The Appsmiths: Community, Identity, Affect And Ideology Among Cocoa Developers From Next To Iphone

This dissertation is an ethnographic study, accomplished through semi-structured interviews and participant observation, of the cultural world of third party Apple software developers who use Apple's Cocoa libraries to create apps. It answers the questions: what motivates Apple developers' devotion to Cocoa technology, and why do they believe it is a superior programming environment? What does it mean to be a "good" Cocoa programmer, technically and morally, in the Cocoa community of practice, and how do people become one? I argue that in this culture, ideologies, normative values, identities, affects, and practices interact with each other and with Cocoa technology in a seamless web, which I call a "techno-cultural frame." This frame includes the construction of a developer's identity as a vocational craftsman, and a utopian vision of software being developed by millions of small-scale freelance developers, or "indies," rather than corporations. This artisanal production is made possible by the productivity gains of Cocoa technology, which ironically makes indies dependent on Apple for tools. This contradiction is reconciled through quasi-religious narratives about Apple and Steve Jobs, which enrolls developers into seeing themselves as partners in a shared mission with Apple to empower users with technology. Although Cocoa helps make software production easier, it is not a deskilling technology but requires extensive learning, because its design heavily incorporates patterns unfamiliar to many programmers. These concepts can only be understood holistically after learning has been achieved, which means that learners must undergo a process of conversion in their mindset. This involves learning to trust that Cocoa will benefit developers before they fully understand it. Such technical and normative lessons occur at sites where Cocoa is taught, such as the training company Big Nerd Ranch. Sharing of technical knowledge and normative practices also occurs in the Cocoa community, online through blog posts, at local club meetings, and at conferences such as Apple's WWDC, which help to enroll developers into the Cocoa techno-cultural frame. Apple's relationship with developers is symbiotic, but asymmetrical, yet despite Apple's coercive power, members of the Cocoa community can influence Apple's policies

Message passing between individual and socially acquainted objects in Smalltalk

This paper reports additions to the commercial, object-oriented language, Smalltalk-80 and their incorporation into a knowledge based environment, POISE. These additions are suitable for the purposes of knowledge representation of engineering design. A dynamic, knowledge representation scheme is supported that allows temporary associations between objects residing in separate, static, hierarchical structures. Message passing between these associated objects is dynamic. Messages are passed, incompletely satisfied, between socially acquainted objects in order to complete a computation. We show that a computing paradigm previously achieved by a specific language, written in the Actor tradition, can also be achieved in a strictly class-instance based language which is then used to create a design knowledge representation environment. A simple, accessible example is used to illustrate the power and generality of the new language

Communication Conduct in an Island Community

Canadian-born Erving Goffman (1922–1982) was the twentieth century’s most important sociologist writing in English. His 1953 dissertation is published here for the first time, on the hundredth anniversary of his birth. The remarkable study, based on fieldwork on a remote Scottish island, presents in embryonic form the full spread of Goffman’s thought. Framed as a “report on a study of conversational interaction,” the dissertation lingers on the modest talk of island “crofters.” It is trademark Goffman: ambitious, unconventional in form, and brimmed with big-picture insight. The thesis is that social order is made and re-made in communication—the “interaction order” he re-visited in a famous and final talk before his 1982 death. The dissertation is, as Yves Winkin writes in a new introduction, the “Rosetta stone for his entire work.” It was here, in 360 dense pages, that Goffman revealed, quietly, his peerless sensitivity to the invisible wireframes of everyday life

Message passing between individual and socially acquainted objects in Smalltalk

This paper reports additions to the commercial, object-oriented language, Smalltalk-80 and their incorporation into a knowledge based environment, POISE. These additions are suitable for the purposes of knowledge representation of engineering design. A dynamic, knowledge representation scheme is supported that allows temporary associations between objects residing in separate, static, hierarchical structures. Message passing between these associated objects is dynamic. Messages are passed, incompletely satisfied, between socially acquainted objects in order to complete a computation. We show that a computing paradigm previously achieved by a specific language, written in the Actor tradition, can also be achieved in a strictly class-instance based language which is then used to create a design knowledge representation environment. A simple, accessible example is used to illustrate the power and generality of the new language

