Browser Culture by Giorgio Mezzolla Pedersen

FACULTY OF HUMANITIES UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN

Master’s thesis Giorgio Mezzolla Pedersen

Browser culture An ethnography of the risks and benefits that result from technological vulnerability in an online community Saxo Institute, department of Ethnology/Master of Applied Cultural Analysis Academic advisor: Astrid Pernille Jespersen Submitted: August 2011

Dedicated to Daisaku Ikeda, Sensei, and all tech supporters everywhere.

Photograph on cover page: The Firefox logo made of Lego building blocks. By courtesy of Justin Dolke’s blog: http://blog.mozilla.com/dolske/2010/12/15/firefox-‐is-‐made-‐of-‐lego/

Table of Contents Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ 4 Resume på dansk/Summary in Danish.................................................................................... 5 Abstract .............................................................................................................................................. 6 Introduction...................................................................................................................................... 7 Problem statement.......................................................................................................................................... 11 1. What’s vulnerable about software?................................................................................... 12 Conceptualisation one: A software culture .......................................................................................... 12 Some brief methodological suggestions ................................................................................................ 16 Conceptualisation two: A technological culture ................................................................................ 19 The convergence between the two conceptualisations................................................................... 20 Bijker’s notion of ‘technological vulnerability’ ................................................................................... 22 2. The Mozilla Firefox community: Is it a community?.................................................... 25 Position one: A Virtual Community.......................................................................................................... 28 Position two: An online community......................................................................................................... 29 Position three: An alternative proposition, ‘Virtual Togetherness’ ........................................... 31 Position four: A rejection of the concept of ‘community’................................................................ 32 Position five: Towards a symmetrical approach ............................................................................... 33 An argument for actor-network theory................................................................................................. 34 3. A multi-modal approach for doing fieldwork in an online community ................ 37 The researcher is an actor, too: The relevant part of my life ....................................................... 40 Becoming part of the Firefox community: Who or what to follow? .......................................... 45 Overt online participant observation of an unofficial, very large Mozilla forum ............... 56 4. Opening up the vulnerability of technology in the community ............................... 68 Firefox user/developers regarded as ‘lead users’ .............................................................................. 68 Some risks that result from ‘technological vulnerability’ .............................................................. 70 Browser customisation by means of Adblock Plus ............................................................................ 72 The Mozilla Firefox community regarded as an ‘innovation community’.............................. 73 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................... 77 Suggestions for further research .............................................................................................................. 82 Appendix: A glossary of key terms ......................................................................................... 84 References ...................................................................................................................................... 89

Acknowledgements First of all thanks to my dear wife and son who provided the fertile soil in which this thesis could take root and ultimately, blossom. Thanks Karina for taking care of the many inevitable practicalities of everyday family life, and for putting up with listening to my academic worries after working time! Thanks Viggo for reminding your father to remain concentrated and focused both on the writing process, and our family activities! Thanks to my supervisor, Astrid Pernille Jespersen, for her meticulous comments, inspiration, guidance, and constructive criticism. Andreas Birkbak, Torben Elgaard Jensen, Aske Juul Lassen, and Robert Willim provided me with invaluable literature suggestions and inspiring discussions early in the process, which enabled me to get on the right track fast. Many thanks to you. Kenneth Mujih and Harpa Stefánsdóttir read and commented upon early drafts of the thesis. Thanks mates! A word of thanks to my interlocutors who I ‘met’ online. They must remain anonymous but aren’t less appreciated for their help in collecting my empirical material. Mange tak to Lars Hallundbæk who was so kind to translate the abstract from English into proper Danish. Innumerable informal discussions with the teachers and classmates from MACA 2009, both in Lund and Copenhagen, have had an indirect, but nevertheless, positive impact on the whole project as well. Many thanks to you all, you know who you are! Last, but definitely not least, I would like to express my gratitude to Amy Clotworthy who proofread the thesis incredibly thorough and made many helpful suggestions.

Resume på dansk/Summary in Danish Pedersen, Giorgio M. (2011) Browser culture: An Ethnography of the Risks and Benefits that Result from Technological Vulnerability in an Online Community. Copenhagen: Copenhagen University. Afhandlingen indledes med en undersøgelse af Lev Manovichs begrebsdefinition af ’software culture’. Denne begrebsdefinition af kultur relateres derefter til Wiebe Bijkers begrebsdefinition af en ’teknologisk kultur’ og hans begreb ’teknologisk sårbarhed’. Konvergensen mellem ’en software kultur’ og ’en teknologisk kultur’ som afsæt tjener til en nøjere undersøgelse og begrebsmæssig udvidelse af ‘teknologisk sårbarhed’. Herefter argumenteres det, at de nye videnskabelige discipliner i Software Studies (software studier) og Applied Cultural Analysis (anvendt kulturanalyse) kan drage nytte af hinanden ved at fremme vores forståelse af disse begrebsdefinitioner og deres konvergens gennem at udvikle nye metodologiske strategier. Som empirisk eksempel tjener Mozilla Firefox Community’et til at belyse hvorledes software, et bærende element i teknologisk kultur, og teknologisk sårbarhed konstitueres. For at sikre symmetri og refleksivitet i analysen, diskuteres en række teoretiske tilgange til begrebet ’fællesskab’, og der argumenteres for, at dette opnås ved at trække på aktør-‐netværk-‐teori (ANT). Empiriske data frembringes fra en flerstrenget tilgang til at udføre etnografisk feltarbejde online. Etnografien består af tre indbyrdes forbundne dele, som trækker på elementer af analytisk auto-‐ etnografi og Bruno Latours aktør-‐netværk-‐teori. Med denne tilgang besvares spørgsmålet: hvordan er teknologisk sårbarhed opfattet og kulturelt konstitueret i Mozilla Firefox’ software-‐producerende fællesskab? Endelig vil en kort refleksion over Eric von Hippels begreber ’lead user’ og ’innovation community’ pege på, hvorledes disse koncepter er relateret til resultaterne i denne afhandling, og hvordan disse kan bidrage til et feltbaseret projekt, der sigter mod at levere anvendelige resultater til en organisation eller virksomhed.

Browser culture

Introduction

Abstract The thesis begins with an exploration of Lev Manovich’s conceptualisation of a software culture. This conceptualisation of culture is then related to Wiebe Bijker’s conceptualisation of a ‘technological culture’ and his notion of ‘technological vulnerability’. The convergence between ‘a software culture’ and ‘a technological culture’ as a point of departure, serve to further explore and expand on the meaning of ‘technological vulnerability’. It is then argued that the young scientific disciplines of Software Studies and applied cultural analysis can mutually benefit each other in furthering understanding of these conceptualisations, and their convergence, by jointly inventing new methodological strategies. The empirical example of the Mozilla Firefox community serves to elucidate how software as a major element of a technological culture, and technological vulnerability, are constituted. To achieve symmetry and reflexivity in the analysis, a few intellectual positions on the concept of the community are discussed, and it is then argued that this is achieved by drawing upon ANT. The empirical data is gained from a multi-‐modal approach to conducting ethnographic fieldwork online. The ethnography consists of three interrelated parts that draw upon elements of analytic auto-‐ethnography and Bruno Latour’s proposal for actor-‐network theory. With this approach, the thesis answers the question: how is technological vulnerability perceived and culturally constituted in the free and open source software-‐creating community of Mozilla Firefox? Finally, a brief reflection on Eric von Hippel’s notions of ‘lead user’ and ‘innovation community’ suggests how these concepts are related to the results of this thesis, and how they may help to contribute to a field-‐driven project that aims at delivering applicable results to an organisation or company.

Browser culture

Introduction

Introduction Presumably, we are living in an Age of Algorithms (Willim, 2010), and we don’t only surf on the internet—we live in there, too. There’s an emerging cultural discourse on the Internet of Things (Chaouchi, 2010; van 't Hof, van Est, & Daemen, 2011). Others claim that the effects of developments in Science and Technology are so profound that it is plausible to speak of a Technological Culture (Bijker, 2006). The sociologist Manual Castells envisioned the rise of the Network Society in the mid-‐1990s (Castells, 2010). Even if these statements are only partially true, then it is equally true that these characterisations of highly developed, rich and mostly Western countries could never have been conceived without the existence of software. An ever-‐increasing number of aspects of our society are made possible by software. Nevertheless, as an aspect of culture, the phenomenon of software is underdeveloped in the field of Applied Cultural Analysis. This is not so surprising, as it is also underdeveloped in related disciplines. The emerging field of Software Studies—as represented by Lev Manovich (Manovich, Forthcoming 2012) and others, who come predominantly from Computer Sciences and Media Studies—is bringing attention to the cultural importance of software, making a powerful argument for an increasing need for, if not the requirement of, the incorporation of software as such in analyses of culture. Generally regarded as something that is mostly technical in nature, software is subject to errors, faults and failures, which combined are some of the constituents of its perceived vulnerability, and the causes for not doing what it is designed to do. However, as long as software is created by humans, there’s always a chance for human error to set off its perceived—and superficially regarded as mostly technical—vulnerability. Hence, the need has been established for a humanistic, or a cultural analytic, perspective, which is as necessary as that of an engineer. The vulnerability of software can have many negative and even disastrous effects. However, there’s also a positive side to vulnerability, and according to the influential sociologist Wiebe Bijker, living in a technological culture is to some extent inevitably connected to living in a vulnerable culture (Bijker, 2006). Moreover, to

Browser culture

Introduction

take it a step further, a perceived, culturally dependent vulnerability may even be a necessary condition if advanced, high-‐tech, rich and mostly Western countries are to maintain and develop their capacity to innovate. It is mostly this aspect of the meaning of ‘technological vulnerability’ that this thesis seeks to explore. I propose here to speak of the potential benefit that results from dealing with ‘technological vulnerability’, as opposed to its risk. An internet ethnographic case study of the free and open source software (F/OSS) web browser Mozilla Firefox is presented in an attempt to explore the rather abstract notion of software vulnerabilities; to make the example of technological vulnerability in a technological culture more easily imaginable; and to investigate how ‘software’, ‘vulnerability’, and ‘community’ are constituted. It is rather challenging to conduct an ethnography that is as rich as possible—generating useful insights that will live up to the expectation of providing satisfactory answers to the research questions—in a short, but very intensive, three-‐week period. However, with the help of an important aspect of the vulnerabilities scrutinised here (namely, the internet), it has proved to be very possible after all. The ethnographic case presented consists of three separate but interrelated parts. First, to introduce an additional layer of complexity, the strategy of auto-‐ethnography was employed and situates the researcher in a dual role of being both in-‐ and outsider. Second, acknowledging that Mozilla and Firefox can be viewed as communities, the immersion of the researcher into those communities is described. Third, after arriving at a user/developer forum, participant observations are undertaken. The non-‐profit organisation Mozilla, which is responsible for creating the Firefox web browser, labels itself as a ‘community’ on its official web pages. This self-‐ description creates the need to further investigate the community concept; it is a hotly debated concept, both within the humanities and social sciences. I strive for a symmetrical approach when considering all actors, both human and non-‐human, and resist as much as possible the temptation to somehow make them fit into a pre-‐ defined frame. However, I don’t intend to reject the merit of other traditions in which the community concept has been successfully employed as an analytical tool from the onset. Therefore, several possible intellectual positions on the concept are discussed, moving from more traditional, anthropological notions toward a 8

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Introduction

discussion of the possibility of communities on the Internet, and further to what these communities might entail. These positions don’t represent all there is to say about the concept; instead, they’re a relevant selection that serves as a transition to the theoretical stance taken here. Drawing on elements of actor-‐network theory (ANT), as represented by Bruno Latour and others, the socio-‐technical relations between the encountered actors are traced and mapped out. To invoke one of ANT’s slogans: I ‘follow the actors’ without a clear and pre-‐defined starting point, and I allow both humans and non-‐humans to guide me on my ethnographic journey toward answering the research questions. The resulting map drawn up from this journey is then laid out both textually and, in part, graphically, which allows the non-‐human actors to ‘speak for themselves’. With this, a greater understanding of the cultural meaning of software and technological vulnerability in the Mozilla Firefox community is reached. Having subsequently connected the nodes in the uncovered actor-‐network, the last stop is an overt participant observation of an online discussion forum. This approach straddles the definition of an online focus group, but it is different in the sense that certain formalities required to conform to such a definition haven’t been met—the most salient being the fact that, prior to the discussions, no interlocutor selection had taken place. Adding the adjective ‘overt’ to ‘online participant observation’ is a more precise characterisation of the employed method; I revealed my identity as a researcher from the start, inviting potential interlocutors with an interest in the topic to voluntarily engage in a spontaneous discussion, moderated by me to an extent. From the ethnographic case, five actor-‐networks related to vulnerability emerge: browser customisation; advertisements; malware (malicious software); computer damage; and privacy infringement. Because Firefox is a F/OSS web browser, it has the unique capacity to be customised with so-‐called ‘extensions’. This capacity (which arguably appeals to more advanced users) means that, when first downloaded, a rather basic web browser can be drastically modified in both functionality and visual appearance. These extensions are additional building blocks of software, and they can be downloaded for free. Moreover, they have been developed by the same user/developer community as the browser itself. A specific extension mentioned by my interlocutors is given as an example of what can be

