| What is the relationship between software and everyday life? The answer I offer, in disciplinary and ethico-political terms, is a study in discursive demarcation I call the "rhetorical ecology of the technical effect." This study articulates the spatial, temporal, and cross-cultural technicities of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), the bridge between software and everyday life.; The phrase, rhetorical ecology of the technical effect, epitomizes and guides this study. It is heavily ramified and accrues meaning as we move among the categories of my analysis, and I trace out its implications with some detail in the conclusion. By rhetoric, I mean symbolic inducement: the specific ways in which the use of symbols generally, and language specifically, shapes belief and action. By ecology, I signal the discursive interconnectedness of the categories and domains, programs and appliances, communities and practices, of ubiquitous computing. By technical effect, I invoke the amorphous but charged criterion of European patent law that seeks to identify ownership of software with mechanical behaviours. Three defining goals inform my use of these components: first, to foreground the interconnectedness, rather than the dichotomy, of software and everyday life; second, to re-appropriate the metaphor of the "software ecosystem," which has been deployed by Microsoft as a filter that legitimates technolibertarian politics; third, to bridge cultural studies and media studies, and create a paradisciplinary dialogue.; The overall rhetorical ecology of technicity that emerges from this approach situates the relationship between software and everyday life in terms of three transversal categories of Everyday Life Studies (architecture, gifting, and geography), to reflect the "cultural turn" in FOSS. The introductory chapter traces the genealogy of Software Studies, a developing field, as its concerns and tactics become oriented toward the everyday; contrapuntally, the middle section of the chapter traces the encroachment of software on the cultural studies notion of "everyday life." After mapping the everydayness of software and the mediatization of everyday life, I outline a synthesis of the two disciplinary trajectories in the notion of the rhetorical ecology of the technical effect. The middle chapters, following a brief of history of FOSS, are largely descriptive and performative of this rhetorical ecology, as I examine the spatial technicities of Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and the temporal technicities of FOSS gifting. Next, I examine the cross-cultural demarcation of software using the example of Swatantra Software, the Indian name for Free Software.; The conclusion brings the results of these investigations together under an ethico-political extension of rhetorical ecology in the form of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call "the common," in their communicative theory of biopolitical production, which moves the current discussion of "the civil commons" beyond its discursive entrenchment and toward a more democratic model for the programming of everyday life. |
