Software, or the Engine of Contemporary Societies
Search engines, recommendation systems, mapping applications, blog tools, auction tools, instant messaging clients, and, of course, platforms which allow others to write new software—iOS [2008], Android [2008], Facebook [2004], Windows [1985], GNU/Linux [1991]—are at the center of the global economy, culture, social life, and, increasingly, politics. This “cultural software”—cultural in a sense that it is directly used by hundreds of millions of people and carries “atoms” of culture (media and information, as well as human interactions around these media and information)—is only the visible part of a much larger software universe.
Software controls the flight of a smart missile toward its target during war, adjusting its course throughout the flight. Software runs the warehouses and production lines of Amazon, Gap, Dell, and numerous other companies, allowing them to assemble and dispatch material objects around the world, in almost no time. Software allows shops and supermarkets to automatically restock their shelves, as well as automatically determine which items should go on sale, for how much, and when and where they go in the store. Software, of course, is what organizes the Internet, routing email messages, delivering webpages from a server, switching network traffic, assigning IP addresses, and rendering webpages in a browser. The school and the hospital, the military base and the scientific laboratory, the airport and the city—all social, economic, and cultural systems of modern society—run on software.
Software is the invisible glue that ties it all together. While the various systems of modern society speak in different languages and have different goals, they all share the syntaxes of software: control statements “if/then” and “while/do,” operators and data types, including characters and floating point numbers, data structures such as lists, and interface conventions encompassing menus and dialog boxes.
Paradoxically, while social scientists, philosophers, cultural critics, media and new media theorists have by now seemed to cover all aspects of the IT revolution, creating a number of new disciplines such as cyberculture, Internet studies, new media theory, and digital culture, the underlying engine which drives most of these subjects—software—has received relatively little direct attention. Even today, when people are constantly interacting with and updating dozens of apps on their mobile phones and other computer devices, “software” as a distinct theoretical category is still invisible to most academics, artists, and cultural professionals interested in IT and its cultural and social effects. […]
If we limit critical discussions of digital culture to the notions of “open access,” “cyber,” “digital,” “Internet,” “networks,” “new media,” or “social media,” we will never be able to get to what is behind new representational and communication media and to understand what it really is and what it does. If we don’t address software itself, we are in danger of always dealing only with its effects rather than its causes: the output that appears on a computer screen rather than the programs and social cultures that produce these outputs.
“Information society,” “knowledge society,” “network society,” “social media”—regardless of which new feature of contemporary existence a particular social theory has focused on, all these new features are enabled by software. It is time we focus on software itself.
What are “Software Studies”?
[…] I think of software as a layer that permeates all areas of contemporary societies. Therefore, if we want to understand contemporary techniques of control, communication, representation, simulation, analysis, decision-making, memory, vision, writing, and interaction, our analysis cannot be complete until we consider this software layer. This means that all disciplines that deal with contemporary society and culture—architecture, design, art criticism, sociology, political science, humanities, science, technology studies, and so on—need to account for the role of software and its effects in whatever subjects they investigate.
At the same time, the existing work in software studies already demonstrates that if we are to focus on software itself, we need new methodologies. That is, it helps to practice what one writes about. It is not accidental that the intellectuals who have most frequently written about the role of software in society and culture so far all either have programmed themselves or have been systematically involved in cultural projects that involve the writing of new software: Katherine Hayles, Wendy Chun, Matthew Fuller, Alexander Galloway, Ian Bogost, Geert Lovink, Paul D. Miller, Peter Lunenfeld, Katie Salen, Eric Zimmerman, Matthew Kirschenbaum, William J. Mitchell, and Bruce Sterling. In contrast, scholars without this technical experience, such as Jay Bolter, Siegfried Zielinski, Manuel Castells, and Bruno Latour, have not included discussions of software in their otherwise theoretically precise and highly influential accounts of modern media and technology.
Since the beginning of this century, the number of students in media art, design, architecture, and the humanities who use programming or scripting in their work has grown substantially. […] Outside the cultural and academic sectors, far more people today are writing software as well. To a significant extent, this is the result of new programming and scripting languages such as Processing [2001], PHP [1994] and ActionScript [1998]. Another important factor is the publication of APIs [Application Programming Interfaces] by all major Web 2.0 companies around 2005. […] These programming and scripting languages […] did not necessarily made programming itself any easier. Rather, they made it much more efficient. For instance, when a young designer can create an interesting design with only couple of dozen lines of code written in Processing versus writing a really long Java program, s/he is much more likely to take up programming. […] It is, therefore, the right moment to start thinking theoretically about how software is shaping our culture, and how it is shaped by culture in its turn. The time for “software studies” has arrived.
