For the upcoming MICE (Mistakes, Ignorance, Contingency, and Error) Conference in Munich I have prepared a paper entitled “When Good Software Goes Bad: The Surprising Durability of an Ephemeral Technology.”

In theory, software is a technology that cannot be broken. Virtual gears do not require lubrication, and digital constructs never fall apart. Once a software-based system is working properly, it should continue to work in perpetuity — or at least as long as the underlying hardware platform it runs on remains intact. Any latent “bugs” that subsequently revealed in the software system are considered flaws in the original design or implementation, not the result of the wear-and-tear of daily use, and ideally could be completely eliminated by rigorous development and testing methods.

In practice, however, most software systems are in constant need of repair. Beginning in the early 1960s, large-scale computer users discovered, much to their surprise, that between 50% and 70% of all their operating expenditures were being devoted to “software maintenance.” This meant that most computer programmers were (and are) spending most of their time “fixing” other people’s computer code.

You can read a draft version of the paper here.

The Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics has awarded me a Research Fellows Grant for the academic year 2014-2015. This grant will be used to fund research on my global environmental history of computing.

At the heart of the discipline of computer security is the problem of risk: how to analyze and quantify risks that are for the most part invisible, intangible, and not immediately life-threatening; how to communicate risk to computer users, software developers, and policy-makers; and how to balance the costs associated with alleviating risk against other considerations such as ease-of-use, access, accessibility, and profitability.

Although there is a large technical literature on risk in computer security, the principle focus of this literature is on the psychology of individual risk evaluation or on techniques for communicating risk to the public. But there is a large literature coming out of the history of science and technology that deals with the broader construction of risk as a social and historical phenomenon.

As part of the forthcoming workshop on Computer Security History hosted by the Charles Babbage Center, I am developing a paper that situates the computer security in the larger context of what Anthony Giddens famously called “manufactured risk.” The goal of this project is to mobilize the social and cultural history of “computer hacking” and “cybercrime” (focused primarily on the period in the early- to mid-1980s when these phenomena for the first time received widespread media exposure) to inform contemporary strategies for engaging with risk in the context of cybersecurity.

The paper is called From Whiz Kids to Cybercriminals: Emerging Narratives of Risk in Computer Security

I am very pleased to announce that I have been appointed an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. I am thrilled to be part of this lively and accomplished group of scholars!

New Course   We are often told that we are living in an “Information Society,” and indeed, this is a truth that seems self-evident: communications and information technologies increasingly pervade our homes, our workplaces, our schools, even our own bodies. But what exactly do we mean when we talk about the “Information Society”? If we are living in an Information Society, when did it come into being? What developments — social, economic, political, or technological — made it possible? How does it differ from earlier eras? And finally, and most significantly: what does it all mean?

For the Spring 2014 semester, I am introducing a new course: I222: The Information Society. This course was specifically designed to provide students from a wide variety of humanistic or social scientific disciplines the tools that they need to make sense of the relationship between social and technological change. I222 fulfills the Social and Historical Studies requirements of the Indiana University General Education Requirement.

This course will explore the ways in Western, industrialized societies, over the course of the previous two centuries, came to see information as a crucial commercial, scientific, organizational, political, and commercial asset. Although at the center of our story will be the development of new information technologies — from printing press to telephone to computer to Internet — our focus will not be on machines, but on people, and on the ways in which average individuals contributed to, made sense of, and come to terms with, the many social, technological, and political developments that have shaped the contours of our modern Information Society. Our goal is to use these historical perspectives to inform our discussions about issues of contemporary concern about information technology.

You can find more information about the course at i222info.org.

It has been a busy month of conferences and speaking engagements.

The Commission for the History and Philosophy of Computing hosted the second in a series of HAPOC conferences in Paris this year.   This was an extraordinarily full and productive conference, with speakers and participants from all over Europe, the UK, and the United States.   My contribution was a talk on “the multiple meanings of flowcharts.”

The Society for the History of Technology conference in Portland, Maine, featured many papers in computing related issues.  The Special Interest Group on Computing and Information Science (SIGCIS) hosted a day of talks devoted entirely to the history of computing.  My SHOT talk was devoted to exploring what I am calling “the environmental history of computing.”

Finally, I attended for the first time the annual conference of the Association for Internet Researchers in Denver, Colorado.  Our panel was organized around the idea of revisiting some of the canonical works in our respective disciplines (history, anthropology, communications) in light of changes in information technology.   I spoke about the classic Latour/Woolgar ethnography of science Laboratory Life and asked, in reference to the study of contemporary, computer-centric scientific practices, What Would Bruno Do?.

This week the National Academy of Sciences is celebrating its 150th anniversary with a Sackler Colloquium called “Celebrating Service to the Nation.” Among other things, they are hosting a series of speakers and panels discussing various aspects of NAS history.