Browser culture

Introduction

installed to decrease the risk of computer damage and privacy infringement by means of blocking unwanted content, mainly advertisements on a website. As mentioned before, ‘to decrease risk’ by exploiting Mozilla Firefox’s vulnerability for the better may be seen as a way of increasing its benefit, which stems from the same source: its inevitable technological vulnerability. The details of the specific software extension’s implications are addressed in the analysis of the ethnographic case. Decreasing the risk that results from inevitable software vulnerabilities by installing software plugins or extensions—here, in the specific case of the F/OSS web browser Mozilla Firefox—may be seen as a counter-‐action that attempts to increase the benefit made possible by the technological vulnerability of software. Put another way, when compared with the closed, proprietary web browser Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE)—a comparison made specifically by my interlocutors—Firefox offers this benefit by virtue of its F/OSS status. The user/developer community has the opportunity to create add-‐ons that enable Firefox’s customisation toward their own collectively specified needs, but IE users—even if they’re technically capable of writing the necessary code or programming language for such a software extension—wouldn’t be allowed to implement such modifications in an individual, uniquely customised copy of the browser. The simple reason being that the End-‐User License Agreement (EULA), entered into with Microsoft upon installing the software, is subject to international copyright law and prohibits one from doing so: “Limitations of Reverse Engineering, Decompilation and Disassembly. You may not [italics added] reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the SOFTWARE, except and only to the extent that such activity is permitted by applicable law notwithstanding this limitation.” (Microsoft, 2011) This is limiting, not only in the sense that one is prohibited from modifying the source code of IE, but also because it is actually prohibited to even ‘touch’ IE’s source code. In stark contrast, there no longer exists a EULA for the latest version of Firefox. Instead, there’s reference to a “few notes” and the OSS Mozilla Public License: “Firefox is made available to you under the terms of the Mozilla Public License. This means you may use, copy and distribute Firefox to others. You are also welcome to modify the source code of Firefox as you want to meet your needs. The Mozilla Public License also gives you the right to distribute your modified versions.” (Mozilla, 2011c) 10

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Introduction

The benefit of freely modifying, using, copying and distributing Firefox is a result of the different, and perhaps more positive, way of dealing with a web browser’s inevitable technological vulnerability. To explore this supposed positive twist to something generally regarded as negative, I attempt to employ some of the ideas of innovation theorist Eric von Hippel, in order to elucidate the presumed benefit. Notably, I attempt to employ his concepts of ‘lead user’ and ‘user-‐innovation communities’ in my analysis of the empirical example, Mozilla Firefox. These reflections aren’t intended to lead to an indisputable perspective on what specific type of software product development is superior; they’re not intended to compare Mozilla Firefox’ F/OSS practices to the closed and proprietary practices of a corporation like Microsoft. Rather, they’re meant to serve as a (hopefully) thought-‐ provoking suggestion of how the insights gained from this thesis could be taken further into a concrete project on user-‐driven innovation.

Problem statement This leads to the following problem statement and research questions. Based on the empirical material collected during my fieldwork, this thesis investigates: •

How is technological vulnerability perceived and culturally constituted in the free and open source software-‐creating community of Mozilla Firefox?

To answer this question, the following points are also addressed: •

First, how can Software Studies and Applied Cultural Analysis mutually benefit each other?

•

Second, how is the theoretical concept of ‘the community’ understood here, from both a reflexive and symmetrically ethnographic perspective?

•

Third, an investigation of the notion of software—as exemplified by the free and open source software web browser Mozilla Firefox and its constituents— is undertaken; and

•

Fourth, the cultural meaning of ‘technological vulnerability’ in relation to the specific empirical case is elucidated.

Browser culture

What’s vulnerable about software?

1. What’s vulnerable about software? Software forges modalities of experience (…) through which the world is made and known. As a product of “immaterial labour,” software is a social, technical, and aesthetic relation that is embodied—and that is at once productive of more relations. That the production of value has moved so firmly into the terrain of immaterial labour, machine-‐embodied intelligence, style as factory, the production of subjectivity, makes the evolution of what was previously sectioned as “culture” so much more valuable to play for—potentially always as sabotage—but (…) most compellingly as synthesis. (Fuller, 2003)

Two inspirational and thought-‐provoking texts serve as our point of departure, authored by Wiebe Bijker and Lev Manovich, respectively. The former discusses the vulnerability of a technological culture, and the latter the cultural pervasiveness of software. These accounts are markedly different, both in their objects of study and methodological approach, but it is predominantly a notion of pervasiveness and ubiquity that makes them converge; Bijker conceptualises the culture of advanced, high-‐tech, rich and mostly Western countries as ‘technological’, while Manovich asserts that software, clearly a manifestation of technology, is one of contemporary culture’s major constituents. Both arguments are sophisticated, ambitious in their scope, and attempt to articulate the cultural influence of phenomena of great magnitude. Their convergence provides this thesis with its starting point and the motivation for the choice of my empirical example. But before we can really start, we need to acquaint ourselves a bit more with the first conceptualisation of culture.

Conceptualisation one: A software culture To consider the conceptualisation of a software culture here requires that we also address the question of how to deal with software in cultural analyses, and why it is important to do so. Furthermore, what does it have to do with technological vulnerability in a supposedly technological culture? Lev Manovich’s Software Takes Command (Forthcoming 2012) offers a good point of departure and draws upon the

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What’s vulnerable about software?

relevant field of Software Studies; one of its major concepts is scrutinised later in this paper with the empirical example of the F/OSS web browser, Mozilla Firefox. Manovich discusses a shift at the beginning of the 1990s regarding the famousness of companies—from those that manufacture material goods to those that produce software. He states that software is laden with cultural meaning because it is used by an immense and growing part of the global population; it contains tiny bits of culture in the form of media and information; and it enables communication between people on an unprecedented global scale (Manovich, Forthcoming 2012, p. 3). At the very least, the first and the last points apply quite well to Mozilla Firefox. The web browser is reportedly used by an estimated 400 million people (Mozilla, 2010), and it is a dominant, inevitable and sometimes even a mandatory way of getting online to connect and communicate with others. Manovich’s second point is perhaps more open for debate; however, as a web browser, Firefox serves as a gateway to innumerable, “tiny bits of media and information”. Through examples of (electronic) warfare, e-‐commerce, software as the organising force of the Internet, the hospital, the military base and the laboratory, Manovich concludes that “(…) all social, economic, and cultural systems of modern society run on software. Software is the invisible glue that ties it all together (ibid.).” This rather vivid metaphor is provokingly illustrated, albeit from a slightly different angle, by Maarten Huygen, editor of the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad. It is also interesting food for thought, in the sense that it shows the mutually inclusive relationship between software-‐ and hardware. Huygen speaks explicitly of, computers and microprocessors (hardware) in his article, “Terug naar de jaren zeventig is al fataal” (Going back to the seventies is already fatal, my translation) (2007). He asserts that after some 30 years, the advanced, rich and mostly Western countries have become so dependent on computers and microprocessors that an aerial nuclear explosion would wipe out a large part of the global population. People wouldn’t die as a result of the nuclear blast in the air; instead, the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) it caused would destroy the ubiquitous microprocessor. The effects of this would be truly disastrous: We wouldn’t be able to use natural gas or electricity, no more phone or television, cars would fail to drive, nothing could be manufactured

Browser culture

What’s vulnerable about software?

or distributed, famine would break out, and economic capital would lose almost all of its value. Huygen goes on to compare the hypothetical nuclear blast that occurred in the 1970s, the era before the information-‐technology (IT) revolution; he states that, in those days, society would be much less severely affected by such a blast because of the lesser degree to which people depended on computers and microprocessors. The same would apply to contemporary, ‘primitive’, less technologically advanced countries. Of course, Huygen’s intention with his short article was to provoke, but just imagine how modern society would be affected if software was sabotaged on a large scale—if “the glue that ties it all together” was dissolved. The effects would be similar because hardware is inextricably linked to software, and vice versa. As we explore later, this dependency and ubiquity of software, hardware and all the other socio–technical elements they’re related to— these core elements of a technological culture hold enormous potential for both benefit and risk. Moving from one metaphor to another, Manovich goes on to compare the rise of the global information society made possible by software with the rise of industrial society, which was enabled by the internal-‐combustion engine and electricity (Manovich, Forthcoming 2012, p. 4). Moreover, according to Manovich, software is pinpointed as the driving force that enables the overarching process of globalisation. In his view, every characterisation of modern society in recent times, as well as information, knowledge or network society, is driven by software. To make this point less ‘overarching’, more context-‐specific and therefore more relevant for cultural analyses, it is worth taking into consideration an observation that Matti Tedre and Ron Eglash made in their essay Ethnocomputing (2008): namely, that Information and Communication Technology (ICT)—software being an important part of ICT—is not culturally neutral. In a discussion about the applications of ICT education, they state: The cultural specificity of ICTs is perhaps most evident in the case of pedagogy. Different kinds of curricula, textbooks and other study material, the examples used, the choice of pedagogical approaches, and even what is considered a “valid problem” in ICT education often have a heavy Western bias. This bias sets expectations that only the students with a Western cultural background can meet

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What’s vulnerable about software?

without extra cognitive overhead. Students from other cultures experience more difficulties than Western students when trying to adapt to culturally specific examples and applications that the current ICT education exhibits, and when the non-‐Western students’ own mental imagery is not supported. (Fuller, 2008, p. 96)

While this may be considered a classic, almost cliché, opposition between more or less technologically advanced societies and the negative consequences this divide inevitably entails for the disadvantaged, it points out that there apparently exist different ‘versions’ or ‘modes’ of what Manovich terms the “information society” and the “process of globalisation”. A cultural analysis that takes the importance of software into consideration may potentially complement the field of Software Studies by uncovering and articulating the cultural specificities to which it is subjected. Acknowledging the existence of cultural specificities also resonates with the above-‐mentioned radical and provocative argument by Huygen, to the extent that so-‐called ‘primitive’, technologically-‐delayed societies would be less affected by a total failure of microprocessors—for the simple reason that there are much fewer of them in these societies. Huygen’s proposition may be regarded as an alternative possibility when extremely negative effects of technological vulnerability occur that escape the cliché. With the help of some critical commentators, we’ve seen that software is important for cultural analyses for the following reasons: 1. its ubiquitous and widespread use throughout the world; 2. its unprecedented function as a communication tool; 3. the almost absolute dependency that technologically-‐advanced, rich and mostly Western countries have on software; and 4. its cultural specificity. However, despite this supposed importance, software has only been directly examined to a limited extent, and Manovich maintains that there’s a pitfall in only taking into account the effects of software, rather than its causes. Hence, the need for a closer look at software itself (Manovich, Forthcoming 2012, p. 4).

Browser culture

What’s vulnerable about software?

