Anthropology of Technology and Sociology of Computing

Time: 10 AM to 12 PM

Location: 401 Physical Sciences Building, Cornell University

Event Date: Mar 8, 2014

Organization: Northeast STS Graduate Student Conference

Through ethnographic interviews and participant observation of the community of third party app developers for Apple, I will show how it is produced and maintained through local club meetings and periodic conferences.... more abstractThrough ethnographic interviews and participant observation of the community of third party app developers for Apple, I will show how it is produced and maintained through local club meetings and periodic conferences. It is at physical meet ups, where developers create informal social relationships and share technical knowledge and practices, that a sense of community is formed. Knowledge sharing, both locally and online, through blogs and Twitter feeds, and the publication of programming books, also plays an important role for community members to gain status and fame, allowing some individuals to become spokespeople for the community vis-a-vis Apple. Although its relations with Apple are highly asymmetric, the community has a symbiotic relationship with the company, with which it often supports, although occasionally it has tensions with as well. One of these tensions involves Apple's culture of secrecy which exists in tension with the community's culture of free sharing of information. I compare and contrast the Apple developer community, which exists in both cooperation and tension with a large, proprietary technology producer which produces the tools developers use and sets the terms of their use, with open source programmers, which Kelty (2008) and Coleman (2013) have shown produce their own software tools and infrastructure. Despite this difference, third party Apple developers share with open source programmers an ethic of information sharing and actively share code, tools, and practices to supplement lacunae in what Apple provides. This study contributes to STS user studies, software studies, and cultures of computing.

Ethnography and Sociology of Computing

Time: 4 PM to 6 PM

Location: San Diego

Event Date: Oct 11, 2013

Organization: Society for Social Studies of Science

Topic: Apple’s object-oriented “Cocoa” technology is the key component of the iPhone software platform. Recently, scores of developers have learned Cocoa in the hopes of making it big writing iPhone “Apps.” However, t... more abstractTopic: Apple’s object-oriented “Cocoa” technology is the key component of the iPhone software platform. Recently, scores of developers have learned Cocoa in the hopes of making it big writing iPhone “Apps.” However, the core of the Cocoa software developer community predates Apple’s acquisition of Cocoa in 1997. Before this, Cocoa was the programming environment for the NeXTSTEP OS, the product of Steve Jobs’ second company, NeXT, which he formed in 1985 after being forced out of Apple. NeXT found a niche selling its development tools to financial institutions, and its early developer community consisted mainly of contractors for the Fortune 500. This paper will look at NeXT developers’ accounts of this 1990s period, and what work they do for the Cocoa community in the present. Argument: Because of NeXTSTEP’s small marketshare, and the obscurity of its programming language, Objective-C, choosing to become a NeXT application developer in the 1990s would seem an irrational career decision. How then, did NeXT developers justify such a move? Developers stressed NeXTSTEP’s technological advantages: its rich and extensible libraries, which to them best embodied the object-oriented paradigm. Rather than develop for the mass market, NeXT developers chose NeXTSTEP because it was personally “fun” and “enjoyable” and because they saw it as the wave of the future. This narrative presents a quasi-religious tale of a small but devoted band of true believers who persevere until a time when the world sees the light. For longtime Cocoa developers, the advent of a mass consumer market with the iPhone App Store in 2008 serves as the culmination of this evangelization narrative. In a community that has recently seen dramatic expansion and includes newcomers whose sole reason for writing for Cocoa is to make money, longtime Cocoa application developers’ evocation of the NeXT days serves several purposes. First, their commitment to the technology during a difficult “exile” period separates the true faithful from the pretenders. Secondly, their longevity serves as a sign of expertise. This cultural capital give their opinions on such forums as blogs and mailing lists weight, and in a labor market in which true experts are of limited supply, visibility, employability, and influence, potentially on Apple itself. Evidence: Oral history interviews of longtime NeXT and Cocoa developers in Seattle, Atlanta, and Silicon Valley. Trade publications such as NeXTWORLD. Blogs and Twitter accounts of prominent Cocoa developers, Cocoa mailing list archives. Contribution to Existing Literature: Popular accounts of NeXT draw upon both software industry narratives surrounding object-oriented programming as progress in the software industry, as well as personal computing narratives tied to Steve Jobs’s association with countercultural values. Nathan Ensmenger’s work on the rhetoric of object-oriented programming as a response to the software crisis speaks to the former, while Fred Turner’s work on the counterculture and computing speaks to the latter. Although popular histories of Apple abound, scholarly work is rare, and that on NeXT is rarer, although Randall Stross’s journalistic account of NeXT from 1985-1993 is an insightful resource. Due to NeXT’s secrecy policy and the topic’s closeness to the present, archival access is difficult, but oral histories of third party actors should shed light on a technological frame (Bijker 1995) drawing from both industry object-oriented rhetoric as well as personal computing values. While oral accounts may be problematic for historical accuracy, these accounts can reveal the role of folk historical narratives for the construction of technical communities, serving roles similar to Stewart Brand’s publications, drawing upon multiple cultural sources to legitimate status and expertise in the present.

