Lev Manovich published a .doc and .pdf of his upcoming book Software Takes Command online. You may download it, send in suggestions and remarks and design your own cover.

Here’s my design for Software Takes Command by Lev Manovich using an image I took while visiting the Software Studies Workshop led by Manovich at UCSD.

The University of California in San Diego (UCSD) organized a two day event in order to pioneer the emerging field of Software Studies. The first day was a public event titled SoftWhere 2008 which consisted of over fifteen short presentation in Pecha Kucha style. The second day consisted of a closed strategic session that dealt with more formal questions on the shaping of a new field of studies and will be discussed in a follow-up blog post.

SoftWhere 2008
The title of the workshop ‘SoftWhere’ embodies the question of demarcating an area of study. Our current society is penetrated by and shaped by software and should thus be subject to appropriate critique. The ubiquity of software has led to a software culture and we are now living in a software society. What does it mean to live in such a software society instead of an industrial society? A world which is created by software is opaque and that is why we need to study software. We should question the streams behind, embedded in and woven through our society and look at what is happening behind the screens. SoftWhere? SoftEverywhere! The Software Studies workshop was organized by UCSD and most of the participants were either from the University of California in San Diego or Irvine or Los Angeles. Participants were asked to prepare a short presentation preferably in Pecha Kucha style. Jeremy Douglass, the first Software Studies Initiative postdoc, was strictly timing our presentations as each of us had either exactly seven minutes or if you followed the Pecha Kucha style of 20 seconds for 20 slides six minutes and fourty seconds. It turned out to be a great format to listen to almost twenty presentations in just one afternoon. Douglass was a great timekeeper, or rather his iPhone stopwatch that made an alarming sound after seven minutes forcing some speakers to cut their story short. In Jeremy’s own apologetic words: “It’s not me, it’s the software.” The presentations showed the diverse perspectives on software and software culture. The diversity of approaches and topics in the research may serve as an intellectual map of the people present. They may also serve to determine a common ground in the extremely diverse approaches to software studies. Liz Losh from Virtualpolitik wrote an extensive post on the “speed dating” Pecha Kucha presentations. Critical storage studies The presentations showed the diverse approaches to studying software and they also served as a showcase of the current state of research into software. However, some presentations did not deal with studies of software itself but also with the questions surrounding the field of software studies. Matthew Kirschenbaum for example talked about preservation as software studies, or what he would jokingly refer to as critical storage studies. Critical X Studies is a term used by Bill Benzon who at first was skeptical about the new field of Critical Code Studies

:

While I tend to be skeptical of any enterprise whose name takes the form “Critical X Studies,” where X is the domain under investigation, there’s certainly room to look at the cultural production of computer code and the styles of computer languages and programs.

What Kirschenbaum is referring to with critical storage studies is the fact that without preservation there is no field. If we want to establish and maintain a new field of Software Studies we should also look at the preservation of software. Emulators are only one way of thinking about storage and keeping software ‘alive’ because we are dealing with a hybrid cultural heritage. This is illustrated ‘the Preserving Virtual Worlds Project‘ that Kirschenbaum is currently working on. Taxonomy of Software Studies Critical Code Studies is just one of the many fields bordering or moving into the field of Software Studies. Mark Marino presented the pitfalls embodied within the metaphor of Critical X Studies as described by Liz Losh. However, these different fields that at some points overlap and form different layers of software form the grounds of Bogost’s taxonomy of Software Studies consisting of five levels:

1. Reception/operation
2. Interface
3. Form/function
4. Code
5. Platform

While this is not a definite taxonomy of the field it does present a useful way to think of how the existing overlapping fields operate. In this taxonomy Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost’s new book series Platform Studies is seen as complimentary to Software Studies. We are approaching different layers of software through both a philosophical and critical practice that may entail either the study of code or the other things (cultural studies). Part of software studies itself is turning it inside-out: What are we looking at if we study software? Which layers do we need to address and which questions and fields have previously addressed similar issues? These questions were part of the second day of the Software Studies workshop which dealt with the typical What, Where, When and How questions and will be addressed in a next post. This is the first post in a series on the Software Studies Workshop at UCSD and the Software Studies Panel at the HASTAC II Conference at UCI and UCLA. Please subscribe to my RSS feed to keep up with updates. This post was originally written for the Institute of Network Cultures who made it possible for me to attend the workshop in San Diego, CA, USA.