Some brief methodological suggestions Now, for our purposes, what could it mean ‘to take a closer look at software’? What are some possible methodological suggestions that would legitimatise a cultural interest in software, and create the need for what could be termed ‘a new scientific discipline’? In 2008, while referring to a ‘mission statement’ for Software Studies composed a few years earlier and in which he envisioned an important role for computer science, Manovich put the importance of this emerging field into a larger cultural perspective than ever before by acknowledging that computer science is a part of culture. Thus, computer science is no longer seen as an explanatory force that accounts for culture in a software-‐driven society. Software Studies should instead examine the phenomena of the creation of software more reciprocally with regard to the shaping of culture, society and economy (Manovich, Forthcoming 2012, p. 5). The widening scope of Software Studies, in my opinion, further opens up the possibility for Applied Cultural Analysis to contribute to the development of a methodology for studying the cultural implications of software. It leaves behind the somewhat radical idea that one has to master one or more programming languages to promote one’s understanding of contemporary culture in technologically-‐ advanced, rich and mostly Western countries, as Manovich maintains (ibid., p. 9). Perhaps the ability to write programming code will be an indispensable competence for the cultural analyst of 2050. However, even if this happens at some point in the future, the need for the exact opposite—namely, the relevance and epistemological capacity of ethnographic internet research, in which the analyst defamiliarises himself from the act of writing code in order to gain a greater cultural understanding of software as such—will most likely still be valid in 2050 and the years after. What follows now is a somewhat more historical argument, useful for understanding the contemporaneous aspect of studying software culturally instead of merely pointing out its supposed ‘newness’—which suggests that, because it is a supposedly ‘new’ phenomenon, it therefore deserves scholarly attention. Manovich subsequently provides an overview of developments in programming languages, the rise of the personal-‐computer industry with its accompanying software, and the incipient Graphical User Interface (GUI) in the 1980s, followed by the birth of all the required technical components of the World Wide Web in the early ’90s. He 16

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What’s vulnerable about software?

concludes, again with a metaphor, that within the span of one decade, the computer emerged from invisibility “(…) to being the new engine of culture” (ibid. p. 10). Manovich argues that the development of software that was easy for people who lacked technical abilities to use was crucial for this development—even more than the development of hardware1. For what Manovich terms ‘the culture industries’, this made the transition to a software environment possible during the 1990s. Thus, the rise of this cultural phenomenon isn’t necessarily new, and it is therefore important in its own right. But it is a phenomenon that has rapidly increased its cultural pervasiveness and ubiquity in technologically-‐advanced, rich and mostly Western countries. It is these characteristics that make it deserving of our attention. With these historical circumstances in mind, Manovich takes the next conceptual step to ‘cultural software’, which constitutes a broad definition that includes both consumer software and the software that is more invisible yet crucial for the operation of all kinds of societal systems and processes: “(…) software programs which are used to create and access media objects and environments” (ibid., p. 11). This definition is relevant for our purposes because it includes a F/OSS web browser like Mozilla Firefox. Although Manovich focuses on software programs for media development and content creation, which are not the focus of this thesis, he specifies the category of software in which web browsers ‘belong’ as: “(…) tools for social communication and sharing of media, information, and knowledge (…)” (ibid., p. 12). Acknowledging the problematics of definitions, Manovich argues that by means of software, humanity has expanded its collective culture. This is especially the case with software that enables one to create and access content, according to Manovich. The latter aspect again includes a F/OSS web browser like Mozilla Firefox, in the sense that the web browser represents a ubiquitous tool used to access all sorts of cultural content. Widening the definition’s scope even further, Manovich points out that we mustn’t regard this expansion of culture as the mere addition of ‘software’ to ‘culture’. He makes a distinction between a ‘culture of software’ and ‘cultural software’, in the sense that the expansion of culture by means of software entails an addition that fundamentally changes the notion of culture (ibid., p. 14). 1 For general explanations of the computer jargon I would like to refer to the ‘Glossary of key terms’ at the end of the thesis.

Browser culture

What’s vulnerable about software?

Manovich states that software fundamentally alters the traditional analytical categories with which society and culture were understood before its advent. Software has replaced the static document or other expression of culture—the hitherto primary units of analysis—with what he terms ‘software performances’. The tiniest building block of culture no longer exists as a static entity because—and here, it must be noted that Manovich specifically has in mind media experiences as an expression of culture—what is constructed with the help of software isn’t static and can’t be located in a single text or piece of work (ibid., p. 15). Perhaps to argue for the development of Software Studies even more, Manovich states that it wouldn’t be a productive strategy to concentrate on reading the code (programming language) and attempting to interpret it in a culturally-‐ analytical manner, due to its extensiveness and complexity. Furthermore, there’s a gap between the understanding of the code and its outcome, in terms of user-‐ experience. A final limiting factor, according to Manovich, would be the loss of perhaps the most important characteristic of a media experience that is driven by software: its interactivity (ibid., p. 16). In my opinion, these suggestions shouldn’t only urge computer scientists and media theorists to contribute methodologically to the emerging field of Software Studies because, drawing on the toolbox of Applied Cultural Analysis, a significant contribution could also be made with, for example, ethnographic studies of the user experience and software’s interactivity. These opportunities for an interdisciplinary approach and cooperation between Software Studies and Applied Cultural Analysis are illustrated by Manovich’s example of viewing a PDF file. Such a widely used computer file is constructed by software in real-‐time, which frames our experience of the textual document we are viewing. This is fundamentally different when we try to say something meaningful about an expression of culture (for example, a novel or a movie) that lacks this dimension of software. The content of the PDF file is obviously important, but just as important is the software that constructs it in real-‐time and offers different ways of interacting with it. Hence, there is a need for the awareness to include software in the analysis of contemporary culture (ibid., p. 17). To summarise, it may be said that relevant methodological suggestions for how to focus on software can be made by Applied Cultural Analysis, despite 18

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What’s vulnerable about software?

Software Studies’ roots in areas that aren’t seemingly of direct interest, like Computer Sciences and Media Studies. Acknowledging software’s importance is necessary, perhaps required, because it is a contemporary, cultural phenomenon with an apparently accelerating degree of pervasiveness and ubiquity in ‘our culture’. Furthermore, Applied Cultural Analysis can be very useful for working toward a conceptualisation of cultural software, or a software culture, by taking software practices into account. Not in the sense of more traditional ethnographies associated with Human Computer Interface (HCI) (Fuller, 2003, p. 12 ff.), which focus on the interaction between the user and the computer, or Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) (Walther, 1995), which revolves around the communicative aspects mediated by computers—but rather an ethnographic approach that is specifically and thematically organised around a certain piece of software. Finally, to briefly address the applicability of results gained from an Applied Cultural Analysis— a field-‐driven project has the potential to fully employ the analytical capacity of Applied Cultural Analysis, combined with sound reflections on, and a translation of, its findings in the specific context. This specific context, bearing in mind software’s pervasiveness and ubiquitous presence in our culture, could be almost any company or organisation imaginable.

Conceptualisation two: A technological culture With the second conceptualisation, we may examine how the notions of ‘technological culture’, ‘technological vulnerability’ and ‘technological system’ relate to software culture, which thereby creates a connection to our case study of the F/OSS web browser Firefox and the Mozilla community that creates it. The influential socio–technical theorist Wiebe Bijker speaks of the ‘vulnerability of a technological culture’ (Bijker, 2006). What exactly does Bijker mean by a ‘technological culture’? Quoting Helga Nowotny, an important thinker within Science Studies, Bijker starts by pointing out that “technology is perceived as the most consequential cultural practice that humankind has developed”, and that “the risks associated with technologies have revealed themselves to be a cultural phenomenon as well” (Nowotny, 2003, in: Bijker, 2006, p. 53). For these reasons, according to Bijker, we need to employ a cultural perspective before we can analyse

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the vulnerability associated with technological culture. Second, Bijker identifies a shift in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS)—from a more local to a broader focus on technological culture as a whole—as the reason for speaking of technological culture. Third, and this has to do with the notion of ‘pervasiveness’, he alludes to some of his earlier work in which he concluded that, to encompass the notion of pervasiveness, it doesn’t suffice to discuss ‘social systems’ and ‘technological systems’ separately. Technological culture as a focal point of analysis is useful to further our understanding of contemporary societies as being—and it must be emphasised that this claim also comes from the field of STS—mostly “shaped by knowledge and technology.” Regarded that way, the conceptualisation ‘technological culture’ serves as an analytical tool that regards the realms of society, culture and technology as mutually inclusive, and allows for a “specific attention to the cultural dimensions.” (ibid., p. 54). Finally, Bijker states that his use of the concept has resonance with Manuell Castell’s analysis of the Network Society (Castells, 2010, in: Bijker, 2006, p.54), in which the analysis is extended to identity, democracy, power and international relations; it also has a contemporary philosophical acknowledgement “that the characteristic traits of our culture are pervasively and irrevocably technological,” and that all current public debates “involve perceptions of technology in its widest and most comprehensive sense, which is to say technology as our culture” (Hickman, 2001, in: Bijker 2006, p. 54).”

The convergence between the two conceptualisations We may now determine where the two conceptualisations, as represented by Manovich and Bijker, converge. Software could be regarded as an inescapable, unavoidable and mandatory component of a technological culture. So whether or not the focus, methodology and object of study are different—and have obviously led to different conceptualisations—they fundamentally converge, and thus hold the promise of rendering visible the socio–technical relations that would have remained hidden if these accounts hadn’t been regarded simultaneously. In connection to the empirical example presented here, the sheer number of Mozilla Firefox users (400 million; (Mozilla, 2010) testifies to the significance of this particular piece of software as a manifestation of contemporary, high-‐technology culture. And it is just one

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example. Moreover, bearing in mind that this specific technology is used on a global scale in very different cultural contexts, the need for a cultural perspective in studying this phenomenon is obvious. The implication being that use of this technology can’t only be beneficial in these different contexts. Alluding to Nowotny’s statement above: There must be risks involved as well, and they must differ somehow from context to context. The next aspect of convergence between the two conceptualisations can be found in a joint attempt to create some sort of meta-‐perspective of software, technology and culture, respectively. Bijker does this by labelling his approach as coming specifically from the relatively young scientific discipline of STS, connecting a widening of that field’s scope with an argument for widening the scope of the concept of culture. Manovich does this—with frequent use of vivid metaphors that make his conceptualisation more discursive in nature—by arguing for the need for and then announcing an entire new discipline, namely Software Studies, which challenges the lines of demarcation between the Media Studies and Computer Science fields. Then there’s the issue of the pervasiveness or ubiquitous presence of technology and software in our culture, as conceptualised by Manovich and Bijker. The latter pleads for a more integrated approach with regard to society and technology, in order to soften the dichotomy that keeps them distinct, open up relevant cultural perspectives on both, and thus reach the conclusion that everything in technologically-‐advanced, rich, mostly Western countries is entrenched in technology and vice versa. In a similar vein, the emergence of the field of Software Studies, as promoted by Manovich, has spun off from Computer Science and from now on rather encompasses that discipline. Redefining the nascent discipline in this way clears the path for its future inclusion in the realms of culture, society and economy. The reason for the broadening of Software Studies and ascribing to software a broader cultural meaning has similar roots as Bijker’s move toward a conceptualisation of culture as being fundamentally technological in nature. As we have seen, Bijker mentions a shift in the field of STS, from more local cultures of technology to technology at large, whereas Manovich broadens Software Studies’ scope by regarding Computer Science as an element of culture, rather than clinging

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to an earlier stance in which it was treated as an explanatory device. With these points of convergence in mind, we can now proceed to the notion of ‘technological vulnerability’ and explore how this relates to software.

Bijker’s notion of ‘technological vulnerability’ Bijker argues that technological vulnerability is not only negative, but also something that can’t be avoided and, in fact, can be a driving force for innovation in a culture like ours. I’m particularly interested in the latter aspect, but to arrive there, the negative aspects need to be mapped out as well. I don’t intend to go into the details about Bijker’s definition of a vulnerable technological system because, as I attempt to demonstrate, ‘technological vulnerability’ can be transposed to the realm of software, an example of a particular technology that Bijker doesn’t discuss. In brief, however, it may be said that Bijker’s interpretation of the notion of a vulnerable system is strongly connected to the potential for accidents—and even large-‐scale disasters—in the event that these large and complex systems stop working, either partially or entirely. Bijker mentions examples such as the Space Shuttle Challenger and London’s Ladbroke Grove train disaster (Bijker, 2006, p. 56 ff.). As I attempt to show here with the example of Mozilla Firefox, we can distinguish technological vulnerabilities of varying degrees in technological systems that are different from those that are Bijker’s primary object of study. Before we move on to what precisely these other technological systems consist of, it may be said that there isn’t an immediately perceivable connection to accidents or disasters as a possible outcome of these vulnerabilities—they are more elusive in this case. However, I attempt to show that the notions of technological vulnerabilities and systems nevertheless hold; they merely differ in degree and scale. So what does a technological system look like here? For our purposes, it takes the shape of a personal computer, roughly divided into ‘PCs’ (personal computers), which typically run either the Windows or, less commonly, the Linux operating system (OS); and ‘Macs’, Apple’s Mac computers, which run OS X (operating system version 10). ‘The computer’, one of the major actors in this analysis and encompassing both PCs and Macs, has a copy of the F/OSS web browser Mozilla Firefox installed and is connected to the Internet. The specific connotation of

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‘vulnerability’ here is related to potential negative effects like computer damage and/or privacy infringements. Either way, and although they are interrelated, there’s a specific emphasis on the vulnerability of the software, not the hardware. Without going into the intricacies of Computer Science, Ivan Victor Krsul elucidates what software vulnerabilities may entail in his PhD dissertation, Software Vulnerability Analysis (1998); they are relevant here to partially answer the question: What’s vulnerable about software? Software vulnerabilities are classified as the result of system failures that decrease acceptable levels of security. “They can cause the loss of information and reduce the value or usefulness of the system” (Krsul, 1998, p. xiv). As seen from this highly technical perspective, these vulnerabilities are preceded by errors, faults and failures. An error needs to be understood as a mistake of different kinds that is made by—and this is important—a human; namely, the software developer. Subsequently, this error may possibly lead to one or several faults in the programming language (code). When faulty code is executed, the result may be a failure. An example of ‘the execution of code’ would be a user who clicks on the icon of the web browser to launch it; and an example of ‘a failure’ would be that the website subsequently doesn’t display on the computer screen. Interestingly, from this ‘engineer’s perspective’, the vulnerability of a technological system is solely perceived as something negative, in the sense that Krsul attempts to show in his dissertation how these vulnerabilities could be eliminated and prevented by establishing a unified definition of what they entail. However, acknowledging the ‘human-‐first’ cause—as represented by the software developer who simply makes a mistake that results in the vulnerability of software—we must at the same time acknowledge that vulnerability can never be entirely eliminated and/or prevented. This opens the door for the relevance of a qualitative analysis to search for pathways to determine how to best deal with the remaining inevitable risks and threats that result from software vulnerabilities. And even to take it one step further: How can they be a driving force for innovation? Returning to Bijker for a moment, he points out that the realisation that technological vulnerability can only be eliminated and prevented to a certain extent creates a need for a relational and active definition, as suggested by Blaikie et al. when they discuss natural hazards: vulnerability then means the reduced “capacity

