, consistent with the Once and Only Once rule (no duplicate code).” ((Beck, Kent. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change. US ed. Addison-Wesley Professional, 1999.)) Extreme programming clearly invokes the image of extreme sports and repetition can also be experienced as a tiring physical exercise because coding is physically exhausting work.
eXtreme Programming. Picture by Akindemir
Repetition is the root of all software evil for many programmers. It is no wonder then that the DRY principle is adhered by many popular frameworks such as Django: “Django focuses on automating as much as possible and adhering to the DRY principle.” The principle is also reflected in Django’s tagline: “Django makes it easier to build better Web apps more quickly and with less code.”
There is an undervalue of the repetition in a framework which contains a community across its practicioners (in contrary to software that is experienced individually). Repetition may provide a way of learning as described by Richard Sennett in his book The Craftsman where he describes the process of learning through repetition:
Skill development depends on how repetition is organised. This is why in music, as in sports, the length of a practice session must be carefully judged: the number of times one repeats a piece can be no more than an individual’s attention span at a given stage. As skill expands, the capacity to sustain repetition increases. In music this is the so-called Isaac Stern rule, the great violinist declaring that the better your technique, the longer you can rehearse without becoming bored. There are ‘Eureka moments that turn the lock in a practice that has jammed, but they are embedded in routine. (Sennett 2008: 38)1
This may be seen in recursion/abstraction, a miraculous transformation of code through one’s repetitive work on it. The miraculous transformation through repetitive work may also provide the joy and fun in programming: “This is repetition for its own sake: like a swimmer’s strokes, sheer movement repeated becomes a pleasure in itself.” (Sennet 2008:175)
The art of repetition can be found in William S Burroughs Essay The art of ‘Do Easy’ which was made into a short film by Gus van Sant. The essay describes the art and strength of repetition and internalizing repetition into your brain as it were a computer.
According to Murtaugh, William Burroughs provides a useful alternative to DRY with a system where the mundane and the repetitive become key to unlocking a unknown knowledge in your subconscious. With this, Murtaugh concludes with the final part of William S Burroughs essay The art of ‘Do Easy:’
Take the inverse skill of the ID back into your own hands. These skills belong to you. Make them yours. You know where the wastebasket is. You can land objects in that wastebasket over you shoulder. You know how to touch and move and pick up things. Regaining these physical skills is of course simply a prelude to regaining other skills and knowledge that you have and cannot make available for your use. You know your entire past history just what year month and hour everything happened. If you have heard a language for any length of time you know that language. You have a computer in your brain. DE will show you how to use it. But that is another chapter.
Take the inverse skill of the IT back into your own hands. These skills belong to you. Make them yours. You know where the wastebasket is. You can land objects in that wastebasket over your shoulder. You know how to touch and move and pick up things. Regaining these physical skills is of course simply a prelude to regaining other skills and knowledge that you have and cannot make available for your use. You know your entire past history just what year month and hour everything happened. If you have heard a language for any length of time you know that language. You have a computer in your brain. DE will show you how to use it. But that is another chapter.
During the Q&A Wendy Chun notes that the mantra of “Don’t repeat yourself” only works by repeating.
On November 9, 2010 Olia Lialina presented her new book on Digital Folklore. The book describes the aesthetics of the amateur web which has been Lialina’s object of study for the past ten years. The book reflects on amateur culture as the basis of the Web; the web that has been built by us, the amateurs. The Vernacular Web refers to the aesthetics of the early web of the amateurs. Not only the World Wide Web but also the 3D amateur culture and font creators indirectly contributing to the graphics online. It is about being a “real” user that uses Comic Sans. Part of the challenge of creating the Digital Folklore book was how to translate the World Wide Web into paper?
The term digital folklore is a term where everybody seems gets the idea but it is not clearly defined. Folklore is traditionally defined as: “The “traditional,” usually oral literature of a society, consisting of various genres such as myth, legend, folktale, song, proverb, and many others.” (Routledge). But how do we translate this type of oral literature to the web genres of under construction banners and animated gifs? The book describes what digital folklore is, why it is important and why it should be studied. It presents digital folklore as a field of study.