The Institute of Network Cultures is a media research centre that actively contributes to the field of network cultures through research, events, publications and online dialogue. The INC was founded in 2004 by media theorist Geert Lovink, following his appointment as professor within the Institute of Interactive Media at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (Hogeschool van Amsterdam).

A few months ago I started taking screenshots of odd software and interface notifications. Here’s a sample of my continuously growing collection:

Hang in there! We know life is tough without Twitter but it will have super strength when it is back online. Nice example of the vitalizing of software.

This is you. This is fugly!

Fugly? Is that Yahoo Mash’s way of saying f*cking ugly? Fugly is the new default.

My boring default picture looks rather scared actually.

I love the way they really point out that they think you are a boring person if you are a default person. Apply social pressure to get people to change the default.

“Do NOT tick yes”

OK, sure, but why is that tickbox there? If I am not allowed to tick it, why show it? Now you make me want to tick it!

I previously wrote about the Whatever Button developed by Michael Stevenson and Erik Borra that it makes your life so much easier. Want to make decision making easier as well? Download the Whatever Button as a Firefox plugin at www.whateverbutton.com

More:

• My Flickr set of Affective Web Notices.

• A theoretical and critical essay on interaction and affect: Michael Stevenson ‘Interactivity is Affectivity,’ Current Themes in New Media class paper, University of Amsterdam, August, 2007.

The following post is a combination of a transcription of Manovich’s keynote and my own notes and commentary.

Introduction by Geert Lovink

Online video is renegotiating its (problematic) relationship with cinema. It deals with cinematographic principles versus the principles of the online age. We cannot directly transfer the cinematographic principles into the online age as new media has its own specificities. YouTube is not just video on the web but YouTube is a natively digital object.

Ten years ago Lev Manovich proposed to consider the database as the (new) dominant media form. The database is the hegemonic media form online, as can be seen on YouTube, Flickr, MySpace and Google. We should think beyond technology now the database is also becoming a dominant social form. The database is shaping the social.

User Generated Content by Lev Manovich

After the novel, and subsequently cinema privileged narrative as the key form of cultural expression of the modern age, the computer age introduces its correlate – database. Many new media objects do not tell stories; they don’t have beginning or end; in fact, they don’t have any development, thematically, formally or otherwise which would organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, where every item has the same significance as any other. (Manovich, Database as a Symbolic Form)

These individual items could be considered to be little narratives. Even though it is debatable we could argue that within the database structure the actual elements are almost intensified little narratives.

It is interesting to note that Manovich starts his note by stating “I shouldn’t be here.” Even though he has a YouTube, Flickr and MySpace account he doesn’t use them because he is too shy. He dislikes talking from an expert point of view as he more of an observer than a participant.

The problems of user-generated content

The challenge user-generated content (UGC) presents to media theory is the same as it does to programmers: scale. If the number of people that produces content grows new social challenges arise such as the question of quality. Not only is the term user-generated content a term that is created by the industry it is also misleading. It is an umbrella term that not only simply counts users, it also tends to homogenize the content. Is every picture that is uploaded to Flickr meaningful? Content is created and uploaded for different reasons, purposes and audiences. Not all content is intended for wide distribution as some pictures are only uploaded for friends and family and others for general viewing. Some pictures are taken especially for (special-interest) Flickr groups and pools which illustrates that all pictures have a different purpose and meaning.

New social media behaviors

Both hardware and software (and interfaces if we choose to put the interface between hardware and software instead of seeing it as software) direct new users to turn their media into social media. YouTube pushes you to interact by offering a wide abundance of “social options” such as Share/Post video/Add to groups etc. I recognize this trend in the use of my new mobile phone. Not only is it my first mobile phone with an integrated camera it also gives me the option to publish a picture on the web immediately. This has been made even easier by installing a piece of software called Shozu that immediately pops up a “Send to Flickr” dialog after I have taken a picture. This causes me to upload nearly every picture I take to Flickr. My mobile phone creates new social media behaviors.

Software Studies

With newly created social media behavior we also need a new field of study to bring into focus the elements of digital culture created by software. Software shapes media behavior and that is why we need to study it.

Henri Jenkin’s Convergence Culture critique

Manovich main critique on Jenkins’ assumptions about user-generated content is that Jenkins’ does not evaluate the content. There is the underlying assumption that everything that the fans create is good. Even though Jenkins is from Humanities he takes a sociological approach and doesn’t look “inside” the content. We need to ask what the grammar of the content is? What is it composed of?

