The Cultures of Computing, Vol. 42

This is one of the first collections exploring the range of cultural practices associated with the design and use of computing. Against the background of the "information revolution", the volume shows how people come to computers as learners, artists, teachers, designers, gatekeepers, or scientists. The contributors cover a range of topics, from the military to gender in cyberspace, from education to multi-national corporate IT use.

Computers are rapidly diffusing through every organizational, creative and domestic setting, creating cultural changes in all of them. Scholars are using the tools of anthropology, sociology and organizational theory to understand these processes. Some of them are associated with making, and some with using, computers and information technology. Because computers are simultaneously intimate and formal, they offer a good opportunity to study a variety of processes: the development of material culture, the formation of practice-based networks, the fallibility of language, the relationship between power and infrastructure.

This book is one of the first collections which explores the range of cultural practices associated with the design and use of computing. Each of the contributors examines specific kinds of work that people do together with and around computers. Each essay examines the ways in which people are brought together in computing practices as learners, artists, gatekeepers and scientists - sometimes as insiders, sometimes as outsiders. The contributors cover a range of topics, from the military to gender in cyberspace, from education to multinational corporate IT use.

Susan Leigh Star is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Illinois and Affiliate Research Scientist at the Institute for Research on Learning in the USA.