编程空间：信息技术与社会行动

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"The.MIT.Press.Coding.Places." 本书主要关注的是编程环境与技术如何相互作用，并在不同文化和社会背景下影响人们的行为。标题“Coding Places”暗示了书中的核心主题，即编程空间如何塑造程序员的工作方式和创造力。这本书可能受到了多方面的启发和支持，正如描述中提到的那样，许多人在各种形式上提供了支持、指导和灵感。从标签“lua”我们可以推断，书中的某些部分可能涉及到Lua编程语言的应用和实践。Lua是一种轻量级的脚本语言，常用于游戏开发、系统管理、嵌入式应用等领域。读者可以期待书中对Lua语言在特定情境下的使用和设计原理的讨论。书中提及的其他书籍标题，如“Acting with Technology”和“Activity-Centered Design”，表明该系列作品探讨了技术如何融入人类活动以及如何设计更加符合人类行为习惯的系统。这些书籍强调了社会文化视角在人机交互设计中的重要性，特别是活动理论（Activity Theory）在理解和改善人与技术关系中的应用。 “Tracing Genres through Organizations: A Sociocultural Approach to Information Design”关注信息设计的社会文化层面，说明了组织中的信息传递如何受到文化和社会结构的影响。这为理解编程环境中如何进行有效的沟通和协作提供了理论框架。 “Scientific Collaboration on the Internet”则探讨了互联网如何促进科学研究中的合作，这可能与“Coding Places”相呼应，展示在线编程和协同工作如何改变科学项目中的编码实践。 “ Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafés of Urban Ghana”则揭示了一个不常被关注的群体——城市加纳的青年互联网用户，他们如何利用互联网空间进行社交和学习。这个话题与“Coding Places”相联系，因为它展示了技术在不同文化背景下的使用情况，尤其是对于编程和计算机技术的普及和接入问题。最后，“Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in the Digital Economy”可能涉及数字经济中工作的性质，包括编程和创业，以及其中的风险和挑战。这对于理解编程工作场所的动态和程序员面临的压力具有重要意义。 "The MIT Press Coding Places"不仅是一本关于编程环境的著作，还涵盖了人机交互设计、社会文化视角、技术在不同环境中的应用，以及互联网时代下工作和合作的新模式。它将深入探讨Lua等技术在特定环境中的使用，以及技术如何在不同文化和社会中塑造工作行为和协作方式。通过一系列相关书籍，该系列作品构建了一个丰富的知识框架，用于理解编程在现代社会中的多元角色。

The Wrong Place 5

universality is achieved in spite of this geographic concentration then

becomes one of the key questions.

In doing so, I put aside the term “knowledge” for the sake of another

one: “practice.” To understand how knowledge comes to new places, we

must look at it in conjunction with all other things that must be in place to

support its power—the social arrangements that provide the “tracks” along

which technical knowledge can travel (Latour 1987). While this expansion

of scope could be done by arguing for a broader notion of “knowledge,” I

switch to a different term partly to draw on the rich body of social theory

from which I borrow the concept of “practice,” and in part because I feel

that the tendency to think of “knowledge” as something akin to the con-

tent of computer files is so strong today that I cannot expect the reader to

ever fully leave behind this unfortunate metaphor.

The concept of “practice” provides us with a useful analytic layer between

the more abstract, propositional notions of knowledge and the messy details

of daily life. As I explain in more detail in the next chapter, I understand

“practice” as a system of activities, a collective way of doing certain things,

or a system of “doings and sayings” (Schatzki 1996). A practice maintains

continuity through a mutually sustaining relationship between patterns of

interactions, material resources, and shared systems of meaning. Looking

at the practice of software development, I thus look at the doing of software

development, the people and groups that engage in this doing, and the rela-

tionships between them. I also look at how such doing interacts on the one

hand with ideas and discourse, and on the other hand with the material ele-

ments of the practice. This nexus of relations creates a context for individual

actions, a context that individuals can “inhabit” in ways that can be likened

to how they inhabit physical places, and to which they can have commit-

ments—commitments that must be balanced with those to the local place

and the national community. Such contexts are bounded and often named.

The developers sometimes talk about being in “the world of software.” For

this reason, I describe such systems of activities as worlds of practice.

Focusing on activities, and especially on systems of activities, makes it

easy to see why the practice of software development would cluster in a

handful of places, since it helps us recognize the many different pieces that

would need to be put together to re-create the practice in a new place. For

someone who adopts this perspective, the problem becomes that of com-

prehending how a living practice could ever move to new places. To put

the same question differently, we can ask how “uploaded” knowledge and

other elements of the practice, removed from their original context, are put

together and made to work in a new place.