What is “Cultural Software”?
German media and literary theorist Friedrich Kittler 11 Friedrich Kittler died on the 18 October, 2011, a few months before the first publication of this text. (Ed.) wrote that the students today should know at least two software languages; only “then will they be able to say something about what ‘culture’ is at the moment.” 22 Friedrich Kittler, Matthew Griffin,Susanne Herrmann, “Technologies of Writing/Rewriting Technology: An Interview with Friedrich Kittler about Cultural Studies in Germany, Literature in the Age of Technology and the Blind Spot in Media Theory,” Auseinander 1:3 (1995), quoted in Michael Truscello, “The Birth of Software Studies: Lev Manovich and Digital Materialism,” Film-Philosophy 7:55 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003). Kittler himself programs in an assembler language which probably engendered his distrust of graphical user interfaces and the modern software which uses these interfaces. Taking a typically modernist stance, Kittler argued that we need to focus on the “essence” of computers—which for Kittler meant the mathematical and logical foundations of modern computing and its early history characterized by tools such as assembler languages.
While Software Studies (as already defined by a growing number of books and articles) is concerned with all types of software, my own particular interests are with cultural software. While this term was used earlier metaphorically, 33 See: Jack M. Balkin, Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). (Ed.) I am going to use it literally to refer to certain types of software which support actions we normally associate with “culture.” These cultural actions enabled by software can be divided into a number of categories:
1. creating, sharing and accessing cultural artifacts which contain representations, ideas, beliefs, and esthetic values (for instance, editing a music video or designing a package for a product);
2. engaging in interactive cultural experiences (for instance, playing a computer game);
3. creating and sharing information and knowledge (for instance, writing an article for Wikipedia, adding places in Google Earth);
4. communicating with other people (email, instant message, voice over IP, online text and video chat, social networking features such as wall postings, pokes, events, photo tags, notes, places, etc.);
5. participating in online information ecology (for instance, adding to information available to Google Web search software for generating future search results every time you use this service, clicking “+1” button on Google+ or “Like” button on Facebook);
6. developing software tools and services which support all these activities (for instance, programming a library for Processing which enables the sending and receiving of data over the Internet).
Technically, this software may implemented in a variety of ways. Popular implementations (referred to in the computer industry as “architectures”) include stand-alone applications which run on user computing devices, distributed applications (a client running a user device communicates with software on the server), and peer-to-peer networks (each computer becomes both a client and a server). If all this sounds completely unfamiliar, don’t worry: all you need to understand is that “cultural software” as I will use this term covers a wide range of products and servers (as opposed to only Word [1983], Photoshop [1990] and Firefox [2002]). All of the above qualify as cultural software: professional film and video editing and visual effects applications that need special computer hardware beyond what a typical laptop offers (i.e., Smoke, Flame and Lustre [2008] from Autodesk), consumer apps like iMovie [1999], social media and social network services such as Facebook and Vimeo [2004]. In the latter case, the software includes multiple programs and databases running on company servers (for instance, [in 2007], Google was thought to have over one million servers around the world [three million in 2016]) and a website and/or apps used by people to send emails, chat, post updates, upload videos, leave comments, etc.
Let’s go through some of the software types which I listed above in a little more detail. The first category is application software for accessing, creating, distributing, and managing (or “publishing,” “sharing,” and “remixing”) media content. The examples are Word [1983], PowerPoint [1990], Photoshop [1990], Illustrator [1987], After Effects [1993], Firefox [2002], Internet Explorer [1995] and Blogger [1999]. […] Therefore, to be able to refer to it via a single simple term, I will call it “media software.”
I will take for granted that since we all use application programs, or “apps,” we all have a basic understanding of this term. 44 For a possible classification of types of application software, see “Application Software” in Wikipedia: http://b-o.fr/app Similarly, I also assume that we understand what “content” refers to in digital culture, but just to be sure, here are a couple of ways to define it. We can simply list various types of media that are created, shared, and accessed with media software and the tools provided by social media and sites: texts, images, digital video, animations, 3D objects and scenes, maps, as well as various combinations of these and other media. Alternatively, we can define “content” by listing genres, for instance webpages, tweets, Facebook updates, casual games, multiplayer online games, user-generated video, search engine results, URLs, map locations, shared bookmarks, etc.
