Schedule FSCONS X

Since the invention of the personal computer in the 1970s, computers have become increasingly part of our daily practices, yet the majority of users of digital media still lack a basic understanding of who is shaping their reality and how they are doing so. Computer programming or coding involves subjective decisions – from when and how data is categorised, to how an interface is designed. Corporate software developers are a quiet, quite unknown mass of people who make decisions that shape the way in which society functions, in turn helping shape our social futures. This emerging social class – with the knowledge to design, manoeuvre, and hack computer systems – holds the key to the back-doors of society.

As an ethnographer of social media, I spent months in a large corporate software company in order to understands and uncover the sometimes magical and mystical life-worlds of programmers. Based on an ethnographic study of programmer’s cultures in Silicon Valley and a 2-month organizational ethnography at a large corporate technology company in Berlin, this presentation gives a voice to our everyday developers - how they innovate, the relationship to the machine, how they negotiate power.

Info

Day: 2016-11-13
Start time: 10:00
Duration: 00:45
Room: Conference Room
Track: FSCONS X
Language:

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