6 Chapter 0

My discussion of practice in place focuses on several themes. The first is

the process of disembedding and reembedding (Giddens 1991) involved in its

reproduction across space: people engaged in a practice that is based some-

where else often have to reassemble the practice around imported elements,

substituting for missing pieces what happens to be available. (And if they

want to get involved more centrally, i.e., extending the practice, they will

have to find ways to thoroughly disembed their own innovations, to make

them mobile and useful in the remote places where the practice is stron-

gest.) The second theme is the cumulative and parallel nature of the reproduc-

tion process. I look at the local practice of Brazilian software developers as a

partial reproduction of the American software practice and frame my obser-

vations as a particular moment in the history of this practice—a moment

when many elements have already been brought in and reassembled (hence

the need to look at history in chapter 4), while others are still missing. I also

look at this reproduction as one of many parallel efforts to re-create foreign

practices. Third is the theme of a “diasporic” situation of the peripheral prac-

titioners, who engage simultaneously in two cultures: the local mainstream

culture and the globalizing world of the practice. (Those engaged with the

practice at its centers may face this issue as well, but the gap between the

two worlds is usually not as wide.) In particular, I look at how commitments

to those two cultures come in conflict and how such conflicts are nego-

tiated. Closely related to this is the complex relation between individual and

collective efforts of reproducing foreign practice: local practitioners must often

decide whether to cast their lot with their local colleagues or focus on their

individual connections to remote centers. The fourth theme is the interaction

between the cultural and economic layers of the practice, and the need to look

at the two simultaneously, considering the situations when one of those

layers is present and the other is missing. Finally, I stress the importance of

paying attention to actors’ reflexive understanding of the world, the possible

futures they can imagine individually and collectively, and the factors that

influence this imagination (Giddens 1979; Appadurai 1996). Together those

themes provide us with a view of globalization that highlights individual

agency of peripheral actors, situating their actions in the context of cultural

and economic structures, while also showing how their individual attempts

to engage in global systems of activities add up, collectively and over time,

to create the seeming universality of global practice.

By bringing to light the work that peripheral practitioners must do to

give software development its seeming universality, I hope to offer them

the credit they deserve (and all too often deny themselves), touching upon

the question of why software development remains centralized. While I do

The Wrong Place 7

not see this centralization as a puzzle per se, I do believe that there are many

explanations that are wrong and self-serving, and that such explanations

may themselves contribute to the persistence of centralization. The dis-

cussions of the geography of software work (or other types of “knowledge

work”) and the feasibility of developing “the next Silicon Valley” in this or

that place quite often arrive at the importance of attracting “smart people”

(e.g., Graham 2006). While smart people are undoubtedly important for a

successful software industry (as for many other types of work), researchers

and policy makers sometimes seem too quick to assume that places that

lack strong software industry lack smart people. In fact, if one assumes that

technological knowledge flows naturally between capable minds and is suf-

ficient for the re-creation of a knowledge industry, then the concentration

of software development in a handful of places would seem to imply that

other places lack smart people, smart governments, smart investors, or all

of the above. Unfortunately, such judgments are often internalized by the

peripheral actors themselves, who might sometimes consider themselves

an exception to the rule, but too often assume that the mediocrity of their

fellow citizens limits what they can achieve. Highlighting the work that

went into bringing about the current state of affairs, and the achievement

inherent in that, I hope will present a brighter picture and in turn facilitate

local cohesion.

I also intend to show how such peripheral work contributes to the con-

tinued dominance of remote centers. Like many other knowledge products,

software production is characterized by strong network effects: software that

is used becomes more useful and will often gain in popularity because of its

popularity. This is often especially true for open source software (which I

discuss in the next section), where products that are widely used often actu-

ally become better as they attract more contributions. By fixing their gaze

solidly on foreign technology and investing efforts into making it work

locally, peripheral developers often deny to local projects the attention that

such projects may need. Such lack of attention and, more important, lack

of trust in local projects is ironically the opposite of what has been credited

for making Silicon Valley the success that it is—the strong networks of per-

sonal relations and personal trust (e.g., Saxenian 1996). Unlike in the San

Francisco Bay Area, in Rio being local carries a stigma and the local place

works against the practitioners. The local developers are thus themselves

involved in replicating the asymmetries from which they suffer.

Such observations should not be interpreted as suggesting that periph-

eral participants and regulators should either turn away from foreign tech-

nology or desist altogether in light of the challenges. As Brazil has learned

8 Chapter 0

in the past, isolationism can be a dangerous strategy and nuanced solutions

are needed. I do not make specific policy recommendations, but I invite

policy makers to follow me on a visit to a world that they govern (in part)

but do not always understand, to see the challenges faced by people who

inhabit this world and to consider how helping them face those challenges

may contribute to the larger developmental agenda. I hope in particular

that the case of Kepler, an open source software project described in chapter

8, read together with the two alternatives to the approach Kepler exempli-

fies (chapters 5–7), will be useful for thinking about innovation policy.

