Folks, I realize the below questions might be more germane to "contemporary history of computing" than SIGSIS' focus on "history of computing" but nonetheless perhaps some of you could point me to the resources that could help me answer the below questions: 1) What percentage of American programmers are involved in start-ups versus working long term at an established firm? 2) What is the age distribution of programmers? 3) What are the political and/or partisan affiliation of programmers? 4) What percentage of programmers are introverts and extroverts? (A cursory review suggests some seeming contradictions: http://www.eng.uwo.ca/people/lcapretz/mbti-IJHCS-v2.pdf versus http://www.infoq.com/news/2013/02/Introverted-Intuitive-Logical ) 5) What (small) percentage of American programmers work in Silicon Valley? Cheers, Luke Fernandez Weber State University Manager of Program and Technology Development PS: By way of background context I'm trying to get answers to these questions to substantiate some assertions about programmers that my editor is questioning in a review I'm writing on Alice Marwick's book __Status Update__. You can read a draft of that review here: http://itintheuniversity.blogspot.com/2014/03/studying-up-review-of-alice-ma... The paragraphs in question are the following: Second, Status Update portrays a world where everyone is on the make, where everyone has become outer directed, where the authentic self is eclipsed by the edited self, and where everyone has become so consumed by self-presentation that nothing is left but an edited self. This hyper edited self actually seems to be the subject that Marwick currently inhabits. She’s @alicetiara instead of @alicemarwick. She is circumspect in replying to tweets. Her “mentor,” “champion,” and “collaborator” (as she states in the acknowledgements) is Danah Boyd who actually goes by the overtly edited moniker danah boyd. Marwick “agonizes” over what to wear. To be fair to Marwick it’s possible that we’re actually all pretty outer directed and that we all seek acclaim from others. In the Discourse on Inequality Roussau postulates that this is simply a facet of becoming civilized. So even if we don’t subscribe to neoliberalism, maybe Status Update is a mirror that reflects all of us. And maybe Marwick is just being a little more honest then the rest of us about the fact that she’s outer directed. Still, it’s unlikely that we are outer-directed to the same degree. That seems pretty clear when I associate with my plainly dressed programming colleagues, a good portion of whom occupy the top introverted quadrants of the Myers Briggs test. It’s not like we don’t occasionally like to bask in the limelight. But programmers wouldn’t be programmers if they didn’t derive some of their most enjoyable experiences from talking to machines rather than performing in front of others. Pace Will.i.AM we don’t generally like to have “all eyes on us.” Third, part of the purpose of studying up is to examine how the colonizers have subjected (or reshaped) the colonized. Marwick does a pretty good job of showing how that has taken place in the Bay Area. But it’s an open question as to how much the ideology of the Valley has colonized the rest of us. I’m a programmer and I’ve programmed in Utah (sometime referred to as “Silicon Slopes”) for the last thirteen years. Before that I programmed in Kentucky. So I’ve met my share of people who live close to the Web and use the term “Web 2.0” in our daily working lives. Many of us are still earnestly laboring to embed Web 2.0 principles in software. But most of us aren’t involved in start-ups, or living anywhere near “the scene” (as Marwick describes the Valley), or subscribing in any conscious way to the tenets of neoliberalism. In particular, when Marwick suggests that neoliberal ideology is part and parcel of whatever people have adopted when they subscribe to Web 2.0 principles and Web 2.0 technologies she is making an association that probably doesn’t have that much traction outside her field site. The people who use the term most these days are programmers and designers who refer to it when they are trying to describe a rich user interface that is snappy and responsive. It has a discrete meaning and its principles are subscribed to by programmers and designers of many different political stripes. Some of them may be neoliberals but others of them are distinctly not. Status Update however glosses over this more common usage and piles onto the term a set of politics that are not in keeping with the way the term is most commonly employed. This isn’t to say that Marwick has invented her definition out of whole cloth. She gets it from the way Tim O’Reilly and other hoi poloi of the Valley have tried to spin the term. But the dissonance between her definition and the way it is used elsewhere illustrates the fact that her study cannot be easily scaled. Put another way, Status Update may be a faithful portrait of life in the Valley. But we should be careful not to let that portrait eclipse how technology is being produced and used in the hinterlands where social media may be being repurposed for other ends.