Digital culture tends to modularize content, i.e., to both enable and reward users for creating, distributing, and reusing pieces of “content” on multiple scales—looping animations to be used as backgrounds for videos, 3D objects to be used in creating complex 3D animations, pieces of code to be used in websites and blogs, etc. 55 For an extended discussion of modularity in new media, see: Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). (This modularity parallels the fundamental principle of modern software engineering of designing complete programs using small reusable parts called functions or procedures.) All such parts also qualify as “content.”
Between the late 1970s and the mid-2000s, application programs for media editing were designed to run on a user’s computer […]. In the next five years, companies gradually created more and more capable versions of these programs running in the “cloud.” Some of these programs are available via their own websites (Google Docs [2006]), while others are integrated with media hosting or social media services (i.e. Photobucket image and video editor). 66 Photobucket, which was created in 2003, is an image and video host service organized around a community dedicated to the storage and sharing of multimedia documents. In 2016, Photobucket has hosted more than 10 billion images, with 4 million images and videos being added daily. (Ed.) Many applications are implemented as clients that run on mobile phones (i.e., Maps on iPhone), tablets, and TV platforms and communicate with servers and websites. […]
Cultural software also includes tools and services which are specifically designed for (or at least include comprehensive tools for) communication and sharing of information and knowledge, i.e. “social software.” 77 A system made up of online communication and interaction tools is currently known as “social software” (or a “social application”). See : http://b-o.fr/socialsoft (Ed.) [Managing multimedia content (sorting photos in Picasa [2004] for instance), but also metamanaging (administrating content management systems, like editing a blogroll), 88 A blogroll describes a list of links towards “friendly” blogs of a blog, giving a good overview of the author’s areas of interest, and is usually situated in a side column. (Ed.) has become as central an activity as creating content itself in people’s cultural life. [The cultural software] includes search engines, Web browsers, blog editors, email clients and services, instant messaging clients, wikis, social bookmarking, social networks, virtual worlds, Massively Multiplayer Online Games [MMOG] and prediction markets. […]
Of course, people do not share everything online—at least, not yet. Therefore, we should also include software tools for personal information management such as project managers, database applications, and simple text editors or note taking apps which are included with every computer device being sold.
These categories are gradually but constantly changing over time. For instance, during the 2000s the boundary between “personal information” and “public information” has been reconfigured as people started to routinely place their media on media sharing sites, and also communicate with other on social networks. […]
Until the rise of social media and proliferation of mobile media platforms, it was possible to study media production, dissemination and consumption as separate processes. Similarly, we could usually separate between production tools, distribution technologies, and media access devices and platforms—for example, TV studio, cameras, lighting, and editing machines (production), transmission systems, and television sets (access). Social media and cloud computing in general erase these boundaries in many cases (especially user-generated content) and at the same time introduce new ones (client/server, open access/commercial). The challenge of software studies is to be able to use terms such as “content” and “software application” (which I myself invoked earlier) while always keeping in mind that the current social media / cloud computing paradigms systematically reconfigure what these terms may refer to.
Finally, I need to add one last set of distinctions to this map of cultural software. I am interested in how software appears to users—i.e. what functions it offers to create, share, reuse, communicate, manage and organize, media interfaces used to present these functions, and assumptions and models about a user, his needs, and society *encoded in these functions and their presentation. Functions are embedded in app commands, menus, and the choices they offer—in other words, what you can do with a given app, and how you can do it. […]
Why a Comprehensive History of Cultural Software Does Not Exist
We live in a software culture—that is, a culture where the production, distribution, and reception of most content is mediated by software. And yet, most creative professionals do not know anything about the intellectual history of software they use daily […].
