NETWORKED MEDIA: W1 – REFLECTION

NETWORKED MEDIA

WEEK 1 – INTRODUCTION

Khoo E, Hight C, Torrens R, Cowie B 2017, ‘Introduction: Software and other Literacies’ in Software Literacy: Education and Beyond, Springer, Singapore. (pp.1-12)

Introduction: Software and other Literacies outlines us with the role and significance of software in contemporary society; presenting key concepts relevant to the study of software, including affordances, agency, human-machine assemblages and performance. Authors Khoo, Hight, Torrens and Cowie argue that software has become the engine of contemporary information society, with code now being part of the infrastructure of modern societies, and furthermore state that we are living in a software culture, one which is fundamentally reshaping all areas of modern life. The authors state that if we wish to understand the contemporary techniques of control, communication, representation simulation, analysis, decision-making, memory, vision, writing and interaction. Our analysis can’t be complete until we consider this software layer, that is comprised of all of these things, meaning that all disciplines which deal with contemporary society and culture – architecture, design, art criticism, sociology, political science, humanities, science and technology studies, and so on – need to account for the role of software and it’s effects in whatever subjects they investigate.

Introduction: Software and other Literacies explain that despite the diversity of hardware involved (e.g. Instagram) at base these all involve us as users engaging with different kind of applications, platforms and infrastructures constituted through software code. At an infrastructural level, for example, the internet and World Wide Web (Web hereon) are themselves organised through software based protocols that govern largely automated processes that are rarely visible to everyday users unless they fail. Once we peel back all the layers of contemporary society, we recognise that software also runs in the background of many of our key institutions and systems, from the information systems if a hospital, the planning and organisation of schools, the disturbingly sophisticated communication and targeting capabilities of the military-industrial complex, to the automated financial exchanged that drive global share markets. Authors advice that it’s useful to think of these kinds of everyday practices as coded, in the sense that they are deeply  embedded within and enabled computer code; they have been translated into software and augmented or transformed into something else because of this fact. This has profound implications for the understanding aspects of culture such as the emergence of the internet and web in the 1990s. The web is not just a means of distribution, but also constitutes a medium itself with distinctive characteristics, and underlies more recent and interconnected developments within mobile and gaming devices. These are all developments which constitute a rapidly expanding universe of software culture fed by recombinatory, evolutionary growth as a capability, or function or set of tools become coded they become available to be recombined in new ways for different platforms and contexts. As new spheres of human activity become coded, they become part of a broader emergence and dominance of software culture.

Introduction: Software and other Literacies presents the theory of Software Studies. Software studies adopts the perspective that the study of software partly involves investigating the cultural discourses that are embedded in code, together with the broader implications for users of how these discourses operate through the application of that code. Coding (or programming) is a form of writing which inscribes types of actions to be performed using a computer. Software is a neglected part in the digital revolution and was not recognised as a distinct industry until the 1960s, developing in the wake of the PC age in the 1970s. Practitioners of this industry are software engineers. They describe software development as an advanced writing technique that translates a text or group of texts written in natural language into a binary text or group of texts. No form of code is perfect’ it emerges from human endeavour and its inscribed with the conditions of its creation as with all cultural artefacts. Software is also an evolving part of culture, with authors identifying that Cultural Software as that which is central to cultural production, in it’s broadest terms it includes:

  • The popular forms of software that we use ourselves (Word processing, Image manipulation, internet browsers, media players)
  • Affordance is an action possibility or an offering. Possible actions on a computer system include physical interactions with devices such as screen, keyboard and mouse. Affordances allow us to do particular things; to select, to view, to manipulate in specific ways.

If we look at a software application as providing a set of possible actions, it’s vital to map these affordances in a specific hierarchy. The interface for a piece of software embodies that hierarchy of affordances. The interface is the default tools we find most easily on ribbons or drop-down menus of one of the MS programs for example. There are key aspects of software culture that are useful to consider when seeking to understand the contention that software entails a form of agency. A core premise of software studies is the need to move away from seeing software platforms and applications as neutral, as simply things that you do something with. Programming code needs to be understood as broadly as engendering both forces of empowerment and discipline. Software applications and platforms are attractive precisely because they are designed toward increasing efficiencies and productivity, generating entirely new markets, and providing new forms of play and creativity. However, they also serve as a broad range of technologies that more efficiently and successfully represent, collate, sort, categorise, match profiles and regulate people, processes and places. This tension between empowerment and discipline offers a broad frame for understanding the layered and complete role which software plays at a variety of levels, especially within networked media. Human agency operates in a complex way within software culture; we become part of human-machine assemblages where agency becomes more contingent on a range of human and non-human factors. Networked software, in particular, encourages a communicative environment of rapidly changing feedback mechanisms that tie humans and non-humans together into new aggregates. We co-create with cultural software, exploring and negotiating their potential to enable and constrain new specific practises. Contemporary media is experienced, created, edited, remixed, organised and shared with software… to understand media today we need to understand media software — it’s genealogy, it’s anatomy (interfaces, operations) and it’s practical and theoretical effects. How does media authoring software shape the media being created, making some design choices seem natural and easy to execute while hiding other design possibilities? How does media viewing/managing/remixing of media and the actions we perform on it? How does software change what “media” is conceptually?

The authors argue that at a fundamental level, we are collaborating with programming code when we engage with, respond to, or create content using an application or platform. But this is also the point where the empowering or discipling possibilities of software are actualised. When using the most basic operations of a word processor application, for example, nothing happens without the active intervention of the user. Generating textual content, as with any creative work involving software, involves human users in collaborative performances with a machine. In this sense, there is assumed to be a complex interplay between affordances and performance, which potentially plays out in a unique way each and every time a user engages with any application. We now interact with dynamic software performances, because what we are experiencing is constructed by software in real time (e.g. video game, website). As an example of how an interface imposes its own logic on media, consider “Cute and Paste” operations. digital Literacy is the awareness, attitude and ability of individuals to appropriately identify and access, digital tools and facilities to identify, access, manage, integrate, evaluate, analyse and synthesise digital resources, construct new knowledge, create media expressions and communicate with others, in the context of specific life situations, in order to enable constructive social actions, and to reflect upon this process.

In the end the authors of Introduction: Software and other Literacies hypothesise that there are three progressive tiers of development towards software literacy:

  1. A foundational skill level where a learner can use a particular software
  2. An ability to troubleshoot and problem-solve when an issue is faced in a software
  3. The ability to critique the software

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