History Of Computing and Sociology of Computing

Time: 8 AM to 10 AM

Event Date: Nov 5, 2011

Organization: Society for the History of Technology

In this paper I present initial findings of an ethnographic study of a for-profit programming education company, the “Big Nerd Ranch.” Though not affiliated with Apple, the "Big Nerd Ranch" teaches programmers to use ... more abstractIn this paper I present initial findings of an ethnographic study of a for-profit programming education company, the “Big Nerd Ranch.” Though not affiliated with Apple, the "Big Nerd Ranch" teaches programmers to use Apple’s object-oriented “Cocoa” technology for the iPhone and Macintosh. It offers weeklong training seminars on both introductory and advanced topics in Cocoa programming, and publishes iPhone and Cocoa programming books. This study will examine how “good” Cocoa programmers are produced–how they are educated and disciplined to think and practice like Cocoa programmers, and, like Hugh Gusterson’s (1996) work on the production of nuclear weapons scientists, how practitioners become enrolled in a technological project and its associated ideologies. This forms a part of my larger project examining sociotechnical values and identity construction in the Cocoa community. Drawing on Oudshoorn and Pinch (2004), I also look at programmers as users of technologies–programming languages, development tools, and design methodologies. I will discuss how these “users” are taught to use these technologies as means for the production of other technologies–consumer “Apps”– and the role these tools play in programmers’ identity construction. I will examine such issues as: what socio-technical values students learn and unlearn; how newcomers are introduced into the Cocoa community; and how the identity of “Cocoa programmer” is performed by instructors and taken on by newcomers. This study will contribute to the STS fields of user studies, software studies, and computing cultures.

Ethnography and Sociology of Computing

Time: 1 PM to 3 PM

Location: Cleveland

Event Date: Nov 4, 2011

Organization: Society for Social Studies of Science

How do cultural values become inscribed in computer code? In this paper I report on the initial findings of my ethnographic study of an iPhone software startup company. The study (conducted over the summer of 2008) in... more abstractHow do cultural values become inscribed in computer code? In this paper I report on the initial findings of my ethnographic study of an iPhone software startup company. The study (conducted over the summer of 2008) involved field work, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews with key informants. The iPhone’s software environment is based on the Cocoa environment on Mac OS X, itself a descendent of NeXT technology. A coherent community of NeXT developers migrated to the Mac and now to iPhone. My study focuses upon the ways in which Cocoa Mac developers continued to promote the cultural values associated with NeXT in the design and development of iPhone applications. The study reveals a number of interesting tensions as the Cocoa developer community interacted increasingly with business values. I discuss these tensions as a form of “boundary work” that demarcated Cocoa engineers from businesspeople, coders from other platforms (Android, Windows, Linux) as well as “iPhone hackers.” I also examine a technical controversy at my fieldwork site involving which programming language should be used to implement the company’s “backend” server software. This controversy became a highly political contest for control over the company’s culture: was the company a group of independent “artists” trying to express their creativity, or a traditional capitalist entity concerned with competition, platform building, opportunities, and risks? Moreover, each side presented the other as dogmatic, rather than objective, about their programming language preferences. This study is intended as an empirical contribution to the STS literature on the politics of code, and to the ethnography of computing subcultures, by focusing on a simultaneously powerful but niche group, the community of Cocoa developers. It draws on and complements Michiel van Meeteren’s 2008 study of “indie” Mac developers, but with different emphases. My study will contribute to current discussions of the role of users in SCOT (Oudshoorn and Pinch 2004, Greenberg 2007). It is my hope that this study will explicate the role of cultural values in technical debates between proponents of different software technologies.

Sociology of Computing

Time: 2 PM to 4 PM

Location: Washington, D.C.

