Maintain-ability : A Thesis On Life Alongside Computer Software
Ojala, Mace (2021)
Ojala, Mace
2021
Informaatiotutkimuksen maisteriohjelma - Master's Programme in Information Studies
Informaatioteknologian ja viestinnän tiedekunta - Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences
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Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2022-02-14
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202202031820
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202202031820
Tiivistelmä
Cultural ideas about technology systematically exclude the mundane everyday of maintaining and taking care of them over longue durée. Popular as well as expert views of digital technologies and computer software in particular are oriented towards the novel, new and futuristic. Despite this amnesia, the future is always built on inherited material past, and extends its legacies.
This thesis examines what lessons about living with technology can we learn from software maintainers, who behind the scenes keep necessary digital infrastructures – at least most of the time – in good running order. The empirical material of the research was collected through participant observation and unstructured interviews conducted at four events in Europe and USA. Drawing from science and technology studies and anthropology of technology, I identify themes which concern programmers as they give testimony of their lives lived alongside computer software. My analysis juxtaposes maintenance-oriented programming with maintenance practices in general, and contextualizes biographies of programmers in wider cultural, symbolic and technological infrastructures.
The findings of this thesis challenge the imaginary of existing software as an atemporal object, and complicate the notions of maintenance as low-status work. Software maintainers exercise considerable agency over the immediate material in their care; code. However in doing so, they also find themselves having to articulate dynamic, interdependent and hybrid networks of relations which they are intimately entangled with, and whose durability depends on the success of their ongoing, indeterminate reconfiguration. Both the programmers and the software they maintain must continuously navigate risks of burnout, bugs or falling into obsolescence. Inspired by feminist technoscience and in response to so-called broken world thinking, I theorize the concept of maintain-ability and demonstrate its application to foreground the situated, fragile and often underappreciated capacity to give and receive care which holds together more-than-human worlds at the dawn of the third millennium.
This thesis examines what lessons about living with technology can we learn from software maintainers, who behind the scenes keep necessary digital infrastructures – at least most of the time – in good running order. The empirical material of the research was collected through participant observation and unstructured interviews conducted at four events in Europe and USA. Drawing from science and technology studies and anthropology of technology, I identify themes which concern programmers as they give testimony of their lives lived alongside computer software. My analysis juxtaposes maintenance-oriented programming with maintenance practices in general, and contextualizes biographies of programmers in wider cultural, symbolic and technological infrastructures.
The findings of this thesis challenge the imaginary of existing software as an atemporal object, and complicate the notions of maintenance as low-status work. Software maintainers exercise considerable agency over the immediate material in their care; code. However in doing so, they also find themselves having to articulate dynamic, interdependent and hybrid networks of relations which they are intimately entangled with, and whose durability depends on the success of their ongoing, indeterminate reconfiguration. Both the programmers and the software they maintain must continuously navigate risks of burnout, bugs or falling into obsolescence. Inspired by feminist technoscience and in response to so-called broken world thinking, I theorize the concept of maintain-ability and demonstrate its application to foreground the situated, fragile and often underappreciated capacity to give and receive care which holds together more-than-human worlds at the dawn of the third millennium.