At 1:20 PM EST on Friday, October 18, I will be talking about the history of computing at the National Academies.  The talk will be streamed live.

I will also be moderating a panel discussion that includes a cast of computer science all-stars: David Farber, the “grandfather of the Internet”; Robert Kahn, the co-inventor of TCP/IP and one of the “fathers of the Internet”; and Janet Abbate, the noted historian of the Internet.

Update: The videos of the Sackler Colloquium talks can now be found on Youtube.

My article “Is Chess the Drosophila of AI? a Social History of an Algorithm” (Social Studies of Science, 2012) was recently awarded the 2013 Maurice Daumas Prize by the International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC).

The Maurice Daumas prize is “awarded to the best submission of an article on the history of technology published in a journal or edited volume within two previous calendar years.” More information about Maurice Daumas, the pioneering and celebrated French historian of technology, can be found here for those of you who read French. A brief biography in English can be found here.

Receiving the Daumas Prize is a great honor, and I am particularly pleased to see the Chess paper, which is one of my favorite and, I believe, most historiographically innovative articles, receive some attention. The timing is also good, as an excellent new movie about chess and computers has just been released.

For the moment at least, the article is freely available from Sage. If this changes, and you do not have access to the Social Studies of Science archive, you can read draft version of the computer chess paper.

Writing book reviews is one of the more important but least rewarded of all academic activities. Every professional researcher, particularly those in the humanities and social sciences, relies extensively on book reviews to keep current with a large and growing literature. As useful as they are to the scholarly community, however, academic book reviews rarely attract much attention. The exception is when the book under review is also a popular best-seller. An excerpted version of my review of George Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral (Pantheon, 2012), originally published in the Annals of the History of Computing, has been picked up by the IEEE Computer Society.

For the upcoming Society for the History of Technology Conference, I have been working on a paper that situates the history of computing in environmental history. This is about more than simply talking about the environmental consequences of computing (although this is an important and intellectually exciting topic), but about the role of computer technologies in structuring the relationship between humans and their natural environment. What follows is a brief synthesis of the paper. A more complete version to be posted in the future.

One of the more persistent and popular explanations of why the modern “Information Age” is so radically different from other eras in the history of technology has to do with the perceived immateriality of information technology. Whereas other technological revolutions were so clearly associated with the production of physical artifacts and the consumption of material resources, the electronic digital computer is often seen as a low-impact, environmentally-friendly, and increasingly “invisible” (or at least microscopic) technology. We all know that our cars and factories pollute, that large-scale agriculture wastes water, and that our addiction to cheap consumer goods causes landfills to overflow. Information technology, on the other hand, seems to operate largely independently of the physical environment, and in fact enables us to transcend it. To the degree that we can work, live, and interact in Cyberspace, we operate (or so we believe) independently of traditional physical or political geography.

True, the geographical and spiritual center of gravity of the computer industry, Silicon Valley, is named after a component element, but even that small recognition of the material dimensions of semiconductor manufacture manages to conveys a larger message of incorporeality: in the information economy, simple sand and intangible “bits” are transformed, as if by magic, into wealth, power, and control. The fact that Silicon Valley is also home to twenty-nine EPA Superfund sites, the largest concentration in the nation, has not managed to change the perception that the electronic computing is a “clean”, post-industrial technology.

Drawing on the literature on environmental history, this paper surveys the multiple ways in which humans, environment, and computing technology have been in interaction over the past several centuries. From Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine (a product of an increasingly global British maritime empire) to Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machine (designed to solve the problem of “seeing like a state” in the newly trans-continental American Republic) to the emergence of the ecological sciences and the modern petrochemical industry, information technologies have always been closely associated with the human desire to understand and manipulate their physical environment. More recently, humankind has started to realize the environmental impacts of information technology, including not only the toxic byproducts associated with their production, but also the polluting effects of the massive amounts of energy and water required by data centers at Google and Facebook (whose physicality is conveniently and deliberately camouflaged behind the disembodied, ethereal “cloud”).

More specifically, this paper will explore the global life-cycle of a typical laptop computer or cellphone from its material origins in rare earth element mines in post-colonial South America to its manufacture and assembly in the factory city-compounds of southern China through its transportation and distribution to retail stores and households across America and finally to its eventual disposal in the “computer graveyards” outside of Agbogbloshie, Ghana. The goal is to ground the history of information technology in the material world by focusing on the relationship between “computing power” and more traditional processes of resource extraction, exchange, management, and consumption.

My goal for the SHOT Conference over the past few years has been to explore radically new historiographical approaches to the history of computing. (See, for example, my 2012 paper on zombies and artificial intelligence) It would be hard to find a less obvious approach to the history of information technology, whose material dimensions are often dismissed as being irrelevant, than environmental history, but I think this pairing is going to prove particularly fruitful.