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to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the impact of a natural hazard” (Blaikie et. al., 1994, in: Bijker, 2006, p. 54). A definition like this takes into consideration the context of the perceived vulnerability, rather than regarding it as an inherent property of the system in question. Vulnerability, regarded in this way, allows for a connection to more positive aspects of its connotation. In the sense that there is a negative connotation of vulnerability, aside from its connection to accidents, this concept could also refer to an ability to show weakness as proof of one’s or its strength (ibid., p. 55). Or as I propose here: Technological vulnerability doesn’t only result in risk; under certain circumstances, it also results in benefit. This seemingly contradictory potential for benefit as a result of technological vulnerability is presumably a characteristic of F/OSS in general and Firefox in particular, as discussed later. When taking into consideration the enormous popularity of Firefox, this openness—combined with the fact that it is a free download that almost any computer user in the world can install—is exploited to steer technological development in the direction of continuous innovation. Having examined the two concepts of culture and their convergence, which served as the starting point of our journey, as well as the transposition of Bijker’s concept of ‘technological vulnerability’ into the realm of software, we must now take the next step, which is to take a closer look at the software-‐creating community of Mozilla Firefox. However, we should keep some analytical distance at this point before total immersion takes place.

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2. The Mozilla Firefox community: Is it a community? There are numerous examples on the mozilla.org website which indicate that the non-‐profit organisation describes itself as a community. In one of its key documents, the ‘Mozilla Manifesto’, where the organisation lays out its guiding principles and ideals, it says: “The Mozilla project is a global community of people who believe that openness, innovation, and opportunity are key to the continued health of the Internet.” Furthermore, it terms its F/OSS practices as “(…) a community-‐based approach to create world-‐class open source software and to develop new types of collaborative activities” with the conviction that “transparent community-‐based processes promote participation, accountability, and trust” (Mozilla, 2011a). Also, in Mozilla’s description of its own history, the organisation is apparently aware that it is a community. Its members are from all over the world and don’t only contribute to the community’s core business—software—but have also been involved in the overall organisation of the project at some point. According to the Mozilla foundation, this spirit of openness ensured that the project became bigger than any company, and that the community members got the opportunity to expand on its original scope. They started to develop different kinds of software products and created other projects. Additionally, Firefox’s predecessor, the Phoenix web browser, was also launched by members of the Mozilla community, and its ultimate goal was to provide the best browsing experience to as many people as possible. Finally, there’s mention of the 10-‐year anniversary of the community in 2008, and according to the Mozilla foundation, this “(…) has shown that commercial companies can benefit by collaborating in open source projects and that great end user products can be produced as open source software (Mozilla, 2011d). Another example is found on Mozilla’s European website: European Mozilla Community Blog (emphasis added). This website is particularly interesting, in the sense that it shows photographs of ‘real’ people in real-‐life (offline) situations at different kinds of Mozilla events. This is most likely a representation of a community, but it resonates with more traditional notions of what constitutes a community. The blog describes

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itself as such: “This blog is a collaborative blog allowing Mozilla contributors in Europe to talk about what they invent, do, create and organize locally for the Mozilla project” (Mozilla-‐Europe, 2011). Now, how can we establish a symmetrical and reflexive ethnographic understanding of Mozilla Firefox if it is regarded as an online or virtual community? First, I take Mozilla Firefox’s self-‐description as a point of departure for the analysis. A second reason for addressing the community concept is to connect my thesis to the disciplines of Ethnology and Applied Cultural Analysis, arguing for the relevance of the incorporation of the topics discussed here in future studies within both fields. Next, we zero in on the notion of ‘virtual community’, in which ‘virtual’ needs to be understood in a colloquial sense. I don’t intend to label the Mozilla Firefox community as being essentially ‘virtual’ from the onset, because Mozilla Firefox doesn’t make that distinction itself. Although the community concept is huge, we won’t go all the way back to Tönnies’ conceptualisations of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, in which ‘community’ and ‘society’ are regarded “(…) as two different modes of mentality and behavior, and as two different types of society” (Tönnies, 2002, p. vii). Neither will we move in a more philosophical direction like, for example, Roberto Esposito’s work Communitas, in which the author attempts to move away from the dialectic as expounded by Tönnies by conducting an etymological investigation of the Latin concept of ‘communitas’ (Esposito, 2010). Nor will we move in a more explicit political direction as found, for example, in Nikolas Rose’s work in which he proposes that: Individuals are to be governed through their freedom, but neither as isolated atoms of classical political economy, nor as citizens of society, but as members of heterogeneous communities of allegiance, as “community” emerges as a new way of conceptualizing and administering moral relations amongst persons. (Rose, 2006, p. 147)

Instead, I would like to maintain a somewhat strict focus on what some call virtual communities. This is necessary because, as I show, when the concept of community is related to practices that take place entirely online, it isn’t unambiguously regarded as unproblematic, especially when compared to discussions in which the internet—

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as a possible condition for the formation of something we could call a community— is absent. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, to strive for symmetry is another reason to focus on community, taking the actors’ self-‐descriptions seriously and trying to avoid explaining it away beforehand. The notion of community, whether called virtual or not, isn’t undebated in the field of anthropology and its related disciplines, where ethnographic fieldwork is part of data collection. The addition of adjectives like ‘online’ or ‘virtual’ only adds to its complexity. This happens because it complicates notions of space, place, time, materiality, immateriality, embodiment and social interaction that didn’t exist—certainly not to the same degree and extent—before the advent and mass-‐adoption of the internet. In the following section, I discuss the concept of community when ‘real-‐life’, place-‐bound versions of the concept are compared with communities on the internet. Or one could also say, communities as they were conceptualised before and after the advent and massive adoption of the internet. I start with an oft-‐ mentioned work by Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (1993), a journalist’s account of the possibility of a virtual community. Second, I draw upon an online ethnography by the anthropologist René T.A. Lysloff (2003) about a musical community on the internet; it is an ethnographic critique on the overly optimistic assumptions of such a possibility, even while maintaining the notion of community. Third, in an attempt to overcome some of the complications of the concept, I examine Bakardjieva’s alternative proposition of ‘Virtual Togetherness’, which is broader and incorporates the possibility of an online community (2005). Then I take a closer look at John Postill’s suggestion to entirely discard the concept as a useful analytical tool within studies of the internet (2008). Finally, with the help of Daniel Miller (2011), I try to make a case for a symmetrical approach when viewing online communities ethnographically. These different intellectual positions provide an overview of a few possibilities for how the concept of ‘community’ may be regarded in discussions of the internet as well as the socio–technical relations that are created on the internet. This overview is meant to connect back to Mozilla Firefox’s self-‐description as an actual community, and it serves as a transition to how the empirical example of a community is subsequently analysed here using elements of actor-‐network theory.

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Position one: A Virtual Community An oft-‐quoted starting point—suitable for narrowing the focus to the community concept as discussed in relation to the possibility of online communities—is journalist Howard Rheingold’s Virtual Communities. It is an account of his personal experience with the computer network WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) in the era that preceded the widespread use of the internet; i.e., prior to 1985. Rheingold makes an enthusiastic case for the possibility of a disembodied community, a virtual community: People in virtual communities use words on screens to exchange pleasantries and argue, engage in intellectual discourse, conduct commerce, exchange knowledge, share emotional support, make plans, brainstorm, gossip, feud, fall in love, find friends and lose them, play games, flirt, create a little high art and a lot of idle talk. People in virtual communities do just about everything people do in real life, but we leave our bodies behind [emphasis added]. You can’t kiss anybody and nobody can punch you in the nose, but a lot can happen within those boundaries. (Rheingold, 1993, p. xvii)

Rheingold aims to inform a broader audience about the promising potential that (at the time of his writing) these relatively new communication technologies seemed to hold. He tries to tame his enthusiasm, but taking into consideration the Zeitgeist, in which these technologies became available to a general public for the very first time, he can’t be blamed for not entirely succeeding. Therefore, it is all the more important to note that his study isn’t ethnographically grounded, and that the author never claimed that it was. As a sociologist and anthropologist, Davies points out in Reflexive Ethnography (2008) that, in fact, a merit of online ethnographic studies has been to put this example of what one could term ‘techno-‐optimism’ in a more critical perspective. According to Davies, it is techno-‐optimistic that an account such as Rheingold’s regards the internet as inherently capable of facilitating egalitarianism. This is wrong in Davies’ view, she sees in it a repetition of the ‘classic’ pitfall where a presumed romanticism is attributed to community, where new forms of “hierarchy” and “social control” are overlooked, and the only difference is that the context is now ‘online’ (ibid., p. 161). Davies points out a second pitfall, which is that it is a mistake to put the internet on par with a physical locality that, by means of 28

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community, is transformed into a “meaningful place”. However, as another commentator notes: “Rheingold’s description was highly evocative, and influential in promoting acceptance of online interactions as socially meaningful activities” (Hine, 2008). This is the main reason that his book should be mentioned in discussions of the nature of so-‐called online communities, as it is here.

Position two: An online community Let’s proceed next to Lysloff’s study, Musical Community on the Internet: An On-‐line Ethnography (2003). He starts with the observation that most studies of the internet—keep in mind that the study was done in the early 2000s, and that the internet has become much more visual since then—were focused on its textual nature (Lysloff, 2003, p. 234). According to Lysloff, arguing for the need to understand social relations at work when using the internet, ethnographic approaches are necessary beyond textual analyses. Although the internet may be regarded as a disembodied medium, its use has consequences for our concrete, embodied realities. Through his analysis of an online musical community, Lysloff points out that there are in fact many similarities to doing fieldwork in the classical sense. This goes for both the methods employed, like participant observation and interviewing, and the intellectual challenges connected with doing online fieldwork (ibid.). However, when comparing his online study with his fieldwork in the country of Java, there are obvious differences as well. Most noticeable, perhaps, is the absence of face-‐to-‐face contact when doing fieldwork online, which he considers a much lonelier experience than performing fieldwork in a classical sense. Interestingly, despite the differences, Lysloff doesn’t regard his online fieldwork experiences as even slightly less social. In fact, new social relations come into being and require a rapport to create them (ibid., p. 235). Having said that, we need to take a closer look at his conception of an online community. Lysloff states that an online ethnography defies traditional ideas about ‘the field’ as being place-‐ and space-‐bound, but despite this difference, the field can still be regarded as some sort of social space. Furthermore, an online community is considered just as real as one that solely exists offline: “(…) the Internet provides a new materiality [italics added] through which social interaction and group formation

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can take place and from which new possibilities for subjectivity and group identity can emerge” (ibid., p. 236). Alluding to modernist and post-‐modernist cultural critiques, Lysloff discusses the absence in these discussions of a question like: What are the consequences for everyday life? Although it may be true, as these cultural critiques maintain, that our categories of ‘the real’ and ‘representation’ in social interaction have changed as a result of technological developments, Lysloff states that they are not divorced from human reality. Moreover, employing a post-‐ modernist vocabulary like a “culture of simulation” doesn’t mean that new technologies like the internet are less cultural than, for example, the fine arts that he discusses. In fact, they are just as cultural. In addition to this, when taking into consideration all the physical hardware—computers, routers, wires, etc.—that is necessary to facilitate the operations of the internet, it is safe to say that the Web is also very material, and that a dichotomy between non-‐material–material doesn’t hold (ibid., p. 237). Through his ethnographic study of an online musical community, Lysloff reaches the following conclusion: An online community, just like one in real life, becomes coherent because of a shared interest. Rheingold is criticised here for giving a simplistic description of community, in the sense that he believes virtual communities only come into being when a growing number of people on the internet engage in an ongoing dialogue, which at some point results in what could be called ‘interpersonal bonds’ (ibid., p. 255). The other extreme perspective, according to Lysloff, is that of utopianism. In Lysloff’s view, when the virtual community opens up to the possibility of utopianism, it turns into “(…) a kind of place where access is guaranteed to all citizens, where they can gather, organize themselves, and hold informed and reasoned debate” (ibid.). Another possible position, according to Lysloff, is that an online community is not a real community, but merely represents the desire for community. Again, he points out: “A community coheres through the common interests, ideals, and goals of its membership” (ibid., p. 256), and the internet needs to be seen as the facilitator necessary to achieve that coherence. In a similar vein, Lysloff pleads for an understanding of community in which shared social relations are more important than shared space. When compared with ‘offline’ communities, there seems to be a greater importance given to social relations over 30

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“physical proximity”. Lysloff urges us to question how online communities are performed, and what they mean for their members (ibid.). Therefore, from his perspective, it is important to distinguish between the context as it is shaped by an online community in its various guises, and the social relations that are made possible by it. The latter is the most important characteristic of what constitutes a community (ibid., p. 257).