Event Date: Oct 29, 2009

Organization: Society for Social Studies of Science

Michael Mahoney and Nathan Ensmenger have both written about the software crisis through the lens of labor history, and both have touched upon object-oriented programming (OOP) as one proposed solution to the crisis. ... more abstractMichael Mahoney and Nathan Ensmenger have both written about the software crisis through the lens of labor history, and both have touched upon object-oriented programming (OOP) as one proposed solution to the crisis. Both have suggested that techniques such as OOP were part of a management strategy to discipline software workers, by making programming more “scientific” through Taylorization or Fordization and less of a “black art.” Despite such attempts, however, programming is still widely considered an art or craft, and this view is corroborated by my ethnographic research of programmers at an iPhone startup. Yet OOP has not withered but thrived, and within the context of my case study of iPhone and Macintosh programming, certain OOP technologies have become part of an “Apple” or “Cocoa” technical culture to be espoused in defiance of management over other, more widely accepted technologies. Moreover, a look at practitioners’ accounts by Alan Kay, Bjarne Stroustrup, and Brad Cox, suggest a more academic, computer science origin for OOP. While motivated by the software crisis, I suspect that OOP did not arise from management attempts to control programmers, but from programmers’ own attempts to find solutions to the crisis by creating technologies to discipline themselves, create better design practices, and better respond to users’ needs.

History Of Computing and History of Software Engineering

Time: 2 PM to 4 PM

Location: Pittsburgh

Event Date: Oct 18, 2009

Organization: Special Interest Group for Computers, Information, and Society of the Society for the History of Technology

Sociology Of Technology (Science And Technology Studies), Software Development, Ethnography of Science, Technology and Practices, Software Developer, and Sociology of Information and Communication Technologies

Publication Date: Feb 10, 2015

Publication Name: East Asian Science, Technology and Society

Computer Networks, Sociology of Technology, Anthropology of Technology, Databases, Software, and 1 more

Journal Name: Social Studies of Science

Publication Date: Dec 2013

Publication Name: Social Studies of Science

Sociology of Computing

Time: 12 PM to 1 PM

Location: 374 Rockefeller Hall

Event Date: Nov 4, 2013

Organization: Cornell University Science Studies Research Group

Ethnography and Sociology of Computing

Time: 12 PM to 1 PM

Location: 374 Rockefeller Hall

Event Date: Apr 29, 2013

Organization: Cornell University, Science Studies Research Group

Anthropology of Technology and Sociology of Computing

Time: 10 AM to 12 PM

Location: 401 Physical Sciences Building, Cornell University

Event Date: Mar 8, 2014

Organization: Northeast STS Graduate Student Conference

Through ethnographic interviews and participant observation of the community of third party app developers for Apple, I will show how it is produced and maintained through local club meetings and periodic conferences.... more abstractThrough ethnographic interviews and participant observation of the community of third party app developers for Apple, I will show how it is produced and maintained through local club meetings and periodic conferences. It is at physical meet ups, where developers create informal social relationships and share technical knowledge and practices, that a sense of community is formed. Knowledge sharing, both locally and online, through blogs and Twitter feeds, and the publication of programming books, also plays an important role for community members to gain status and fame, allowing some individuals to become spokespeople for the community vis-a-vis Apple. Although its relations with Apple are highly asymmetric, the community has a symbiotic relationship with the company, with which it often supports, although occasionally it has tensions with as well. One of these tensions involves Apple's culture of secrecy which exists in tension with the community's culture of free sharing of information. I compare and contrast the Apple developer community, which exists in both cooperation and tension with a large, proprietary technology producer which produces the tools developers use and sets the terms of their use, with open source programmers, which Kelty (2008) and Coleman (2013) have shown produce their own software tools and infrastructure. Despite this difference, third party Apple developers share with open source programmers an ethic of information sharing and actively share code, tools, and practices to supplement lacunae in what Apple provides. This study contributes to STS user studies, software studies, and cultures of computing.

