PDF Ebook Software Takes Command
In the beginning of the 1990s, the most famous global brands were the companies that were in the business of producing materials goods or processing physical matter. Today, however, the lists of best-recognized global brands are topped with the names such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. (In fact, Google was number one in the world in 2007 in terms of brand recognition.) And, at least in the U.S., the most widely read newspapers and magazines - New York Times, USA Today, Business Week, etc. - daily feature news and stories about YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Apple, Google, and other IT companies.
What about other media? If you access CNN web site and navigate to the business section, you will see a market data for just ten companies and indexes displayed right on the home page.1 Although the list changes daily, it is always likely to include some of the same IT brands. Lets take January 21, 2008 as an example. On that day CNN list consisted from the following companies and indexes: Google, Apple, S&P 500 Index, Nasdaq Composite Index, Dow Jones Industrial Average, Cisco Systems, General Electric, General Motors, Ford, Intel.2
This list is very telling. The companies that deal with physical goods and energy appear in the second part of the list: General Electric, General Motors, Ford. Next we have two IT companies that provide hardware: Intel makes computer chips, while Cisco makes network equipment. What about the two companies which are on top: Google and Apple? The first appears to be in the business of information, while the second is making consumer electronics: laptops, monitors, music players, etc. But actually, they are both really making something else. And apparently, this something else is so crucial to theworkings of US economy—and consequently, global world as well—that these companies almost daily appear in business news. And the major Internet companies that also daily appear in news - Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon, eBay – are in the same business.
This “something else” is software. Search engines, recommendation systems, mapping applications, blog tools, auction tools, instant messaging clients, and, of course, platforms which allow others to write new software – Facebook, Windows, Unix, Android – are in the center of the global economy, culture, social life, and, increasingly, politics. And this “cultural software” – cultural in a sense that it is directly used by hundreds of millions of people and that it 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, almost in 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 in the store. Software, of course, is what organizes the Internet, routing email messages, delivering Web pages from a server, switching network traffic, assigning IP addresses, and rendering Web pages 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 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.
If electricity and the combustion engine made industrial society possible, software similarly enables gllobal information society. The “knowledge workers”, the “symbol analysts”, the “creative industries”, and the “service industries” - all these key economic players of information society can’t exist without software. Data visualization software used by a scientist, spreadsheet software used a financial analyst, Web design software used by a designer working for a transnational advertising energy, reservation software used by an airline. Software is what also drives the process of globalization, allowing companies to distribute management nodes, production facilities, and storage and consumption outputs around the world. Regardless of which new dimension of contemporary existence a particular social theory of the last few decades has focused on—information society, knowledge society, or network society—all these new dimensions are enabled by software.
Paradoxically, while social scientists, philosophers, cultural critics, and media and new media theorists have by now seem to cover all aspects of IT revolution, creating a number of new disciplines such as cyber culture, Internet studies, new media theory, and digital culture, the underlying engine which drives most of these subjects—software—has received little or not direct attention. Software is still invisible to most academics, artists, and cultural professionals interested in IT and its cultural and social effects. (One important exception is Open Source movement and related issues around copyright and IP that has been extensively discussed in many academic disciplines). But if we limit critical discussions to the notions of “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 the 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.
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PDF Ebook Software Takes Command
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