Position three: An alternative proposition, ‘Virtual Togetherness’ In Internet Society: The Internet in Everyday Life (2005), Bakardjieva confronts some of the problematic dimensions of the concept of the community more directly than Lysloff, who maintains a notion of community by proposing an alternative to a conceptualisation of collective online practices: ‘Virtual Togetherness’. Bakardjieva observes that, whether one speaks of a community or not when discussing Mozilla Firefox, for example, it depends on the specific interpretation of the concept. However, “(…) by engaging in different forms of collective practice online, users transcend the sphere of the narrowly private interest and experience. They use their homes as bases for reaching out into the public sphere” (Bakardjieva, 2005, p. 166). But now, just six years after the publication of Bakardjieva’s book, it is rather dated to consider a home as the base from which one reaches out to the public sphere by means of an internet connection, especially considering the ever-‐increasing ubiquity of wireless internet connections, combined with an ever-‐increasing amount of mobile devices that can tap into these wireless connections. That said, Bakardjieva’s point that the community concept is problematic for understanding collective online practices is still accurate. One of her arguments actually resonates with Lysloff’s point mentioned earlier; namely, that the notion of a virtual community is “premised on a false dichotomy” in which the internet is presented as a separate reality, divorced from people’s embodied everyday lives. She maintains that certain important parts of people’s lives are, regarded that way, not captured with the concept of a virtual community. Drawing upon community-‐ and historical studies, Bakardjieva asserts that many communities understood in the traditional manner are on par with virtual communities, in the sense that both can be considered virtual because they are both, to a certain extent, mediated and imagined (ibid., p. 167).

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Therefore, collective online practices mustn’t be regarded as inferior to a ‘traditional community’ simply because of a lack of face-‐to-‐face contact. Neither must they be extolled as “liberating or empowering” (ibid.). A virtual community can’t be scrutinised and described solely by regarding that which is a result of online production, according to Bakardjieva; rather, cultures are “enacted online” and “have their roots in forms of life existing in the real world” (ibid., p. 168).” Avoiding the debate about whether or not a genuine community can exist online because, in Bakardjieva’s view, it poses the wrong question, she proposes to ask why internet users choose to participate in various forms of virtual togetherness (or do not). Based on her ethnographic research, she claims that the notion of community is too much of a value-‐laden concept to always be accurate enough to describe social engagement online. Instead, with the concept of Virtual Togetherness, an online community would be one of several options for this kind of social engagement. Virtual Togetherness should not be regarded as the opposite of a ‘real’ or ‘genuine’ community; instead, this would be the “isolated consumption of digitized goods and services within the realm of alienated private life” (ibid.). Thus, taking a position between two important binaries with regard to social engagement on the Web—that is, virtual–real and public–private—Bakardjieva points out that “Users approach the medium (…) from a variety of situational motivations, needs and ideologies” (ibid., p. 186). With this, she offers a way to analyse social activities that are facilitated by the internet, which is more heterogeneous, and perhaps flexible, than if one were to hold on to some interpretation of the community concept.

Position four: A rejection of the concept of ‘community’ The anthropologist John Postill (2008) rejects the notion of a community as a useful analytical tool and argues instead for an expansion of our conceptual vocabulary to localise the internet. His study is also based on ethnographic fieldwork. Taking his point of departure from the observation that, with the rise in the sheer number of global internet users, the Web is getting more and more local, Postill proposes a new set of conceptual tools to deal with this ongoing development. According to Postill, to further understand how the Internet is becoming more local, we need to move

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beyond two dominant and mutually dependent notions: community and network. For our purposes, I focus on Postill’s critique of the first notion. Following anthropologist Vered Amit (2002), Postill sums up the theoretical difficulties with the community concept: To begin with, the term is emotionally appealing, and therefore very useful in public rhetorical strategies, “(…) even though its empirical referent is seldom specified or, indeed, specifiable” (Amit, 2002 in Postill, 2008, p. 415). Thus, according to Amit, it is always necessary to investigate the term sceptically and to not expect that community can be regarded as a pre-‐defined unit of social analysis: “Relying on emotionally-‐charged, bounded notions such as community [isn’t a solid strategy,] for there are numerous sets of social relations that cannot be brought under these banners” (ibid.). To summarise, “(…) community merits attention as a polymorphous folk notion widely used both online and offline, but as an analytical concept with an identifiable empirical referent it is of little use” (ibid., p. 416).

Position five: Towards a symmetrical approach Anthropologist Daniel Miller presents an anthropology of the online social-‐media network Facebook in his latest work, Tales from Facebook (2011). Here, he makes some interesting points about Facebook being regarded as a community. They serve as a transition to the occupied position as explained here, and from the position in which the Mozilla Firefox community has been conceptually approached. Mozilla Firefox is different from Facebook in ways that aren’t relevant to our discussion; instead, we need to consider their similarities. The most salient and important one for our purposes is that both may be viewed as an online community. Miller’s arguments are relevant because his fieldwork with Facebook—in contrast to the ethnographic data generated in this thesis—hasn’t only taken place online. It was actually based in classic ethnographic methods like participant observation and interviews in an offline context; therefore, it supplements the empirical material presented here. Miller succeeds in uncovering a conception of Facebook as a community through one of his interlocutors, Alana, who is both a Facebook user and lives in a real life, close-‐knit community in Trinidad: “Listening to her talk about the use of Facebook at night, amongst her peers, there is no getting away from the conclusion that Facebook creates, maintains and constitutes some

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kind of community, whatever we mean by that term” (Miller, 2011, p. 23). Miller points out that values that are typical in communities come into being through the shared use of Facebook. It facilitates “an ethical sensibility” between its members on one hand, while on the other, it holds the devastating potential to violate people’s privacy (ibid., p. 24). Miller criticises the widespread use of the concept of ‘community’ by people who have never actually lived in one, and he makes a plausible argument for his interlocutor being authoritative in this case, since she’s in a position to compare her ‘virtual life’ on Facebook—regarded as being some kind of community—with her experience of having grown up in and being part of a close-‐ knit, real-‐life community. Alana can confirm from her participation in these communities that both aspects are true: Facebook facilitates the positive aspects of a real-‐life community, such as maintaining and strengthening close human ties, but also the negative ones, such as being a breeding ground for scandal and violations of privacy. However, there’s also an important difference, according to Miller’s interlocutor: Referring to the highly negative aspects of growing up in a close-‐knit community—such as unfounded gossip, undesired interference with each other’s lives and the occurrence of violent incidents—Alana reaches the conclusion that “(…) Facebook is a much safer version of community, a whole lot less malicious and vicious than the real thing” (ibid., p. 25).

An argument for actor-‐network theory From this overview of the intellectual positions on the community concept, Miller’s comes closest to the one I hold. It shows that the interlocutor can, in fact, be authoritative when compared to the analyst, and that such a modest theoretical stance is productive for generating new ethnographic insights. So this example from Miller’s fieldwork demonstrates the usefulness of leaving behind one’s theoretical preconceptions upon entering the field, and in that way, the analyst may learn as much as possible from the interlocutors and other actors. I have referred to this here as a symmetrical approach, and such an approach resonates with the more ANT-‐ inspired analysis that follows in the discussion of the empirical example, Mozilla Firefox. This is not to say that the other positions mentioned don’t have any analytical value; however, Latour’s proposition of ANT as applied here constitutes a

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critique of ‘the social’ altogether—including the assemblage of what is commonly referred to as a ‘community’. Put another way, choosing ANT to analyse the empirical example because it has the potential to open up the powerful conceptualisations that determined our point of departure entails letting go of the idea that the analyst is imbued with a meta-‐gaze that the actors don’t possess: We have to resist pretending that actors have only a language while the analyst possesses the meta-‐language in which the first is ‘embedded’. (…) analysts are allowed to possess only some infra-‐language whose role is simply to help them become attentive to the actors’ own fully developed meta-‐language, a reflexive account of what they are saying. (Latour, 2005, p. 49)

Furthermore, ANT’s emphasis on the agency of non-‐human entities is appropriate for an analysis of the many non-‐human actors encountered during my fieldwork. The emphasis on the agency of objects is also one of the rather subtle differences between Miller’s views on materiality and Latour’s. Both theorists actively include objects in their analyses, and both try to overcome the dichotomy between objects and subjects (Miller, 2005, p. 3). Miller’s work is associated more with consumption studies and material culture (at least until his 2011 book, Tales from Facebook), while Latour is traditionally associated with philosophy and Science and Technology Studies. Perhaps it is the object of study in Miller’s and Latour’s work that differs the most, and which makes me lean more toward an ANT-‐inspired approach; but it is also because Latour’s critique of the social, as formulated in Reassembling the Social, suits my analysis of the community concept. In this sense, ANT offers two seemingly contradictory analytical advantages. First, it allows the actors to speak for themselves: If Mozilla Firefox claims to be a community, then who are we to tell it a priori that it is not? Second, Latour’s recent modification of actor-‐network theory—from its traditional association with Science Studies to a more general theory of how to study all aspects of the social, not only the relationships between science and technology—enables me, at the same time, to critique the community concept as a commonly preconceived social assemblage. Thus, to answer the question that was raised at the beginning of this chapter: Yes,

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the Mozilla Firefox community is indeed a community. At least for now, until we see what it is actually made of as observed in the field.

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A multi-modal approach

3. A multi-‐modal approach for doing fieldwork in an online community To give the reader a better understanding of who entered the field and why, a brief personal history of my own experience with the Internet, computers and web browsers is overviewed here. My motivation for choosing an auto-‐ethnographic strategy was to juxtapose myself as an analyst against the interlocutors I encountered through my participant observations in the Mozilla Firefox community. Entering and being part of the ethnographic setting would facilitate personal acquaintance and expertise with the topics discussed. Describing this contrast should also allow the reader to position him/herself as a third party outside the text, offering an additional layer of abstraction. In addition, this approach needs to be seen as an extension of the theoretical point made in ANT: that one must consider all actors and achieve symmetry in the ethnography. Drawing upon Charlotte Aull Davies’ Reflexive Ethnography: A Guide to Researching Selves and Others (Aull Davies, 2008), it may be said that the self serves to position the researcher in this section as the stranger versus the different other. In addition, the self must be included as a product of the ethnographic situation, as well as the effects of the fieldwork experiences on the self. Furthermore, incorporating the self somehow can be regarded epistemologically as a way of knowing through embodied experience (ibid., p. 216, ff.). To complement Davies’ theoretical reflections and to distinguish the approach presented here from what is termed ‘evocative auto-‐ethnography’, we should include Leon Anderson’s proposal of an Analytic Autoethnography (2006). This approach also ensures compatibility between auto-‐ethnography and the more traditional practices that have also been employed, even though they were mostly conducted on the Web. The three core characteristics of analytic auto-‐ethnography mentioned by Anderson are: (1) complete member researcher status; (2) visibility as such a member in the text; and (3) a commitment to the development of theoretical understanding of broader social phenomena.