Users and Templates

Is the content produced by using old models, templates and iconography copied from mass media? Who are creating the new models? Are they still created by the professionals? Templates are no longer provided only by professionals such as the Word templates provided by Microsoft. Nowadays amateurs produce templates too. In relation to my thesis this can be applied to user-generated WordPress templates and plugins. Very few of these templates are created by so-called professionals. Where do we draw the boundary of professionals and amateurs? Are the default WordPress templates created by professionals? Most WordPress themes are created by the user community which we may label as amateurs. Some of these users are professional webdesigners or coders but others create themes for fun, recognition or money. To refer back to Henry Jenkins the themes are also part of the remix culture. Users adjust and adapt existing themes to their own needs. Keeping in mind Manovich’ critique on Jenkins not all themes bear the same quality. Not all themes are written according to W3C standards for example.

Cultural DNA

Models, templates and iconography are part of the cultural DNA of content. We should not only study the circulation of content but also this underlying cultural DNA.
Critique on the Long Tail

The long tail is often presented as having a fixed form while it actually comes in different shapes and forms. Not only is the curve is changing over the years, it is also different for different industries. The long tail in architecture for example is very steep with just a few major architects such as Rem Koolhaas. Manovich asks us what the different shapes of the long tail are in terms of popularity. Not only should we see the long tail through the eye of popularity, but we could also see it through the eye of quality or quotability. How many elements of a piece of content is used by others to produce a new piece of content?

New Tools

To be able to adequately analyze global culture (the numbers of professionals, prosumers and users continuously growing) – patterns of creation, consumption, circulation and remix of content – we need new tools. (Manovich slide)

This is exactly what we are dealing with at the Digital Method Initiative: natively digital objects need new tools and research methods that take into account the natively digital.

The Future

Future (media) theory will be software based. The analysis must be able to deal with the scale of contemporary culture. On top of that a gap between the cultural tools and the industrial tools (for example data mining) must be bridged. We need large displays to visualize the immense amount of data that is being produced and visualized. New software will be based on theoretical tools. Software theory will do justice to the scale of contemporary cultural production. The form of scale we are currently dealing with is new/unkown to Humanities. The content we find online is only a small part of the totality of the cultural circulation. Instead of a structuralism like semiotics, where the structure is imagined and tested with individual texts, here the individual movements (flows) of content form an emergent structure.

On top of quantative analysis we also need to take into account a qualitative analysis that deals with questions such as what happens if you switch on a certain piece of technology. It is a double approach that not only looks at software but also studies it using software. Michael poses the important reflexivity question as the software we use to study software has certain assumptions embedded into it. The Wikiscanner has a particular vision of Wikipedia built in it.

It will be interesting to see what kind of new cultural reflections will these (new) tools will lead to.

Peter Lang, New York, NY, USA 2006
216 pp. Paperback, $31.95 USD
ISBN 0-8204-7823-7
Buy at Amazon

Cutting Code addresses the subject of software that has previously been marginalized due to its invisibility. Software is a very mutable object that is entangled in a web of relations. Mackenzie thus sees software as a social object and process that is intrinsically linked to code as a material and practice. Software has previously been studied from a formalist approach by Manovich. The problem with such an approach is that software is abstracted from practices and contexts surrounding coding and reduced to “relations and operations (such as sorting, comparing, copying, removing) on items of data.”¹ These relations and operations are seen as quite stable forms and are often directly transfered from the field of computer science. Instead of abstracting and formalizing software Mackenzie argues for an ontology of software that deals with the mutability of software and its web of relations. Code is at the core of this web that software weaves:

[...] it treats the sociality of the software, the relations that obtain in its neighborhood, as mutable, involuted agential relations indexed by code.²

Mackenzie contributes to the emerging field of Software Studies with an interesting take on code and software. We should render software visible and notice the agency it provides, generates and distributes:

At stake here is an account of software as a highly involuted, historically media-specific distribution of agency. This account diverges from a general sociology of technology in highlighting the historical, material specificity of code as a labile, shifting nexus of relations, forms and practices. It regards software formally as a set of permutable distributions of agency between people, machines and contemporary symbolic environments carried as code. Code itself is structured as a distribution of agency.³

1. Mackenzie, Adrian. Cutting Code: Software And Sociality. Peter Lang Pub Inc, 2006. p. 4 [↩]
2. Mackenzie, Adrian. Cutting Code: Software And Sociality. Peter Lang Pub Inc, 2006. p. 19 [↩]
3. Mackenzie, Adrian. Cutting Code: Software And Sociality. Peter Lang Pub Inc, 2006. p. 19 [↩]

Google Earth. De wereld als interface.