Digital Folklore encompasses the customs, traditions and elements of visual, textual and audio culture that emerged from users’ engagement with personal computer applications during the last decade of the 20th and the first decade of the 21st century.1
User Timeline
The preface of the book, ‘Do you believe in Users?,’ is presented by Lialina and is shown as a Google Docs working document in Comic Sans. The preface is a historical account of the changing role of the user in the history of computers:
1940′s Vannevar Bush – imaged the Memex, the table, a personal working stage, where the user was the Scientist. 1960′s Douglas Engelbart, the user was the Knowledge Worker, Intellectual Worker and the Programmer. 1970′s XEROX PARK: Thacker, Alan Kay, Licklider (History of the personal workstation) – Lady with the Royal Typewriter, Kids, Real Users (People who are buying computers, especially personal computers) 1974 Ted Nelson – Dream Machines, the Naive User2 Two categories of users: user hackers and naive users. A user can be a developer of the system with no distinction between developer and user. 1982 TRON – You believe in the Users? Big moment for the user, the user as God.
1983 Time Magazine, “The Computer Moves in.” Machine of the Year. Technology becomes the person of the year.
1993 Eric S. Raymond: September that never ended. User lacking netiquette. “September that never ended” refers to a phenomenon happening since September 1993. One of the seasonal rhytms of the Usenet used to be the annual September influx of clueless newbies who, lacking any sense of netiquette, made a general nuisance of themselves. This coincided with people starting college, getting their first internet accounts, and plugging in without bothering to learn what was acceptable. (more info)
1996The New Hacker’s Dictionary is a lexicon which contains an entry on the user:
user n.
1. Someone doing `real work’ with the computer, using it as a means rather than an end. Someone who pays to use a computer. See real user. 2. A programmer who will believe anything you tell him. One who asks silly questions. [GLS observes: This is slightly unfair. It is true that users ask questions (of necessity). Sometimes they are thoughtful or deep. Very often they are annoying or downright stupid, apparently because the user failed to think for two seconds or look in the documentation before bothering the maintainer.] See luser. 3. Someone who uses a program from the outside, however skillfully, without getting into the internals of the program. One who reports bugs instead of just going ahead and fixing them.
The general theory behind this term is that there are two classes of people who work with a program: there are implementors (hackers) and lusers. The users are looked down on by hackers to some extent because they don’t understand the full ramifications of the system in all its glory. (The few users who do are known as `real winners’.) The term is a relative one: a skilled hacker may be a user with respect to some program he himself does not hack. A LISP hacker might be one who maintains LISP or one who uses LISP (but with the skill of a hacker). A LISP user is one who uses LISP, whether skillfully or not. Thus there is some overlap between the two terms; the subtle distinctions must be resolved by context. (source)
The entry clearly distinguishes between implementors (hackers) and lusers (users). Lialina observes that twelve years later the Software Studies lexicon does not contain an entry dedicated to the user.
2006 Time Magazine: YOU!
From 1983 onwards people are designing posters in Word, praise activity of the users that are disrespected, the users that are not developers. You are now appreciated for your lolcats, your Facebook Likes. The User is only appreciated now.
An alternative history
The history of the World Wide Web is often dated in 1993 with the appearance of the Mosaic browser. It marks the year when the first users started to design the web. While Tim Berners-Lee invented the technology that build the web four years earlier, in 1989, the web was shaped by its users from 1983 onwards. In this publication (Digital Folklore) the user is pushed to the foreground. As such it provides a different history which foregrounds the users instead of the technology.
The idea of the “Rich User Experience” is one that typically accompanies Web 2.0. The term refers to all the Ajax apps with a richer interaction in the browser but also in general the claim that with Web 2.0 and social networking sites users finally have a rich experience. In the Midnight project based on Google Maps the rich user experience is hiding the real user experience. In the Gravity project navigating is done by scrolling providing a more rich interactive experience to scrolling.
