Critical aspects of software aesthetics

A critical if rather technical and therefore potentially baffling aspect of software aesthetics has become highly visible in the wake of the United Nations' World Summit on the Information Society. The Internet, which includes the World Wide Web, email services, bulletin boards (BBS), file-transfer services, many only partially public subscription services, and is in effect a network of networks, whence its name, is an iceberg: four-fifths of it or more lie hidden below the surface. A global network of telecommunications cables and satellites and switching stations, millions of computers, at least 15 major organizations charged with maintaining and developing technical standards and hundreds of other players working on everything from intellectual property rights to the protection of children are all involved in making decisions about how the system works. True to the Californian roots of much of the computer industry (see Barbrook and Cameron 1995), Internet governance has been a mixture of freewheeling innovation and entrepreneurship.

But as the Internet becomes a key infrastructure for global commerce, politics and communication, those who have traditionally been excluded from the elite decision-making processes of computer and telecoms engineers, especially those outside the industrial West, have begun to demand a say. Meanwhile, the American government has been successfully lobbied by entertainment and software giants to prioritize the protection of intellectual property rights, convinced that as American manufacturing decays in the competition with Asia, films, television, music, games and software will replace it as the growth engine of the economy. The current battleground is Internet Protocol version six (IPv6), the software that allows different computers to talk to each other. Without going into the technical details that while modern societies were characteristically societies of discipline and postmodern societies of control, digital society is characterized by protocols, the invisible but ubiquitous codes which simultaneously enable and constrain what can and cannot be done in a given system, such as the Internet or indeed a given computer. It's argued that decisions concerning technical capabilities effectively shape the ways technologies perform, and the kinds of expectation we have of them, which in turn shapes our behaviours when we work with them.

Far from the vistas of infinite freedom scented the Electronic Freedom Foundation, the Internet is rapidly becoming a highly and rigidly commercial domain. Against this utopian vision are ranged some darker fears. The key threat comes not from the state but from commercial surveillance, characterized by another invisible technology, cookies, small packets of software run by Internet applications on a user's computer which may report back on anything from what software you have to your browsing habits, without your knowledge, and with the collusion of browser manufacturers. Indeed, a great deal of the discourse about the web, in particular, and digital networks more generally, concerns the unresolved contradictions between the promise of freedom and plenty on the one hand, and fears for security breaches, theft, piracy, child abuse, pornography and, since 9/11, terrorism. Understanding how digital devices and networks work is thus more than a necessary step in forming an aesthetic appreciation: it is crucial in countering the ill-informed utopian/dystopian squabble that characterizes old media coverage of the new. This dialectic of excitement and trepidation over emergent media has a long history too: the digital media are being treated much as comics were in the 1950s, television in the 1940s, cinema was in the 1920s, and cheap newspapers and magazines were in the 1890s.

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In postmodern society, physical appearance has become increasingly central to defining personal identity, as evidenced by the proliferation of ...

2. Tatoos as statements of identity
Tattoos, because of their relatively permanent nature, have been seen by many as being antithetical to fashion, whose governing imperative is t...

3. About the nature of tatoos
It is commonly assumed that the permanent nature of tattoos makes them inherently antithetical to fashion, which is premised on the idea of con...

4. The meaning of tattoos is changeable
However, such attempts to permanently fix one's identity in one's body are ultimately doomed to failure since the meaning of tattoos is changea...

5. A particular type of masculine identity
Until the 1970s, the wearing of tattoos was a predominantly masculine practice, especially prevalent amongst the military, prisoner, and biker ...

6. Reconnection with tribal cultures
In contrast with the earlier tattoo tradition associated with the military, prisoners, and biker groups, which disavowed any connection with th...

7. Advertisements and the male image
Before the 1980s, tattoos were rarely included in advertising images, and when they were, they served primarily as symbols of a "red-blooded" m...

8. Another interpretation of the sailor icon
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Critical aspects of software aesthetics

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