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Anderson goes on to describe these characteristics in more detail, and he proposes five key features of analytic auto-‐ethnography. To position my own internet ethnography and to argue for the enriching analytical potential of auto-‐ ethnography, I overview them briefly, comparing Anderson’s approach with my own. Let’s begin with complete member researcher (CMR). Anderson refers to Patricia and Peter Adler (Adler & Adler, 1987 in: Anderson, 2006, p. 379) when discussing two types of CMRs: ‘opportunistic’ and ‘convert’ CMRs. The most salient aspect of the former is that group membership precedes the decision to study the group, while in the latter, the starting point for research is a “(…) purely data-‐oriented research interest in the setting (…)” that ultimately leads to “(…) complete immersion and membership during the course of the research” (ibid.). If we consider the group under scrutiny here—computer, web-‐browser and internet users—one could make a case in this ethnography for an ‘I’ who was already a group member and whose membership preceded the decision to conduct research. On the other hand, if we say that ‘the group’ studied here consists of fairly advanced computer users who use the F/OSS web browser Firefox, and who furthermore possess at least some programming skills, then some degree of ‘conversion’ to group membership has taken place as well. What is problematic is the broad definition of what exactly constitutes ‘the group’ and the rather brief time span that was reserved for the Internet ethnography to allow for “complete immersion and membership” (ibid.). Nevertheless, to unify aspects of both poles into the ‘I’ in this ethnography means that CMR is achieved to the extent that it enriches the collected data. The second point Anderson mentions, which distinguishes analytic auto-‐ ethnography from more traditional practices, is analytic reflexivity. Here, the focus is not exclusively directed to “(…) understanding and making understandable to others a social world beyond [the ethnographer]”, but also includes reflections on the self that contextualises the acquired data in personal experiences and understanding (ibid., p. 382). While it may be argued that a general trait of ethnography is that reflexivity on the self results in greater self-‐understanding, the difference is one of degrees—to the extent that CMR status increases the effect of self-‐engagement and reflexivity, and it may change “(…) the researcher’s own beliefs, actions and sense of self” (ibid., p. 383). I experienced the consequences of CMR status and self-‐reflexivity 38

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to some extent during the course of my fieldwork, as I later discuss with regard to the empirical example of a malware attack on Apple’s Mac computers by MACDefender. Anderson’s third key characteristic also applies; that is, the textual visibility of the active researcher in the text, as I attempt to demonstrate. This is perhaps a more obvious point, but it is necessary to ensure that the above-‐mentioned reflexivity becomes manifest in the text. Moreover, in this manner, the ‘I’ in the text, the analyst, becomes one of the human actors—together with the interlocutors, the non-‐human entities and the reading audience—which is compatible with actor-‐ network theory. To clarify this point, Latour compares the ‘sociology of the social’ with his proposal for a ‘sociology of associations’: For the sociologists of associations [i.e., the analysts who draw upon ANT], any study of any group by any social scientist is part and parcel of what makes the group exist, last, decay, or disappear. In the developed world, there is no group that does not have at least some social science instrument attached to it. This is not some ‘inherent limitation’ of the discipline due to the fact that sociologists are also ‘social members’ and have difficulties in ‘extracting themselves’ out of the bonds of their own ‘social categories’. It is simply because they are on par [emphasis added] with those they study, doing exactly the same job and participating in the same task of tracing social bonds, albeit with different instruments and for different professional callings. (Latour, 2005, p. 34)

Returning to Anderson, personal experiences and feelings become pathways to a greater understanding of the research setting. However, the analytical purpose needs to be maintained, and there’s a pitfall in the balance between self-‐absorption and the incorporation of the self’s subjective experiences that lead to novel insights. In other words, the ‘I’ in the text—with all its engagement, personal experiences, feelings and insights—needs to lead us to new vistas that would otherwise have remained hidden. If not, the text loses its ethnographic qualities (ibid., p. 385). This last point relates to Anderson’s fourth proposed feature of analytic auto-‐ ethnography: dialogue with informants beyond the self, which in this case means the researcher. This point also distinguishes analytic auto-‐ethnography from evocative auto-‐ethnography, in the sense that the latter “(…) seeks narrative fidelity only to

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the researcher’s subjective experience [while] analytic auto-‐ethnography is grounded in self-‐experience but reaches beyond it as well” (ibid., p. 386). Finally, according to Anderson, there needs to be a commitment to an analytic agenda in order to justify the approach he calls analytic auto-‐ethnography. In his view, the ultimate goal of analytic ethnography is to transcend the description of a ‘mere’ personal experience, an insider’s view or to succeed in striking the right emotional chord in the reading audience. We need to transcend the collected data and employ it to gain new insights into the studied cultural phenomenon, which goes beyond the empirical material (ibid., p. 387). Although this point doesn’t differ from more traditional ethnographic approaches, the risk of not succeeding is perhaps greater, due to the incorporation of the analyst’s own personal experiences.

The researcher is an actor, too: The relevant part of my life Now let’s go back in time—to the year 1993, to be precise. Graduating from secondary school at that time meant that all schoolwork was done manually, and all information (primarily books) was searched for, found and retrieved physically. The one-‐hour-‐a-‐week class called informatica wasn’t a major subject, and the computers used were from the pre-‐Graphical User Interface (GUI) era. A user had to type in a command line followed by ‘enter’ to make it ‘do’ anything, and the only thing I remember about trying to type in the correct command line was an annoying beep and the textual response ‘syntax error’ that displayed on the monochrome computer screen when I didn’t succeed. Deciding not to pursue any further studies at that time, there was a computerless period of some four years. These were the years leading up to the release of the Windows 95 OS, which introduced GUI to the masses. In addition, the Microsoft Office Suite had seen the light of day, and it became increasingly popular. I became familiar with both software packages through dedicated courses. The first time I had private access to the internet was around 1998. It was on a Compaq PC that was running the follow-‐up version of Windows 95, Windows 98. To browse the internet, I did the same thing as perhaps millions of others—I used the pre-‐installed Internet Explorer. I might have also tried Netscape Navigator without thinking much, if at all, about why exactly those programs worked; they

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were simply the tools necessary to browse the Internet, the latter being the most important and thought-‐provoking. The period from that time onward could be characterised as an explorative phase, in which this new ‘thing’ was somewhat hesitantly investigated. I remember using Altavista, Ask Jeeves and perhaps Yahoo! to search for information (Google didn’t yet exist). I created my first email address with Microsoft’s Hotmail service. Aside from surfing the internet, the PC was used for some gaming; online shopping was still an unknown phenomenon. Being aware that others might have unauthorised access to private information that one sends and receives over the internet led me to use an alias instead of my real name in certain cases. However, acknowledging that I could somehow be ‘seen’ by others while surfing the Web was the only security/privacy issue I was vaguely aware of at the time, that can be related to the ‘technological vulnerability’ discussed here. I didn’t have any bad experiences with viruses; thus, there was no clear indication that I needed to take any precautionary measures to protect myself online. This phase of entering the newness of it all was also accompanied by a sense of hesitance and reluctance, as if somehow trying to hold off the compelling possibilities that the internet obviously seemed to have. Soon after, I was forced back to reality and avoiding the inevitable was no longer possible; I went back to school. I became further acquainted with MS Office, especially Word. Being a student at a translation academy also meant that I took classes in some specialised translation software called Trados. Email correspondence was perhaps my favourite way to use the Internet privately. People a few years younger were also using IRC (chat) services like Microsoft Messenger and ICQ a lot; however, whether related to the age difference or not, I didn’t really like chat, even though I tried to use it. It seemed like a very slow phone call without being able to hear the other person’s voice. At this point, online shopping was still not part of the whole internet experience. In addition to my reluctance to use chat, I was also reluctant to use Word; for example, to type and print out a simple homework assignment. However, the teachers wouldn’t accept my neatly handwritten work anymore, so to advance in my studies, I simply had to use Word, a computer and a printer. Working at home and not just from the school’s library, I started to use an old Apple laptop that had an older version of Microsoft Word installed to print out

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the assignments at school. My desire to use the computer from home probably led to my need for an internet connection there as well. But this was still a slow and expensive ‘dial-‐up’ service (that connected through a phone line). I reached a tipping point when my phone bills got too high to stubbornly stick to an outdated computer, software and internet connection. In January 2004, I bought my first desktop computer. Having my very first computer experiences as an eight-‐year-‐old on an Apple II and then a Macintosh, I decided to buy an Apple eMac, a somewhat unusual choice in the days before the Apple brand slowly became part of the general public’s consciousness. The world was still dominated by PCs and Microsoft’s software products. My new ‘machine’ opened up a whole world of possibilities; perhaps most noteworthy is that online purchasing became a part of my shopping habits that continues to this day. Searching for information intensified with the rise of Google and Google Scholar; moreover, the eMac became a writing and communication tool that I used daily for my studies (now in Arts and Culture) and volunteer translation jobs. In 2006–2007, I ended up working for Apple Inc., providing technical support for their products. From this work experience, I learned a lot about the Mac OS and, with help from my much more technically-‐knowledgeable colleagues, I discovered how to use a computer as efficiently as possible on a GUI level. In addition, I developed a sense of how to behave in online contexts, which is important in relation to the user forum where I conducted my fieldwork, as discussed in the next chapter. These contexts refer to all sorts of digital communication, like email and chat with colleagues all over the world, but especially the use of technical-‐support forums. Knowing how to formulate a technical question in a way that can be immediately understood by the reading audience is crucial, especially if it is supposed to serve as an effective troubleshooting instrument. The use of online technical forums is also instructive in the sense that this practice enables one to develop the skills required to ‘filter out’ the best solution provided by the respondents. For example, these forums usually operate with rating systems with which it is possible to get an idea of the authority and technical knowledge of the respondent. This element is also essential in effectively utilising such forums to one’s benefit. 42

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The usability of basic computer competences combined with the above-‐ mentioned element of understanding ‘netiquette’ in different online environments— and explained in a context in which their applicability became much clearer compared to learning from a manual—provided for a powerful learning experience. Furthermore, these experiences made me much more independent in being able to solve my ‘private’ computer issues, those that inevitably happen if one wants to ‘keep up’ with the rest of society. These improved technical competences led to me developing a sense of trust in technology and the internet; if the unknown becomes more known, its fear-‐inducing capacity perhaps also decreases. However, I was still not quite at a computer scientist’s level of understanding, so this sense of trust could be misguided in many ways. Furthermore, the phase where I was slow and reluctant to adopt computers, software and the internet had ended by that time. I even rediscovered IRC (chat), and appreciated it much more than before. The virtual world Second Life was at the peak of its hype during this period and, although it is difficult to admit, a short but very intense participation in that hype resulted in me replacing my eMac with a brand-‐new iMac. The new computer’s hardware was much better able to render the graphics used in Second Life and, therefore, the user experience was markedly improved. This experience further expanded my competencies in navigating online environments, both on a technical level in getting familiar with a complex GUI that can be found in Second Life, and on a social level; i.e. how to interact using chat and quickly become acquainted with the relevant ‘netiquette’. My present-‐day browsing is characterised by a lot of information seeking, either for serious reasons like my studies and reading newspapers, or in a more entertaining manner. Of course, I regularly participate in online social-‐networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, and online shopping for certain goods has almost completely taken over shopping in a traditional sense. The temptation to illegally download by means of bittorrents isn’t resisted. And although the transformation from computerless to a full-‐fledged digitalisation of my life has, to some extent, contributed to a complete abandonment of watching television, this process has also enabled me to selectively watch only certain TV programmes online. And mainly because of requests from my two-‐year-‐old son, the iMac’s DVD-‐player isn’t used solely to install software, but also to watch movies. Finally, I’ve been intensively

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A multi-modal approach

following technology news and speculations—especially about Apple’s products—for the past five years on dedicated websites like Ars Technica, Macrumors, MacNN and Electronista. These personal life experiences are relevant in the following ways: First, my own experience of a transformation process toward the digitalisation of culture with the specific role software plays, and the experience of seeing it gain an ever-‐greater cultural significance. This relates to the points made in the first chapter about software culture (conceptualisation one), especially the first three points: the development of becoming ubiquitous and massively used; the transformation toward a culture in which the computer with its software has turned into a unprecedented tool for communication; and the development of our culture toward an almost complete dependence on computers and software. Second, the fact that I have never personally experienced technological vulnerabilities in software, in the sense of privacy infringements or computer damage, which helps to facilitate both an insider’s and an outsider’s perspective. Third, my primary use of Mac OS X, a computer operating system that is generally regarded to be less susceptible2 to computer damage and privacy infringements compared to Microsoft Windows OS, which despite being much more dominant on a global scale, is often perceived as a more vulnerable technological system3. Fourth, my personal use of and familiarity with a closed, proprietary web browser (Apple Safari), versus an F/OSS browser like Firefox, qualified me as a sort of novice Firefox user; this made it easier to be open to instances of serendipity. Fifth, my complete lack of experience with and prior knowledge of the online Mozilla community, which ensured an outsider’s perspective. Sixth, my lack of any programming skills whatsoever, which entirely disqualified me as an advanced user, capable of altering the browser’s visual appearance and technical capabilities on a level of the underlying software 2 The New York Times’ computer columnist David Pogue put it like this: “Mac OS X has a spectacular reputation for stability and security. At this writing, not a single Mac OS X virus has emerged—a spectacular feature that makes Windows look like a waste of time.” Pogue, D. (2009). Mac OS X Snow Leopard: The Missing Manual. Sebastopol: O' Reilly Media. 3 However, the expansion of Mac OS X to millions of mainstream users, combined with Apple Inc.’s steady increase in market share over the past years, make it a more interesting target for malicious attacks nowadays.

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framework (code); this is an additional characteristic that juxtaposes me against the interlocutors.