Ethnography and Sociology of Computing

Time: 4 PM to 6 PM

Location: San Diego

Event Date: Oct 11, 2013

Organization: Society for Social Studies of Science

Topic: Apple’s object-oriented “Cocoa” technology is the key component of the iPhone software platform. Recently, scores of developers have learned Cocoa in the hopes of making it big writing iPhone “Apps.” However, t... more abstractTopic: Apple’s object-oriented “Cocoa” technology is the key component of the iPhone software platform. Recently, scores of developers have learned Cocoa in the hopes of making it big writing iPhone “Apps.” However, the core of the Cocoa software developer community predates Apple’s acquisition of Cocoa in 1997. Before this, Cocoa was the programming environment for the NeXTSTEP OS, the product of Steve Jobs’ second company, NeXT, which he formed in 1985 after being forced out of Apple. NeXT found a niche selling its development tools to financial institutions, and its early developer community consisted mainly of contractors for the Fortune 500. This paper will look at NeXT developers’ accounts of this 1990s period, and what work they do for the Cocoa community in the present. Argument: Because of NeXTSTEP’s small marketshare, and the obscurity of its programming language, Objective-C, choosing to become a NeXT application developer in the 1990s would seem an irrational career decision. How then, did NeXT developers justify such a move? Developers stressed NeXTSTEP’s technological advantages: its rich and extensible libraries, which to them best embodied the object-oriented paradigm. Rather than develop for the mass market, NeXT developers chose NeXTSTEP because it was personally “fun” and “enjoyable” and because they saw it as the wave of the future. This narrative presents a quasi-religious tale of a small but devoted band of true believers who persevere until a time when the world sees the light. For longtime Cocoa developers, the advent of a mass consumer market with the iPhone App Store in 2008 serves as the culmination of this evangelization narrative. In a community that has recently seen dramatic expansion and includes newcomers whose sole reason for writing for Cocoa is to make money, longtime Cocoa application developers’ evocation of the NeXT days serves several purposes. First, their commitment to the technology during a difficult “exile” period separates the true faithful from the pretenders. Secondly, their longevity serves as a sign of expertise. This cultural capital give their opinions on such forums as blogs and mailing lists weight, and in a labor market in which true experts are of limited supply, visibility, employability, and influence, potentially on Apple itself. Evidence: Oral history interviews of longtime NeXT and Cocoa developers in Seattle, Atlanta, and Silicon Valley. Trade publications such as NeXTWORLD. Blogs and Twitter accounts of prominent Cocoa developers, Cocoa mailing list archives. Contribution to Existing Literature: Popular accounts of NeXT draw upon both software industry narratives surrounding object-oriented programming as progress in the software industry, as well as personal computing narratives tied to Steve Jobs’s association with countercultural values. Nathan Ensmenger’s work on the rhetoric of object-oriented programming as a response to the software crisis speaks to the former, while Fred Turner’s work on the counterculture and computing speaks to the latter. Although popular histories of Apple abound, scholarly work is rare, and that on NeXT is rarer, although Randall Stross’s journalistic account of NeXT from 1985-1993 is an insightful resource. Due to NeXT’s secrecy policy and the topic’s closeness to the present, archival access is difficult, but oral histories of third party actors should shed light on a technological frame (Bijker 1995) drawing from both industry object-oriented rhetoric as well as personal computing values. While oral accounts may be problematic for historical accuracy, these accounts can reveal the role of folk historical narratives for the construction of technical communities, serving roles similar to Stewart Brand’s publications, drawing upon multiple cultural sources to legitimate status and expertise in the present.

History Of Computing and Sociology of Computing

Time: 8 AM to 10 AM

Event Date: Nov 5, 2011

Organization: Society for the History of Technology

In this paper I present initial findings of an ethnographic study of a for-profit programming education company, the “Big Nerd Ranch.” Though not affiliated with Apple, the "Big Nerd Ranch" teaches programmers to use ... more abstractIn this paper I present initial findings of an ethnographic study of a for-profit programming education company, the “Big Nerd Ranch.” Though not affiliated with Apple, the "Big Nerd Ranch" teaches programmers to use Apple’s object-oriented “Cocoa” technology for the iPhone and Macintosh. It offers weeklong training seminars on both introductory and advanced topics in Cocoa programming, and publishes iPhone and Cocoa programming books. This study will examine how “good” Cocoa programmers are produced–how they are educated and disciplined to think and practice like Cocoa programmers, and, like Hugh Gusterson’s (1996) work on the production of nuclear weapons scientists, how practitioners become enrolled in a technological project and its associated ideologies. This forms a part of my larger project examining sociotechnical values and identity construction in the Cocoa community. Drawing on Oudshoorn and Pinch (2004), I also look at programmers as users of technologies–programming languages, development tools, and design methodologies. I will discuss how these “users” are taught to use these technologies as means for the production of other technologies–consumer “Apps”– and the role these tools play in programmers’ identity construction. I will examine such issues as: what socio-technical values students learn and unlearn; how newcomers are introduced into the Cocoa community; and how the identity of “Cocoa programmer” is performed by instructors and taken on by newcomers. This study will contribute to the STS fields of user studies, software studies, and computing cultures.

