I found this very interesting..............
Behind the Blip: Essays on the culture of software by Matthew Fuller15 November 2003
NewScientist.com news service
Mike Holderness
Reviewed by Mike Holderness
GIVEN how many people spend every working moment with software, surprisingly little is published about it as a cultural machine. Matthew Fuller, who teaches media design at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, is filling the void with Behind the Blip.
The blip? That's you, as represented in your boss's payroll program and by the tax authorities. And behind the blip Fuller shows us that there are new ways of looking at the dataverse, as provided by the Web Stalker program that he helped to scrape together, and other efforts at subverting the searcher.
Open-source software, he warns, is doomed while it merely replicates corporatethink-enforcing anti-desiring machines. He is illuminating, for example, on how the grammar-checker and ubiquitous templates in a certain word processor program set out to destroy intelligent or creative thought: real writers do plain text.
Sometimes Fuller is pithily plain-spoken, and sometimes you'll want French Theorists for Beginners at your elbow. Everything he has to say is provoking, and you'll never see the computer you belong to in the same way again.
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Printed on Wed Apr 06 09:58:11 BST 2005
........here is a link to an interview with Matthew Fuller
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Originally Posted by brenda
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