Becoming part of the Firefox community: Who or what to follow? If we accept Mozilla Firefox’ self-‐description as a community (see chapter 2), then we subsequently need to investigate what comprises the ‘community’ in this case. Or as Bruno Latour puts it: (…) it is no longer enough to limit actors to the role of informers offering cases of some well-‐known types. You have to grant them back the ability to make up their own theories of what the social is made of. Your task is no longer to impose some order, to limit the range of acceptable entities, to teach actors what they are, or to add some reflexivity to their blind practice. Using a slogan from ANT, you have ‘to follow the actors themselves’. (Latour, 2005, pp. 11-‐12)

With this position toward the actors that I would encounter, I tried to approach what is called ‘the community’ in this case, instead of ‘the social’; the implications are similar, of course, in the sense that heterogeneous elements that consist of humans and non-‐humans were followed, and the socio–technical relations between them are described. This approach offers a cultural analysis that is detailed yet limited—the Mozilla community consists of more than 100 websites—and it opens up the two conceptualisations of a software culture and a technological culture, as well as the technological vulnerability related to both conceptualisations and the Mozilla Firefox community in which I try to identify elements of all three. For anybody who isn’t familiar with Firefox, it is a web browser that has been produced since 2004 by the non-‐profit organisation Mozilla. The fact that it is created and continuously updated by a global community of users and developers, and freely available, is connected to it being a piece of software that is ‘open source’—as opposed to proprietary software that is developed by a software manufacturer and generally incorporated into a paid computer’s Operating System (OS); for example, Linux, Windows or the Mac OS. These last two OSs incorporate the web browsers Internet Explorer™ and Safari™. A perhaps more formal definition is found in Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software:

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(…) The terms “free software” and “open source software” refer to software products distributed under terms that allow users to: use the software, modify the software, redistribute the software in any manner they see fit, without requiring that they pay the author(s) of the software a royalty or fee for engaging in the listed activities. (Feller, Fitzgerald, Scott, & Lakhani, 2005, p. xvii)

I chose to focus on the Firefox web browser as a relevant case for several reasons: First, since the source code (the software framework) of the web browser is freely available to anyone and modifiable by anyone who’s capable of doing so, it is interesting to examine the issue of unavoidable software vulnerabilities and how they’re dealt with in this specific community of users/developers. As seen later, the developers are themselves always users of the web browser. Hence, it is in their own best interests to decrease the browser’s susceptibility to risks and threats related to its inherent and inevitable vulnerabilities. This aspect deals with the negative connotation of vulnerability—that is, the potential risk for computer damage and privacy infringements. Second, because the developers generally contribute to the Firefox project on a volunteer basis and are themselves users, they are interested in a continuous innovation of Firefox. This is connected to a positive connotation of vulnerability—that is, the potential benefit found in a technological system precisely because, paradoxically, it is vulnerable. By making its source code freely available (by exposing its weak spots, in Bijker’s terms), Firefox can be continually improved by a global, online community of software developers. Third, and this point relates to the ethnographic aspect of the empirical case because the fieldwork takes place completely online, the characteristic of openness in the online Mozilla community can be applied to both developers and users of the Firefox browser. This is in opposition to the secretive, closed community of software developers who work for large corporations like Microsoft or Apple. Before starting my internet ethnography, I suspected that these people would be relatively easy to persuade into serving as interlocutors—to share their knowledge freely, perhaps even passionately—because they contribute to the Mozilla project on a voluntary basis. In fact, they might even regard their participation in my research project as a way to further contribute to the Firefox project. Finally, the sheer scale of the Mozilla Firefox phenomenon in terms of numbers, reportedly some 400 million users worldwide, arguably makes 46

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it—when combined with other web browsers—a more significant cultural phenomenon than Facebook, which is currently receiving a considerable amount of scholarly and media attention. The main reason being that, if Facebook is considered to be a contemporary cultural phenomenon of great importance, then the web browser—even though it has a much lower profile because it tends to be regarded as ‘just a tool’—can in fact be seen as the cultural condition that makes online social networking possible on a massive, global scale. In other words, without a web browser like Firefox, there would simply be no way to participate in an online social network like Facebook. In the previous section, the reader was introduced to one of the human actors in this study and, by means of a brief auto-‐ethnography, has now hopefully reached a greater understanding of what comprises the different human and non-‐ human actors that ‘the researcher’ regarded as an actor-‐network in and of itself. Keeping this in mind, I then set upon the difficult task of combining an insider/outsider perspective with the role of a participant/observer. Difficult, but necessary to account for studying the Mozilla Firefox community solely online, and thereby making as strong a case as possible in the absence of an offline approach in my research. This approach is in line with a possible critique of conducting fieldwork online, as pointed out by Garcia et al. (2009), which suggests that prior to choosing to study an online community or other phenomenon online, a consideration should be made with regard to topic of interest, not vice versa. It should be clear by now that the point of departure in my work has been the cultural-‐analytical relevance of software, and the vulnerability of technology in a technological culture. Thus, the Mozilla Firefox community was selected for the reasons already mentioned. Having said this, we may now continue to a description of following the actors in practice. Next, I describe how, by embodying both the insider and outsider as well as the participant and observer, I follow the actors encountered in the Mozilla Firefox community. I strive for symmetry between myself as the analyst and my discussion partners, and I attempt to trace and describe the socio-‐technical relations between both human and non-‐human actors. The principle of symmetry has caused confusion in earlier formulations of ANT; Latour’s clarification of it in Reassembling the Social best articulates how I’ve tried to apply it here:

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There is no empirical case where the existence of two coherent and homogeneous aggregates, for instance technology ‘and’ society, could make any sense. ANT is not, I repeat is not, the establishment of some absurd ‘symmetry between humans and non-‐humans’. To be symmetric, for us, simply means not to impose a priori some spurious asymmetry among human intentional action and a material world of causal relations. There are divisions one should never try to bypass, to go beyond, to try to overcome dialectically. They should rather be ignored and left to their own devices, like a once formidable castle now in ruins. (Latour, 2005, p. 76)

With this in mind, certain questions have guided me on my journey, specifically: How are community, vulnerability and software constituted in a web browser as exemplified by Firefox? And what do the socio-‐technical relations that can be traced between these elements consist of? I began by leaving my preferred web browser, Apple Safari, unopened for a while, and launched Firefox instead. A logical starting point was to surf to the official website of the organisation, mozilla.org. It offers an immediate glimpse of its self-‐ description: “Mozilla is a global non-‐profit dedicated to putting you in control of your online experience and shaping the future of the Web for the public good. When you use Firefox, you're supporting that mission and making the Web better for everyone!” (Mozilla, 2011a). The organisation doesn’t only develop Firefox, but with more than 400 million users, it is a major part of their activities. The next logical step was to find some sort of sub-‐community that would fit my limited technical skills; a place where I could try to contribute, becoming one of ‘them’ by being ‘me’. Now, before taking a closer look at a few of these sub-‐communities, I would like to briefly employ some of ANT’s vocabulary to describe this first trace of socio– technical relations between the identified actors, and thereby further our understanding of the constituents that make up the Mozilla Firefox community. To begin with, Firefox was utilised to serve as the researcher’s software tool to enter the community, and then the mozilla.org website served as a gateway to the community. By clicking on the link ‘get involved’ on the mozilla.org website, an overview of its sub-‐communities is displayed. This link subsequently transforms the Mozilla website from a place that many users might only visit when they need to download the F/OSS browser into a community website, where anyone can choose

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to start contributing to the Mozilla Open Source project in a specific area of interest. Following Latour, it may be said that the hyperlink ‘get involved’ is an example of ‘agency’. The researcher, who was looking for a way to involve himself in the Mozilla Firefox community, became an ‘actant’ because of the hyperlink’s agency, which made him click on it. In other words, agency (the hyperlink) made the actant (the researcher) behave in a certain way. Having done that, the transformation from a general website (with a lot of focus on how to start a download of Firefox) to a community website is also an aspect of agency. Related to agency is the concept of ‘figuration’. This is what gives agency a concrete form or shape, and it helps one to avoid taking invisible explanatory forces into account. In this case, examples are the researcher with a particular question in mind who clicks on a hyperlink, the transformed visual appearance of the mozilla.org website, and a new path to trace in order to answer the research questions (Latour, 2005, p. 52 ff.). The first suitable entrance into one of these sub-‐communities took the shape of a cartoon-‐like image of a cute little fox (beneath the visual layer is a hyperlink that connects to another web page), wearing old-‐fashioned pilot clothes and named Test Pilot. Test Pilot is defined as follows: “Test Pilot is a open source user research program. As a Test Pilot, you'd be helping us to improve Mozilla products, both existing ones like Firefox and those that are still in development. Our overarching goal is to help the open source community grow knowledge on how people use the Web and provide the best tools and services for them” (Mozilla, 2011g). In reality, installing this open source user research program didn’t mean much more than having a tiny version of the cute little fox sit in the lower right-‐hand corner of my Firefox browser, only periodically requiring my attention whenever a new questionnaire was sent from some server, probably owned by Mozilla. This communication was too one-‐sided for my taste, so I continued my journey through the community. However, I left the little program installed in my browser.

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Figure 1 The Test Pilot

The next step consisted of trying to talk with volunteer Firefox developers; I expected them to be able to tell me more about ‘their’ community and what elements they thought must comprise vulnerability. This led me to a short encounter with the Q&A department (Testing and Quality Assurance). The first time I managed to ‘talk’ to ‘somebody’, mediated by IRC (Internet Relay Chat), s/he had the enchanting name DeathShot. My personal alias is Eaglepeak: 11:23 Eaglepeak Hi, just a question about running a nightly build. Do I need to create an account with QA for that? 11:25 DeathShot no 11:26 DeathShot just download and isntal [sic.] it 11:26 Eaglepeak Ok thanks, do I need to report the bugs manually? 11:27 DeathShot what do you mean by menually [sic.]? 11:27 DeathShot if it is an addon compatability bug, then no. Anything else use Bugzilla 11:28 Eaglepeak I mean how does QA get the results from me using the nightly build? 11:28 Eaglepeak I'm completely new to this. 11:29 DeathShot well I'm not part of the QA, but from what I understand any majore [sic.] bugs get reported by users like us. 11:30 DeathShot The only difference between nightly builds and other vesions of firefox is that they have no been deemed tested and stable enough for public rlease [sic.] 11:30 Eaglepeak Ok, so then you'll just get the possibility of sending in a crash report or something after for example a crash 11:30 DeathShot yes, it works just like with any beta, or released verion for that matter11:30 Eaglepeak Thanks a lot! 11:30 DeathShot no problem.(chat transcript, 4-‐3-‐2011)

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The chat transcript above is meant to show that, despite being invited by all sorts of banners, videos and persuasive text on more than 100 individual websites that constitute the Mozilla Firefox community, it is actually quite a task to become ‘one of them’. To illustrate, I consider the IRC channel to be user-‐unfriendly, unlike a program such as, for example, Skype or the Instant Message feature built into Facebook, both of which are intuitive and relatively easy for anybody with basic computer skills to use. In other words, just to have ‘a chat’ with someone at Mozilla isn’t as easy as it might seem at first glance. But this exchange provided some initial hints on how vulnerability is dealt with in the community. Browser security is an ongoing part of Firefox’s development, so vulnerability may be seen as an aspect of the browser’s overall product quality. With this, the importance of a Q&A department evidently comes into play.

Figure 2 The 'entrance' to the Q & A department

Despite the fact that I didn’t quite understand what DeathShot was trying to say during our seven-‐minute conversation, the Q&A department’s path seemed to lead to downloading and installing a so-‐called ‘nightly build’, described as follows: By using one of our in-‐development nightly builds, you’ll see new features before most of our users, and it means you may also be the first one to spot bugs. Nightly builds are not for everyone – they change regularly and new features will show up before they are completely polished, but the feedback we get from our nightly users help shape the products we build very directly. If that sounds a little too scary for you, using a beta build gives us the same type of feedback, but keeps you only on things that we consider polished enough to be almost final. (Mozilla, 2011e))

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After installing the nightly build, Firefox is no longer Firefox, but is instead transformed into ‘Minefield’. I received this welcome message: Thanks for using a pre-‐release version of Firefox! You are using a pre-‐release version of Firefox. Release notes and other documentation are not usually provided for pre-‐ release versions of our software, but will be posted when an official release is made available. Information about upcoming releases is available on the wiki. (welcome message in browser, 4-‐3-‐2011)

Figure 3 Another possibility to get involved in testing: The Nightly Builds

The nightly build may be regarded as another example of a way to involve more or less common users of Firefox—those who have a desire to contribute to the community and the product development of the browser—in how to handle the inevitable vulnerability of the web browser. Then I encountered ‘Drumbeat’, which is described as follows: “Mozilla Drumbeat is a global community of innovators like you, building a more awesome web and world. Connect with others. Find great projects that need your help. Or share your own” (Mozilla, 2011f). In my encounter with this part of the community, I could only perceive a vague connection to how Mozilla Firefox deals with innovation, and therefore it wasn’t explored any further.