The research not only about aesthetics but also about what the user could be and how to change it. One example of such a project is Trailblazers:
This is a project by Theo Seemann, a student of Russian online art pioneer Olia Lialina at the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart. Seemann created Trail Blazers as a surfing match in which the winner is the person who can find the shortest path between two sites, with only a mouse to navigate. The player has no keyboard and cannot use a search engine. The game is played with a slightly modified browser that registers every click. Besides being a lot of fun the project seems like a declaration of war on the search engine. It is a return to the feel of the early Web, in which navigation largely depended on links. In this sense it is also a return to the truly social web. In a time when the search engine, and this is usually Google, increasingly guesses the pathway (‘did you mean?’), link surfing is the digital equivalent of the six degrees of separation. (Josephine Bosma on Neural.it)
The project is based on the Memex from Vannevar Bush where he describes the (professional) users of the system as trail blazers: “‘There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.’” (Bush, 1945) Lialina shares that the most difficult part of the Trailblazers projects was how to get out of walled gardens like Facebook.
Dragan Espenschied and Olia Lialina, Digital Folklore: To Computer Users, with Love and Respect (Merz Akademie, 2009). [↩]
“Person who doesn’t know about computers but is going to use the system. Naive user systems are those set up to make things easy and clear for such people“. Ted Nelson: “The Most important computer terms for the 70′s”, in Dream Machines, Tempus Books, 1987, p.9 [↩]
Presented at the DMI mini-conference, University of Amsterdam, day 2.
Introduction to my paper on Identity 2.0
Yesterday we talked about the web having technological eras, or periods of the web that have specific providers, software and templates. This is also what I indirectly undertake in my study into the reconfiguration of identity in the era of search engines. By studying different software platforms for presenting the self online through their medium specific qualities we see what Fuller calls “digital subjectivity – that software constructs sensoriums, that each piece of software constructs ways of seeing, knowing and doing in the world that at once contain a model of that part of the world it ostensibly pertains to and that also shape it every time it is used” (2003: 19)
The reconfigured relationship between the user, the platform and the search engine is studied from what Manovich calls ‘cultural software,’ a genre of software that is cultural through its use and because it carries atoms of our culture. It is an undertaking that looks at the different software platforms that have been developed over time to allow us to understand how the configuration of the ecology the software is embedded is in has changed with the advent of the search engines. The platforms: the homepage, the blog, the social networking profile, the micro-blog and the lifestream are not presented in a chronological order in order to create a teleological account, rather they are presented in more or less the order in which they came into being. All platforms for presenting the self online still exist, while one may argue that the homepage is slowly disappearing, and some platforms even co-exist in the hands of the user who integrates her Twitter account into her blog.
In general, the Digital Methods Initiative researches society through the online, however, what I aim to do is research online web culture through the online software and devices that shape it. How is this research placed within digital methods? At first it seems an ethnographical account of my Web 2.0 being placed within the studies into identity but what it aims to do is to look at the medium specific qualities of the platforms and determine their web native elements, such as the permalink or the status update, in order to see how these tie up to search-engines. In a first small casestudy, it was shown that platforms relate to each other and that some platforms are closer together than others through their entanglement of structuring natively digital objects such as site feeds and embed codes. The question then is, how to operationalize the relationship between the platforms and their distance (topological).
This paper is based on the Networked book chapter ‘Lifetracing’1 commissioned by Turbulence. Rewritten for the Digital Methods Initiative mini-conference January 20-22, 2010 at the University of Amsterdam.
Identity 2.0: Constructing identity with cultural software.
ABSTRACT: This essay deals with the change of identity on the web as a result of the assemblage of social software platforms, engines and users. It can be stated that major platforms for presenting the self online have developed over time: the homepage, the blog, the social networking profile, the micro-blog and the lifestream. They each have their own specific way for presenting the self online. The advent of the search engine has had a major impact on both the construction and the presentation of the online identity. Search engines not only index the platforms on which identity is performed, but they also organize and construct identity online. They act as a central point where identity performance is indexed. Since identity construction and identity performance have significantly changed with the advent of these engines, identity must be reconsidered. It can be argued that the assembly of platform, engine and user has constructed a new type of identity: Identity 2.0. This type of identity, placed within the period of Web 2.0, is always under construction, never finished, networked, user-generated, distributed and persistent.
Helmond, Anne. “Lifetracing. The Traces of a Networked Life.” Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art). 2 July 2009. Available online: http://helmond.networkedbook.org/[↩]
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