Day Two
Social Systems
An OS and its design philosophy "exert an extremely strong influence on the technical cultures that grow up around its host machines," as the motto goes. Passionate groups of devotees and cults form around OSs, defending and promoting them with almost religious zealotry. When Umberto Eco classified the Mac OS as catholic and DOS as protestant, he unleashed a minor religious war. "Technical cultures" refers first to the cultures of technicians. More generally, though, all cultures that are based on media are always technical as well. An argument could even be made that the phenomenon that is society represents nothing other than an effect of the interconnections created by media technology.
The second day will deal with the difficult question of the relationship between the operating systems of technical systems and what in a non-trivial analogy might be called the operating systems of social systems. Sociology of technology, research into the effects of technology and similar approaches have shown that forcing technology and culture into a dichotomy simply doesn't work.
In the design of a technical artifact such as an OS, non-technical aspects come into play in a variety of ways: the culture of the computer scientists within a culture of science; the forms of social organization under which computer scientists work; general, contemporary management and organization theories; broader epistemological fields; the structures of the application domain within which the software is to operate; models of various users of the software (system administrators, programmers, end users - each is assigned his or her place in the system by their respective interface to the OS), etc. These aspects which work their way into the design feed back into the social systems in the form of the artifacts where in turn they effect changes.
The user interface - from the desktop to systems for CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) or groupware - is the central link through which psychological and social systems are mediated into technical ones, and vice versa. The most advanced instance of the interface between man and machine, or more precisely, between humans and digital information are agent systems, allowing the user to train a software module which is able to learn according to his or her wishes. "This implies a two-sided relationship: in order to create and shape the user model, the human has to express himself in the agent; his inner value system has to be made explicitly manifest (at least in the form of examples). At the same time, the phantasmagorical agent serves as a manifest image of the self. It makes objective just how one perceives by regulating what one encounters, and therefore, what one knows (of oneself)." [Pflger 97: 447 f.] It can't be made more clear just how intimately both sides of the reciprocal constitution are interwoven. And further, just how problematic the position held by some cultural scientists is who use and think of the computer as little more than a typewriter.
At the same time, social systems refer to OSs in their self-description. Thomas Wulffen unleashed the term "Betriebsystem Kunst" ("Art Operating System") to the world. The term represents a flat analogy relating more to the "functioning systems" of sociological system theory than to computer science. What's meant are collections, museums, galleries, art schools and art publications, that is, elements underlying the variety of possible "applications" which define the total art system and keep it running. If one were to carry the analogy further, every institutionalization or differentiation of a social functioning system would be based on the formation of an OS, that is, a bundle of functionality, such as the allocation of resources, scheduling and Input/Output (the institutionalized communication with other functioning systems), forming the foundation of a social system. Could the legal system be viewed as the "OS of society"? Or "communication"? Or money? If capital can be seen as the operating system of social systems, with the hardware on which it is compiled (made "excecutable"), with its fundamental operations, its application software and its interfaces to other system components?
Viewing technical and social systems together, thoroughly and deeply, may turn up valuable insight. Actor-Network Theory (Latour, Callon, Law) seems at first glance to offer a vocabulary ideally suited to describing distributed, object-oriented systems. The discourse analysis of technical systems (Friedrich Kittler) makes a subject-centered bias avoidable. System theory as well (Niklas Luhmann) and its concepts of functioning systems which distinguish among various tasks for society seems applicable for the observation of fundamental operations which keep systems running. Or, in the end, would a Marxist reading, a capital analysis of the market and its checks and balances be sufficiently to explain the system?
In any case, it is significant that the term "operating system" has left the field of computer science and is beginning to be utilized by social systems to describe themselves. This alone reveals possible points of departure concerning the construction of the identities of systems in the age of digital media.
Computer scientists who make use of social models and cultural observers who borrow from computing models - in the field between them, additional questions can be raised. Questions about wealth and poverty (which are behind the recent decision of the Mexican government to install GNU-Linux in 140,000 elementary and middle schools), educational questions (are children being socialized into a Microsoft world during their computer lessons?), and last but not least, political questions (who has read-access and who has write-access to which information - a question confronting anyone who designs a multi-user, i.e. a social system).
The goal for this day can obviously not be so ambitious as to completely clarify the relationship between "society" and "technology". It would be enough to show that a relationship exists, to bring the OS out of the background and into the focus of attention and show that this "ground" has social, psychological, cognitive and world-constituting aspects. If the first day proposes that the paradigm shift of OSs takes us into a new phase in which decisions can still be made, then the second day can show that these decisions have an impact on all who have any relationship with media.
Day Two
http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/3/3332/1.html
Darstellungsbreite ändern
Da bei großen Monitoren im Fullscreen-Modus die Zeilen teils unleserlich lang werden, können Sie hier die Breite auf das Minimum zurücksetzen. Die einmal gewählte Einstellung wird durch ein Cookie fortgesetzt, sofern Sie dieses akzeptieren.
