Tonight, there is a lecture part of CODE which is a follow-up to NextWeb, which I attended about Web 2.0 technologies. What is CODE? This comes from the Project Open Source|Open Access initiative at KMDI.
CODE: Project Open Source|Open Access at the Knowledge Media Design Institute brings you Building the New Agora, an exploration of current perspectives on the contemporary perception of hardware/software and investigates how open source/open access alters our approaches to professional and social networks. Less than five years ago the cultural theorist Lev Manovich claimed that while the 1990s were all about the virtual, the next decade might be about physical space and interactions, albeit augmented by electronic information.
Tonight's lecture is by Wendy Chun of Brown University. This is the abstract of her talk.
The motivation behind the open source software movement has often been discussed in terms of a "gift economy" or pleasure ("just for the fun of it"). Drawing from Benedict Anderson's analysis of the nation as an "imagined community," Chun will argue for the open source movement and other glocal phenomena as "imagined networks." In doing so, she does not argue for the distributed network as the model for our social interactions, bureaucratic organizations, or even our technologies, but rather asks: what needs to be in place for us to understand ourselves and our technologies as networked? How do social and technological abstractions coincide, diverge and inform each other? and how are these abstractions experienced, sensed, felt?
Wendy is looking at the social phenomenon of the open source movement. She is working on this initiative called "open source imagined networks" and code building the new agora. So, I've never really heard of code being called "building a new agora". According to Wendy, it's about involving users and machines in constant and insecure interchanges. Open and public is not synonymous. Building the new agora also raises other questions, agora is not just a public space or marketplace, it is an assembly, this reminds me of the bazaar and cathedral analogy that Richard Stallman talks about when discussing open source software.
Software is a form of enlightenment, the base layer or logic of new media. According to Lev Manovich, new media needs to look to computer science to characterize media that become programmable. Yeah, this shows that computer science permeates society! The essence of software is now becoming philosophical and psychological. What does software do? OED defines software as the programs and procedures required to enable a computer to perform a specific task, as opposed to the physical components of the system. Software blurs the difference, taking the process in time into process in space, turning words into action.
She is now talking about how goto statements complicates the process into command, gotos make it difficult to make the source program to act as a legible source. Gotos also make for "spaghetti code" which every programmer learns when first coding (at least if you're using a programming language that uses gotos like BASIC). So what is code? Code is the first language that actually does what it says - it is a machine for converting meaning into action. Code is the only language that is executable. Source code only becomes source after the fact, so really source is "re-source". According to Wendy, hardware does not require software, for example we can implement conditional branching using gates.
To know the code, is to know that the inside is connected to the outside. This is the first time I've heard the philosophical nature of software, the lecture sounds like one of those philosophy lectures. She is now talking about social interactions with networks. Facebook is social networking software, part of Web 2.0. According to her, Web 2.0 is an imagined network. Facebook provides the interactions for students online. With social network software, we are trying to create cognitive maps.
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