ABSTRACT
Building on the two premises in the Preface, this chapter makes the case for critical software studies as a viable field of study. Where Fuller (2008) previously assembled a deliberately incomplete vocabulary of terms, examples and provocations, this work shifts emphasis towards a more explicitly methodological account of how such studies might be undertaken in practice. At a finer grain, critical code studies has made a parallel case for reading source code itself as a culturally situated sign system (Marino 2020). Building on my own earlier short essay (Fletcher 2020) and critical works by others (e.g. Tufte 2016, Barr 2012) but particularly the platform analyses of Pollock and Williams (2008) and Montfort and Bogost (2009) as well as aligning with new media explorations regarding the cultural power of software (Manovich 2021), it explains the value of examining all forms of software as constructed artefacts that simultaneously reflect and shape human behaviour and society (Winner 1980). The study by Pollock and Williams (2008) does share a sensibility with this book in its tracing of the biography of software across multiple sites of practice and over extended periods of time. Our complex relationship with software, by implication, extends to all facets of individual lifeways, whether it is personal, social, organisational or professional experiences, or a mix of all of these. Similar cases have been presented before within anthropology, with digital anthropology positioned around the treatment of the digital as an intensification of long-standing cultural dialectics and intended as a way to disrupt naïve stories about “virtual” life displacing the real (Horst and Miller 2012). Where Horst and Miller (2012) collect together a narrative that covers topics from polymedia in transnational families to e-waste and disability activism, critical software studies narrows the focus to position software as the artefact that represents the starting point for inquiry while sharing the same commitment to holism, materiality and a refusal of false authenticity. In parallel, critical code studies has developed analogous close readings of computer source code as the specific cultural artefact of attention (Marino 2020). These cases for (research) action also act as a warning against obscuring interrogation of software behind a “will to improve” agenda that recasts social life as a sequence of targets that will benefit from software-based optimisation (Morozov 2014). Critical software studies is a proposition for a slower, more situated analytic practice that stays with the tensions, failures and asymmetries that these more common solutionist narratives try to smooth away (irrespective of whether that is in a situation that involves using software or a situation related to the creation of software). A similar view is found in Agre (1997) and his call for a “critical technical practice”. He describes a form of technical work that is continuously interrupted and redirected by reflection on its own metaphors, methods and historical conditions rather than working as if it is part of a foundation-seeking “normal science” (Agre 1997). This attention to the need for critical practice in relation to software is explored in later chapters.