Peculiarities

Understanding the way a universal practice is made to work in a concrete

place requires looking at the many peculiarities of that place: the specific

configurations of resources that are available to the actors who inhabit that

place and the specific history that has led to those configurations. It is for

this reason that I focus on a single city and present it as something con-

crete, rather than sampling software developers from a wide range of places

and losing the concreteness. While looking at one specific place, however, I

seek to show relations I believe exemplify the patterns we can find in many

other places. Every place has a history and every place has a local context.

In every place concrete work must be done to turn abstract knowledge into

a living practice.

While I believe the patterns I explore in this book could have been

shown using many other cities, the choice of the specific place can make

a difference. Different degrees of peripherality would bring into focus dif-

ferent parts of the reproduction process. Focusing on a place where the

practice of software development has yet to take root would help us see

the earliest steps in this process, but would shorten the history available

to exploration, leaving us to imagine all sorts of possible scenarios for the

future. Picking a place that is secondary today but could have become the

main center of information technology had the history of the twentieth

century gone just a little differently (e.g., Cambridge or Berlin) would high-

light the importance of contingencies, but would give us little insight into

the future possibilities. I believe that my choice of place gives us a good

balance: a city present on the world map, yet not quite one of the “global

cities”; in a developing country that seems to be gaining momentum, yet

doing so at a pace that allows for some reflection; and with a history of IT

policy that goes back a few decades—putting some of the most important

events in this history far enough back to allow for critical analysis.

The Wrong Place 9

In addition to the peculiarities of Rio de Janeiro, two other aspects of the

book may strike the readers as unusual and thus call for a brief introduction.

Free / Open Source Software

The book focuses disproportionately on a specific form of software practice

known as “open source” or “free” software development. Although those

two terms vary substantially in connotation, both refer to software that is

distributed in a manner that allows the recipient to modify it, and then

redistribute it to others without paying royalties to the original author.

While such distribution of software has been common since the earliest

days of software, it has come to particular prominence since the develop-

ment of Linux, an open source operating system, in the 1990s.

In recent

years, the development of free / open source software has attracted substan-

tial attention from social scientists, including sociologists and anthropolo-

gists who have often looked at it as a political and cultural movement (e.g.,

Kelty 2008) and economists who have looked at efficiency gains associated

with this form of software production. In this book, I look at cases of open

source software development through the lens of practice, highlighting the

interrelations between culture and material production, and positioning

open source within the context of the global world of software practice.

Open source software development presents in perhaps the clearest form

the paradox between placelessness and centralization described earlier.

Open source communities are intentionally open, and the apparent gener-

osity of those “communities of geeks” provides much of the motivation for

Friedman’s discussion of “uploading” as one of the key factors contributing

to the “flattening” of the world. Such communities are also remarkably

dispersed and rely predominantly on computer-mediated interaction, with

members often having little idea where on the planet other participants

happen to be. At the same time, however, the geographic concentration of

those communities rivals that of the software industry, with rare projects

that originate in “wrong places” often quickly moving their centers to the

West Coast of the United States. The global culture of such communities is

based largely on the “hacking” culture that originally developed in Ameri-

can universities.

Their practices are today supported by business models

pioneered by American companies and optimized for the situations they

face. English is almost always the working language of such communities,

even as they might strive to create software products that support every

last script on the planet. As I will try to show, participation in open source

projects involves a complex negotiation of culture, language, and geogra-

phy, and is often harder than engaging in other forms of software practice,

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编程空间：信息技术与社会行动

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Coding.For.Fun.mit.C#.2010

$ ssh -T git@git.coding.net ssh: connect to host git.coding.net port 22: Connection timed out 是什么意思 就是说git@git.coding.net这个要填自己的呗？

读取process.bmp或者process.raw，产生1组二进制序列（长度为16），通过‘异或’操作，完成图像的编码，另存为coding.bmp或者coding.raw；

读取coding.bmp或者coding.raw，利用之前(1)的1组二进制序列（长度为16），通过‘异或’操作，完成图像的解码，另存为decoding.bmp或者decoding.raw；

用matlab读取coding.bmp或者coding.raw，利用之前(1)的1组二进制序列（长度为16），通过‘异或’操作，完成图像的解码，另存为decoding.bmp或者decoding.raw；

用matlab读取process.bmp或者process.raw，产生1组二进制序列（长度为16），通过‘异或’操作，完成图像的编码，另存为coding.bmp或者coding.raw；

ssh -T git@git.coding.net是什么意思？

读取 coding.bmp 或者 coding.raw，利用之前的 1 组二进制序列（长度为 16），通过‘异或’操作，完成图像的解码

git@e.coding.net: Permission denied (publickey).

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$ ssh -T git@git.coding.net ssh: connect to host git.coding.net port 22: Connection timed out 是什么意思就是说git@git.coding.net这个要填自己的呗？