Even for those of us who have STS training, proving causality in cultural shaping of technical architectures can be difficult. In one draft of my dissertation, I made a statement about the need to understand Apple software developer culture because it shapes the way apps are designed and implemented. But my committee rightly pointed out that despite getting inside the black box of Mac and iOS programming, I didn’t actually show what I claimed aside from some tenuous connections I drew. This is inherently hard to do, doubly so for scholars from other disciplines. But I agree with Tom, for historians and sociologists, the burden of proof should be higher for claims implying causality. While McPherson’s article is an interesting conversation starter for us academics and a provocative thought piece for students, I fear that it could do more harm than good in our attempts to reach across the aisle to engineers because undoubtedly there are many more like Ken who might see the article as symptomatic of everything that’s wrong with the humanities and dismiss the lot of us.

On Aug 18, 2015, at 1:30 PM, Thomas Haigh <thaigh@computer.org> wrote:

So where I find McPherson unconvincing is in implicitly dismissing such explanations, to convict those who might give them credit of naivety “or worse.” In this respect I think the article undercuts its own agenda – a call to “historicize and politicize code studies” with which I very much agree. She wants to convince us that technical innards matter, and that we need to do the hard work to map social and political factors onto the internals of the black box – which many on this list would recognize as a classic STS move (though she reaches for Gramschi rather than Winner or MacKenzie). But she doesn’t do that. She picks one technical feature, doesn’t explore it in depth, and jumps straight past all the possible social explanations to the giant, fuzzy fact of racism in society. It’s an explanation that doesn’t explain, at least by the personal aesthetic standards I apply to scholarly arguments, which are shaped more by social history than cultural history or cultural studies.