Ethnography and Sociology of Computing

Time: 1 PM to 3 PM

Location: Cleveland

Event Date: Nov 4, 2011

Organization: Society for Social Studies of Science

How do cultural values become inscribed in computer code? In this paper I report on the initial findings of my ethnographic study of an iPhone software startup company. The study (conducted over the summer of 2008) in... more abstractHow do cultural values become inscribed in computer code? In this paper I report on the initial findings of my ethnographic study of an iPhone software startup company. The study (conducted over the summer of 2008) involved field work, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews with key informants. The iPhone’s software environment is based on the Cocoa environment on Mac OS X, itself a descendent of NeXT technology. A coherent community of NeXT developers migrated to the Mac and now to iPhone. My study focuses upon the ways in which Cocoa Mac developers continued to promote the cultural values associated with NeXT in the design and development of iPhone applications. The study reveals a number of interesting tensions as the Cocoa developer community interacted increasingly with business values. I discuss these tensions as a form of “boundary work” that demarcated Cocoa engineers from businesspeople, coders from other platforms (Android, Windows, Linux) as well as “iPhone hackers.” I also examine a technical controversy at my fieldwork site involving which programming language should be used to implement the company’s “backend” server software. This controversy became a highly political contest for control over the company’s culture: was the company a group of independent “artists” trying to express their creativity, or a traditional capitalist entity concerned with competition, platform building, opportunities, and risks? Moreover, each side presented the other as dogmatic, rather than objective, about their programming language preferences. This study is intended as an empirical contribution to the STS literature on the politics of code, and to the ethnography of computing subcultures, by focusing on a simultaneously powerful but niche group, the community of Cocoa developers. It draws on and complements Michiel van Meeteren’s 2008 study of “indie” Mac developers, but with different emphases. My study will contribute to current discussions of the role of users in SCOT (Oudshoorn and Pinch 2004, Greenberg 2007). It is my hope that this study will explicate the role of cultural values in technical debates between proponents of different software technologies.

Sociology of Computing

Time: 2 PM to 4 PM

Location: Washington, D.C.

Event Date: Oct 29, 2009

Organization: Society for Social Studies of Science

Michael Mahoney and Nathan Ensmenger have both written about the software crisis through the lens of labor history, and both have touched upon object-oriented programming (OOP) as one proposed solution to the crisis. ... more abstractMichael Mahoney and Nathan Ensmenger have both written about the software crisis through the lens of labor history, and both have touched upon object-oriented programming (OOP) as one proposed solution to the crisis. Both have suggested that techniques such as OOP were part of a management strategy to discipline software workers, by making programming more “scientific” through Taylorization or Fordization and less of a “black art.” Despite such attempts, however, programming is still widely considered an art or craft, and this view is corroborated by my ethnographic research of programmers at an iPhone startup. Yet OOP has not withered but thrived, and within the context of my case study of iPhone and Macintosh programming, certain OOP technologies have become part of an “Apple” or “Cocoa” technical culture to be espoused in defiance of management over other, more widely accepted technologies. Moreover, a look at practitioners’ accounts by Alan Kay, Bjarne Stroustrup, and Brad Cox, suggest a more academic, computer science origin for OOP. While motivated by the software crisis, I suspect that OOP did not arise from management attempts to control programmers, but from programmers’ own attempts to find solutions to the crisis by creating technologies to discipline themselves, create better design practices, and better respond to users’ needs.

History Of Computing and History of Software Engineering

Time: 2 PM to 4 PM

Location: Pittsburgh

Event Date: Oct 18, 2009

Organization: Special Interest Group for Computers, Information, and Society of the Society for the History of Technology

Sociology Of Technology (Science And Technology Studies), Software Development, Ethnography of Science, Technology and Practices, Software Developer, and Sociology of Information and Communication Technologies

Publication Date: Feb 10, 2015

Publication Name: East Asian Science, Technology and Society

Computer Networks, Sociology of Technology, Anthropology of Technology, Databases, Software, and 1 more

Journal Name: Social Studies of Science

Publication Date: Dec 2013

Publication Name: Social Studies of Science

Sociology of Computing

Time: 12 PM to 1 PM

Location: 374 Rockefeller Hall

Event Date: Nov 4, 2013

Organization: Cornell University Science Studies Research Group

Ethnography and Sociology of Computing

Time: 12 PM to 1 PM

Location: 374 Rockefeller Hall

Event Date: Apr 29, 2013

Organization: Cornell University, Science Studies Research Group

History Of Computing

History Of Computing

History Of Computing