Understanding the actors behind our software
From: Paula Bialski <bialski@???>
Reply-To: Paula Bialski <bialski@???>
CC: maco@???
Hello!
For those STS-curious, Hacker-ish-friendly folks out there (all of
you?), our call for papers* *is now open for next year's 2020 4S/EASST
joint conference in Prague, taking place August 18th-21st. This panel
will be run by myself and Mace Ojala from the IT University Copenhagen.
Please send your 250-word abstracts to bialski@???
<
mailto:bialski@leuphana.de> and maco@??? <
mailto:maco@itu.dk>. The
deadline for submissions is on *February 17th, 2020. *
* *
Looking forward to hearing from you all,
Paula & Mace
ps: please circulate widely!!
Hacker Cultures: Understanding the actors behind our software
Paula Bialski, Leuphana University Luneburg; Mace Ojala, IT University
of Copenhagen
The spiralling changes around how we experience our social and physical
world have stemmed from the massive amount of digital technologies that
are ubiquitously used in all parts of our society today. Big data,
offshore data centres, universities, grocery stores run by software
companies of all shapes and sizes, are often hard to grasp and
black-boxed, deeming the user unable to participate. These
infrastructures are constructed by a wide range of “hackers” – a
slippery term generally applied to anybody building or maintaining
software or hardware. They (or we?) go by a wide range of labels such as
programmers, developers (or “devs”), designers, analysts, data
scientists, coders, sysadmins, dev/ops, or sometimes simply tech. They
build, break, fix, and secure our navigation system, our banking
database, our doctor’s healthcare software, our games, our phones, our
word processors, our fridges and toasters. They work in massive software
corporations, in teeny startups, or in something in-between. They
volunteer for, or are employed by, free and open-source projects. While
their work is ubiquitous, hackers can hold a lot of power but also none
at all – as the software they are building oftentimes overpowers their
capabilities of understanding and managing it. Inspired by research
around hacker cultures, such as Chris Kelty’s work among free software
communities, Biella Coleman’s work on the Debian communities (2012) and
the politically-motivated hacker collective Anonymous (2014), or Stuart
Geiger’s embedded ethnography in Wikipedia (2017 with Halfaker) – this
panel shines a light on the people who build our opaque and oftentimes
confusing technical worlds. In doing so, we wish to challenge the role
of the STS scholar in describing the powers and agencies, and the
practices and struggles of hacker cultures – a challenge that, in our
increasingly complex, commodified technical worlds might never be fulfilled.
Submit To: bialski@??? <
mailto:bialski@leuphana.de>
Keywords: software, hackers, culture, agency, data collection,
ethnography, computing
Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology
Big Data
Engineering and Infrastructure
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