Where does contemporary cultural software come from? How were its metaphors and techniques arrived at? And why was it developed in the first place? […] Despite the common statements that the digital revolution is at least as important as the invention of the printing press, we are largely ignorant of how the key part of this revolution—i.e. media software—was invented. Then when you think about this, it is unbelievable. People in the business of culture know about Gutenberg (printing press), Brunelleschi (perspective), the Lumière Brothers, Griffith and Eisenstein (cinema), Le Corbusier (modern architecture), Isadora Duncan (modern dance), and Saul Bass (motion graphics) […]. Yet, even today, relatively few people have heard of Joseph C. R. Licklider, Ivan Sutherland, Ted Nelson, Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay, and their collaborators who, between approximately 1960 and 1978, have gradually turned the computer into the cultural machine it is today. […]
Modern art institutions—museums such as MoMA and Tate, art book publishers such as Phaidon and Rizzoli—promote the history of modern art. Hollywood is similarly proud of its own history—stars, directors,cinematographers, and classic films. So how can we understand the neglect of the history of cultural computing through our cultural institutions and the computer industry? […]
I believe that the major reason has to do with economics. […] The IT industry […] does not derive any profits from the old software—and therefore, it does nothing to promote its history. Of course, contemporary versions of Word, Photoshop, AutoCAD, and many other popular cultural applications build on the first versions that often date back to the 1980s, and the companies continue to benefit from the patents they filed for new technologies used in these original versions. But, in contrast to video games from the 1980s, these early software versions are not treated as a separate products which can be reissued today. […] In fact, given that consumer culture systematically exploits the nostalgia of adults for the cultural experiences of their teenage years and youth by making these experiences into new products, it is actually surprising that early software versions have not been marketed yet. While I used MacWrite and MacPaint [1984] in the mid-1980s, or Photoshop 1.0 and 2.0 in 1990–1993, I think these experiences were as much a part of my “cultural genealogy” as the movies and art I saw during the same period. […]
Since most theorists so far have not considered cultural software as a subject of its own, distinct from social media, social networks, new media, media art, Internet, interactivity, and cyberculture, we lack not only a conceptual history of media editing software but also systematic investigations of the roles of software in media production. For instance, how has the use of the popular animation and compositing application After Effects reshaped the language of moving images? How did the adoption of [Alias/1, 1985, then Studio Tools, 1990], Maya [1998] and other 3D packages by architectural students and young architects in the 1990s, not to mention the tools available in these programs in different periods similarly influencethe language of architecture? What about the co-evolution of Web design tools and the esthetics of websites—from the bare-bones HTML in 1994 to visually rich Flash-driven sites five years later? […]
How to “Understand Media”
[…] The first goal is to better understand the media objects that we experience and engage with hundreds of times every day: animated TV titles, TV and Web animated ads, graphic designs, illustrations, Web graphics and banners, and so on. Very often, these artifacts are parts of interactive media experiences—navigating the Web, playing a video game. The examples of “engagement” are sharing, editing, remixing, and commenting. (So-called “social media block” buttons [“like,” etc.] […] exemplify these forms of engagements.)
This media is experienced, created, edited, remixed, organized and shared with software. The software includes stand-alone professional media design applications such as Photoshop, Dreamweaver [1997], After Effects, Aperture [2005], Illustrator, Maya, and Word; consumer-level apps such as iPhoto [2002], iMovie, or Picasa; and social media tools (editing/sharing/commenting) provided by social media sites such as Facebook, Vimeo, and Photobucket. Therefore, my second goal is to understand media software—its genealogy (where does it come from), its anatomy (the key features shared by all media viewing and editing software), and its effects in the world. Specifically, I will be concerned with two kinds of effects:
- how media design software shapes the media being created, making some design choices seem natural and easy to execute, while hiding other design possibilities; 2. how media viewing/managing/remixing software shapes our experience of media and the actions we perform on it.
My third goal is to understand what “media” is today conceptually. Do the concepts of media developed to account for industrial area technologies, from photography to video, still work in relation to media that are designed and experienced with software? Do they need to be updated, or completely replaced by new, more appropriate, concepts? For example: do we still have different media or did they merge into a single new metamedium? 99 Regarding the concept of “metamedium” see: Adele Goldberg, Alan Kay, “Personal Dynamic Media,” Computer 10:3 (Washington: IEEE Computer Society Press, 1977), 31–41. (Ed.) Are there some structural features that motion graphics, graphic designs, websites, product designs, buildings, and video games all share since they are all designed with software?
In short, does “media” still exist?
This text is excerpted from the foreword of *Software Takes Command* by Lev Manovich, published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2013.