Cultural software and the shaping of online documentary practice

Hight, C. (2010). Cultural software and the shaping of online documentary practice. Visible Evidence XVII 2010, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey, August 9-12.

Abstract: This paper argues that the analysis of online documentary culture needs to include consideration of the ways in which users are encouraged toward specific forms of creating, accessing, remixing and distributing content through software design. The comparatively new paradigm of software studies offers possibilities for a framework for such research. As outlined by Manovich, this involves investigating ‘both the role of software in forming contemporary culture and cultural, social, and economic forces that are shaping development of the software itself’. Within this frame, ‘cultural software’ refers to specific programs which are used to create and access media content and environments. We need to consider how specific examples of cultural software operate to structure and facilitate the engagement and interactions of different groups of users, both through key online sites and more broadly through communities of practice. Instead of the dichotomies between ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ which are inherent to the generic constraints and institutional boundaries of mass media, analysing the different sets of strategies, affordances and tools provided by pieces of software provides an entry point into the levels of understanding and skill which distinguish 'practitioners' from more general 'users'. This paper argues for a software-focused ethnography as a key approach for distinguishing between different kinds of digital documentary practice, and the particular cultural forms which they produce. A number of pieces of software are used as illustration, with the software experience associated with the Flip Video Mino digital camcorder serving as the central case study.