Open Process Software

In Program or Be Programmed (2010), Douglas Rushkoff argues that we’ve ceded questions of software to a high priesthood of programmers:

Our enthusiasm for digital technology about which we have little understanding and over which we have little control leads us not toward greater agency, but toward less ... [W]e have surrendered the unfolding of a new technological age to a small elite who have seized the capability on offer. But while Renaissance kings maintained their monopoly over the printing presses by force, today’s elite is depending on little more than our own disinterest. We are too busy wading through our overflowing inboxes to consider how they got this way, and whether there’s a better or less frantic way to stay informed and in touch.¹

Although Rushkoff’s text moves a bit too quickly through complicated terrain, his larger argument holds water.² Most users of technology have remained just that—users. We have taken little interest in building our own tools or, at the very least, understanding how our tools are constructed. Despite the goals of engineers and designers such as Alan Kay and Douglas Engelbart, who hoped to create a situation in which all users would have the tools and know-how to write code, the role of user and designer have remained separate.

Humanistic scholarship provides a possible opportunity for those of us interested in addressing this problem. Attuned to questions of language and expression, humanists have begun to examine some of the ins and outs of programming. Scholarship in various disciplines has begun to take up the questions of the digital in earnest. But regardless of recent pushes to promote the digital humanities, these efforts have not been as widespread as some might hope. One can imagine some ambitious programs. For instance, computer programming could be taught broadly at the K-12 level and could be integrated into higher education beyond computer science programs. But in the meantime, we might look to smaller, incremental steps, such as the development of critical tools for better understanding how software works.

Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s Expressive Processing provides some of those tools. Wardrip-Fruin’s notion of “expressive processing” evokes two ideas at once. First, the term suggests that software is a significant and unique expressive medium that calls for users to pay careful attention to how processes have been authored. Second, the term allows Wardrip-Fruin to discuss “what processes express through their designs and histories” (5). Software bears traces of its design history, and Wardrip-Fruin hopes that his work can give us ways to recover that history. In addition to this titular term, Wardrip-Fruin develops a number of other critical concepts in the interest of providing game designers, artists, writers, new media scholars, gamers, and users new ways of considering the inner workings of software. Balancing so many different audiences is a difficult task. Indeed, Wardrip-Fruin suggests that two books are contained within Expressive Processing, one that argues that we “pay more attention to the processes of digital media” and another that provides a historical account of digital fiction and game design strategies (18). The text succeeds in balancing these tasks and audiences by providing detailed explanations of the theoretical apparatus, by putting that apparatus to work, and examining numerous examples.

Expressive Processing also works through some of the key questions posed by those of us interested in a bigger tent for computer programming. While scholars of new media will no doubt find Wardrip-Fruin’s discussion useful, one goal of the text is to reach beyond the relatively small conversations of software studies (an emerging strand of new media scholarship) and digital fictions. Within this broader project, we might locate a promising expansion of the various political projects of open source and free software. For while free and open source software certainly allow for “more eyeballs” and “shallow bugs,” they do not necessarily account for the development of software...