Szczepanska, Anna Maria

Open Source and the Construction of Collective Identity

Abstract

The increase of "new social movements" since the 1960's has been identified as an answer to different kinds of conflicts and ambivalences caused by the changes of the late-modern society. The movements, however, also contribute to these social alterations through their actions, cultures, and construction of identities. Today, we are entering a new era that is often referred to as the Information Society. Many of the new social movements use the Internet and computer-mediated communication to organize actions, members, knowledge, and to formulate goals and strategies. This paper presents a hitherto obscure phenomena called "Open Source" that can be seen as a new social movement although in a more novel sense. Based on the Internet, with its origin in hacker culture and the Information Society, the movement's focus is on the information technology itself. The main objective of this movement, constituted mainly by a worldwide network of hackers, is to develop, modify, and distribute free software of high quality. The movement's ideological standpoint is that software should be free, and it's capacity to produce alternative software, has come to challenge and question the commercial proprietary software and the monopolistic software industry. In this paper, the author illustrates, by using discourse analysis, how the Open Source movement constructs collective identities, a sense of "us", through the use of Internet.