Ratto Matt

Distributed collective practice, Linux, and a commitment to the material

Abstract

It makes sense that recent studies of the Internet have focused on the social and cultural work that goes into the ongoing construction of sociality - in the past this work within technological contexts was often made invisible. However, I argue that the time has come to renew our interest in the technical aspects of studies of distributed technological systems. By 'commitment to the material' I mean a commitment to acknowledging the importance of the material and technical features that make up the systems that we study. I draw upon some theoretical developments in what has recently been named the study of Distributed Collective Practices (DCP) in order to relate a method for a systematic social and technical analysis of distributed collectivities. While DCP scholars come from many different perspectives and often have wildly divergent agendas, they all share two similar interests. The first is an interest in a notion of social values as located in asymmetrical human relations. The second is a commitment to incorporating the material infrastructure into social analyses. In this paper I use an analysis of the Linux development effort in order to erase or redefine a number of related analytic dichotomies I see as particularly limiting. These include the social and the technical, the cultural and the material, and interface and functionality. To do so, I incorporate a few conceptual definitions from recent DCP work. In addition, I demonstrate my 'commitment to the material' by describing a simple typology for analyzing software and social relations.