“[E]ach piece of software constructs ways of seeing, knowing, and doing in the world that at once contain a model of that part of the world it ostensibly pertains to and that also shape it every time it is used” (Quoting Matthew Fuller 345).
Liminality
“Software studies theorizes the computational turn in everyday life by examining the ‘new terms, categories, and operations that characterize media that became programmable’ (Manovich 48). No longer objects of fetish, digital appliances are becoming invisible and routine, perhaps dangerously so. This critical moment, the mutation period between unknown and unnoticed, marks the emergence of software studies…It is, in the first place, nowhere – invisible – in the human-factors sense of blending seamlessly into the tasks we perform with it. But it also (unlike science) presents a situation in which it is much more problematic to identify rhetors, for example, or audiences, or exigencies” (346).
Everyday
“The concept of the everyday, then, offers at least two possibilities for theorizing an environment of software ubiquity. First, the sense of totality that accompanies everydayness establishes a theoretical unit for understanding the notion of ubiquity in ubiquitous computing. Second, and more important, “If as Lefebvre suggests the everyday lies both outside all the different fields of knowledge, while at the same time lying across them, then the everyday is not a field at all, more like a para-field, or a meta-field” (Highmore 4). The everyday’s paradisciplinary structure enables a framing of technology that accepts its paradoxical nature as both discursive and nondiscursive” (348). “The concept of everydayness, then, with its emphasis on lived experience and the materiality of culture, offers substantial opportunities for theorizing a rhetoric of technology that encompasses the concepts of both ubiquitous computing and what Hansen calls technology’s ‘radical exteriority’” (349).
Radical exteriority
“The technical effect attempts to demarcate discovery from invention, natural law from engineering fabrication, abstract algorithm from concretized software. It attempts to divorce idea from expression; like technesis, it attempts to repress the ‘radical exteriority’ of technology and attach proprietary authority to particular material configurations through the textual properties of the patent” (349-50).
“The technical effect is deployed here as both an example and a methodological exemplar” (350).
Though Truscello uses the term “ecology” in his title, he does not with it. One could connect this article to ecology through sustainability.