Communication Conduct in an Island Community

Canadian-born Erving Goffman (1922–1982) was the twentieth century’s most important sociologist writing in English. His 1953 dissertation is published here for the first time, on the hundredth anniversary of his birth. The remarkable study, based on fieldwork on a remote Scottish island, presents in embryonic form the full spread of Goffman’s thought. Framed as a “report on a study of conversational interaction,” the dissertation lingers on the modest talk of island “crofters.” It is trademark Goffman: ambitious, unconventional in form, and brimmed with big-picture insight. The thesis is that social order is made and re-made in communication—the “interaction order” he re-visited in a famous and final talk before his 1982 death. The dissertation is, as Yves Winkin writes in a new introduction, the “Rosetta stone for his entire work.” It was here, in 360 dense pages, that Goffman revealed, quietly, his peerless sensitivity to the invisible wireframes of everyday life

Neighbouring as an occasioned activity : "Finding a lost cat"

To illustrate the decline in a strong sense of community the characteristics of suburban living are often cited by social and cultural commentators. Spatially dispersed, lifeless during the daytime due to commuting, an excessive concern with keeping up appearances in terms of lawns, flowerbeds and property maintenance, moreover, suburbia, suffers perhaps worst of all, from weak social relations between residents. Such disparaging commentary on suburban neighbourhoods is frequently a premise for social scientists to define their version of “the good community”, bemoan its absence or decline, and has little concern for the phenomena of daily life in suburbia. In its concern to advance one or another political agenda conventional social and cultural studies miss just how suburban residents organise their everyday lives at ground level. Drawing on the insights of ethnomethodology and other studies of social practice we offer some therapeutic descriptions of neighbouring. From our ethnographic fieldwork in a UK suburb we show, via the incident of the search for a lost cat, how everyday talk formulates places and is formulated by its location in the ongoing occasioned activities of neighbours. In contrast to studies that have depicted suburbia as a place where morals are minimised, we show how conduct amongst neighbours constantly displays specific and locally accomplished moral commitments. Building on our own and other ethnographic research we list some of the rules of good neighbouring and investigate how such rules are followed or otherwise oriented to during encounters between neighbours. We also make a start on the explication of the seen but un-noticed features of what neighbours know of one another as settled neighbours. In doing so we return to our initial topic of community and neighbouring to learn some of the good reasons for neighbours maintaining the social distances that they typically do

‘Shinu Shika Nai’ – ‘There is Nothing to Do but to Die’: Contextualising the Rising Young Female Suicide Rate in Japan

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the suicide rate for the 18-39 age cohort of Japanese women has been drastically subverting a long period of prior sustained decline. This work is an anthropological study of social conditions contributing to a social zeitgeist in which these young women are taking their own lives, as told in survivor and advocate testimonies. It seeks to question the ways ideas around what suicide means in the Japanese cultural context to stakeholders in the suicide process. It further elucidates how these ideas exist, and how they have evolved to be meaningful to young women in contemporary Japan

Design and implementation of a network revenue management architecture for marginalised communities

Rural Internet connectivity projects aimed at bridging the digital divide have mushroomed across many developing countries. Most of the projects are deployed as community centred projects. In most of the cases the initial deployment of these projects is funded by governments, multilateral institutions and non-governmental organizations. After the initial deployment, financial sustainability remains one of the greatest challenges facing these projects. In the light of this, externally funded ICT4D interventions should just be used for “bootstrapping” purposes. The communities should be “groomed” to take care of and sustain these projects, eliminating as soon as possible a dependency on external funding. This master thesis presents the design and the implementation of a generic architecture for the management of the costs associated with running a computer network connected to the Internet, The proposed system, called the Network Revenue Management System, enables a network to generate revenue, by charging users for the utilization of network resources. The novelty of the system resides in its flexibility and adaptability, which allow the exploration of both conventional and non-conventional billing options, via the use of suitable ‘adapters’. The final goal of the exploration made possible by this system is the establishment of what is regarded as equitable charging in rural, marginalized communities - such as the community in Dwesa, South Africa