Figure 4 The Drumbeat logo

The next station that was supposed to bring me closer to finding interlocutors was a website with a list of the people on the Board of Directors of Mozilla’s sister

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organisation: Mozilla-‐Europe. At this point, I used three online social networks— Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn—to try to locate some of the Board members on this list. One of them, Tristan Nitot, is the founder of Mozilla-‐Europe. By ‘following’ him on Twitter, at one point I was led to a techno-‐blog on The Wall Street Journal’s website, which discussed Firefox’s ‘do not track’ feature. With the topic of vulnerability in mind, I considered this blog post relevant because it discussed the security-‐related issue of ‘tracking cookies’, and it furthered my understanding of the effects of a web browser’s technological vulnerability. To briefly explain, (normal) cookies are tiny computer files that get stored on a computer when a user visits a website; they are generally harmless and even beneficial, in the sense that they help to load the page faster the next time it is visited. ‘Tracking cookies’, on the other hand, have the ability to monitor web users’ browsing habits; among other things, they allow companies to obtain detailed information about potential customers (Valentino-‐de Vries, 2011). These cookies are an example of the commercial exploitation of a web browser’s technological vulnerability. I registered for several other parts of the Mozilla Firefox community that didn’t lead me to the interlocutors I was looking for. At this point, the reader might begin to doubt the slow and perhaps chaotic method of data collection by ‘following actors’. However, I would argue that—despite not having found what I was looking for at this point—with my preconceived assemblages of how to frame the topics of interest in mind, the process of becoming ‘one of them’ that characterised my online journey did in fact yield knowledge that helped me to zero in on the tiny parts of the enormous actor-‐network that inspired this thesis; slowly but surely, it was emerging from the flatlands of the online field. For example, reverting to my preferred web browser Safari after a day with Firefox led me to re-‐discover Safari’s (relatively new) ability to install extensions, much in the same way that this is done in Firefox. An increased awareness of security-‐related issues as a result of my fieldwork made me look in a direction that I had forgotten, even though I knew of its existence. In other words, using Firefox as a stranger changed my perspective on the familiar and, as a result, led to new insights. In addition, the assumption made earlier to classify Safari as a closed and proprietary browser proved to be wrong. Realising the future business potential of F/OSS, Apple

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released the source code of Safari’s engine, WebKit4. In practice, this means that the GUI of Safari is Apple’s property, but the underlying code is open source. Thus, a divide OSS versus closed and proprietary isn’t tenable, since there’s also a sort of a middle way as represented by Safari. When asked whether it was fair to label Safari as closed and proprietary, one of my interlocutors, a senior software developer, put it like this: The WebKit engine itself is open-‐source. It is a collection of code, mostly C++, that can read information in HTML and other formats, create graphics from it, and draw those onto various platform-‐specific graphics contexts: Quartz, GTK+, Qt, etc. Everything in Safari other than the HTML area on the screen – the menu bar, the tool bar and scroll bars in the browser window, the preferences dialogs, etc. – is proprietary to Apple and controlled by them. (online discussion, 5-‐6-‐2011)

Additionally, he provided me with a useful scheme that gives a further indication of the different degrees of F/OSS and closed proprietary: 100% proprietary (as far as I know): Microsoft Internet Explorer Mostly proprietary, a little open-‐source: Opera, ACCESS NetFront Mostly open-‐source, a little proprietary: Safari* 100% open-‐source: Firefox, Google Chromium*, Midori* The items with a * are based on WebKit. (online discussion, 7-‐6-‐2011)

However interesting this insight might be, it must also be said that during my participant observations, the interlocutors were comparing Microsoft’s Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firefox—Safari wasn’t part of the online discussions—so in that sense, the analytical divide that’s made here is still useful. Another example of serendipity emerged from an apparent dead-‐end; namely, the above-‐mentioned Drumbeat website. At first glance, the sub-‐community seemed non-‐existent, but by clicking on a hyperlink labelled ‘Mozilla news’ on the website, the browser directed me to ‘MozillaZine’ (MozillaZine, 2011). It turned out that this website hosted an unofficial but substantial Mozilla forum; it was the ‘place’ where the interlocutors I had been looking for were gathered. And they did so in large numbers. These examples, I believe, testify to the relevance and efficiency of 4 WebKit is an example of an open-‐source project that’s comparable to the Mozilla Firefox project. For more information, visit: http://www.webkit.org/.

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the body of thought that is often referred to as ANT when applied as a fieldwork method. Even more so when the fieldwork is conducted in a disorderly realm with an overwhelming amount of information combined with endless possibilities for computer-‐mediated interaction—as represented by the internet in general, and online communities in particular. Moreover, engaging in this slow process presented some examples of how the community is constituted. My observations of the Mozilla Firefox community resonates with Latour’s claim for the need to modify the social sciences as a result of the products of science and technology—to this, I include the Mozilla Firefox community as a prime example, and ANT can potentially rise to the challenge of dealing with ‘the social’ in our radically changed world in new ways: It is no longer clear whether there exists relations that are specific enough to be called ‘social’ and that could be grouped together in making up a special domain that could function as ‘a society’. The social seems to be diluted everywhere and yet nowhere in particular. (Latour, 2005, p. 2)5

In the next section, the results of my overt participant observations of the MozillaZine forum show how this third part of the ethnographic case study led me to identify the following actor-‐networks: ‘advertisements’, ‘malware’, ‘browser customisation’, ‘computer damage’ and ‘privacy infringements’. In addition, there’s a particular role for the software extension ‘Adblock Plus’. These constituents help us further our understanding of the actors that constitute ‘software’, ‘technological vulnerability’, ‘the Mozilla Firefox community’, and their reciprocal socio–technical relations.

5 In Reassembling the Social, Latour formulates his introduction to actor-‐network theory by proposing an alternative to what he terms ‘a sociology of the social’, which he calls ‘a sociology of associations’. Although I neither discuss the concept of ‘society’ nor is this a sociological thesis, his book needs to be understood as a proposition for how to study all aspects of ‘the social’; in this case, ‘the community’ as a commonly preconceived social assemblage. In Barbara Czarniawska’s view: “The question for social sciences is not, therefore, ‘How social is this?’, but how things, people, and ideas become connected and assembled in larger units. Actor-‐network theory (ANT) is a guide to the process of answering this question. It is not a theory of the social, but a theory of how to study the social, set apart by this specific definition of its object” Czarniawska, B. (2006). Book Review: Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-‐Network-‐Theory. Organization Studies, 27(10), 1553-‐1557.

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Overt online participant observation of an unofficial, very large Mozilla forum Having arrived at MozillaZine, which in hindsight was the end-‐station of my ethnographic journey, I started trying to identify some users and developers of the Firefox browser. MozillaZine is an online discussion forum with more than 370,000 registered members; it addresses a variety of subjects related to Mozilla and its range of F/OSS products. The empirical data that follows was gathered from two discussion threads I started myself after registering on the website; here, I identified myself as a student writing his Master’s thesis. Nine people subsequently participated in the thread, and this setting could be seen as overt online participant observation, where I moderated to some extent and intervened by asking follow-‐up questions to the participants’ replies. In each of these posts, there’s a reference to the previous post or the thread as a whole, or they may be more personal with the participants addressing each other by user name, or quoting from previous posts and then commenting on those. The approach mustn’t be regarded as an online focus group, although there are some similarities. The most salient difference, however, was the fact that the interlocutors had not been selected in advance. The discussion that unfolded did so spontaneously, using my auto-‐ethnographic authority to select the most useful answers to my questions and the data produced by the interaction between the respective interlocutors. The extent to which I was able to moderate was much more limited than it might have been in a ‘real’ online focus-‐group interview. The discussion was asynchronous, despite being updated via email almost instantaneously when new replies were added. Therefore, there was always a chance that the interlocutors might briefly take the discussion in a direction that I hadn’t anticipated. Another difference in degree between a real online focus-‐group interview and one that’s offline is how the discussion is recorded. Since the discussion I held was entirely textual in nature, it was easy to create PDF files of the conversation with some pictures to ensure that they’re saved for posterity. Although also different in degree, a notable feature of (online) focus groups is that they benefit from the group interaction to generate data, and this occurred because people were both replying to and complementing each other’s contributions. Finally,

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perhaps the most significant difference is the ability of the researcher to create an atmosphere in which everybody feels able to openly and freely contribute to the discussion (Stewart & Williams, 2005, pp. 141-‐142) . For obvious reasons, this is beyond the analyst’s control when solely conducting research online. In the online world, people easily hide in anonymity behind aliases, and the moderators of the MozillaZine forum have the challenging task to find the right balance between what is considered acceptable and what is not. Quite understandably, they only intervene when people really go over the edge of generally accepted forms of online interaction; for example, by using profanity. Being familiar with the use and ‘netiquette’ of many technical discussion forums, as discussed in my auto-‐ethnography, I used this experience to determine the best strategy to counter the elements that were beyond my control as a researcher in such settings. The main consideration for this—and the reason why I explicitly speak of overt online participant observation—was to state from the very beginning that I’m a student writing his Master’s thesis. While an overt approach is always evident in traditional conceptions of ethnographic fieldwork, the internet as field setting also provides an opportunity for covert ethnography. As Christine Hine points out: “(…) It is possible to lurk in many online environments without being visibly present to the informants” (Hine, 2008, p. 262). Without going into the details of the epistemological and ethical challenges posed by such an approach, my point is merely that secretive lurking hasn’t been employed as a conscious research strategy in this ethnography; instead, my goal in collecting empirical data has been the opposite, for the reasons already mentioned. To protect myself from potentially negative effects that might occur after my participant observation on the forum ended (and which I couldn’t foresee at the start of the discussion), I used an alias. However, this is a very common practice in these settings, and should therefore be seen as having a negligible effect on the spontaneity of the discussion. Furthermore, I deleted my account with MozillaZine at the conclusion of my participant observations. The rationale behind this overt strategy was that, by being open and respectful in my attitude from the outset, I hoped to yield the most interesting answers from people who were sincerely interested in the topics presented; at the same time, I tried to discourage posters

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with different, less desirable, intentions. I leave it up to the reader to judge whether I succeeded or not, as we move on to the actual discussion. After posting a thread on the forum that invited people to participate in a general discussion about Firefox, I tried to achieve some degree of interlocutor selection by stating: “I would like to talk to both people who write code for the Firefox browser, and users who consciously choose Firefox as their preferred browser” (online discussion, 18-‐3-‐2011). The first observation is that Firefox users see themselves or are seen by others as “diehard users”, “power users” or people who are “12–14 hours a day online, just for fun—Firefox always running”. None of the interlocutors identified him/herself as a volunteer software developer for Firefox. However, many of them indicated that they have programming skills: “I'm not a great programmer...I can make graphics and I can do some HTML and CSS (…)”(online discussion, 20-‐3-‐2011). Another said: “And of course there are other ways of modifying the functionality of Firefox via the various CSS type files. I use some of those changes but since I don't code anymore, (…) I've gathered those code-‐ changes from some of the other outstanding people who do their help-‐posts on this board” (online discussion, 20-‐3-‐2011). And: “Mostly a user, but I've had a few patches I've written committed into Firefox's code” (online discussion, 19-‐3-‐2011). When compared to my own use of the Internet and browsing habits, the interlocutors seem to be tech-‐savvy to a degree that goes beyond being familiar with and able to use a computer and its software at the user interface (UI) level. Having two years of work experience as an IT Supporter, I consider myself to be at a higher level of tech-‐savviness than most everyday internet users. Thus, on a technical level, my interlocutors were at least two degrees above ‘the ordinary’ Firefox user. The interlocutors’ high level of technical knowledge beyond the UI proved, to some extent, to be connected to their preference for using an F/OSS web browser like Firefox as compared to a closed, proprietary browser like Internet Explorer. One of the interlocutors puts it succinctly when he says: So I came to Firefox as someone who was developing websites and was frustrated with IE [Internet Explorer] for two reasons: ads and bad HTML formatting. As soon as I downloaded Firefox I fell in love with the fact that I could block ads and that I could view the websites I was developing in proper formatting. For the next 4 years I

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toyed around with using a few extensions and themes, but I always ended up running a basically clean Firefox with AdBlock. Then Firefox 3.0 came out and I found that the design of the default theme just didn't look right (to me) on the Windows 2000 and XP machines I was using, so I started building themes. (online discussion, 20-‐3-‐2011)

The possibility of customisation with Firefox is a recurring theme; apparently, this option makes it a unique piece of software and thus the preferred web browser for many, especially when compared to Internet Explorer. The ‘themes’ mentioned by the interlocutor are an example of browser customisation. There’s no immediate connection to vulnerability with respect to ‘themes’; it relates more to the visual appearance of the web browser. These themes are part of the so-‐called ‘add-‐ons’ that can be installed from within the browser; they’re categorised under ‘appearance’ and are OS-‐specific. Installing some of these themes myself showed that only a few were designed for the Mac OS—obviously, I couldn’t install the ones that are designed for the Windows OS. The ones that I could install significantly modified my experience of browsing the web. These themes are related to the aesthetics of the browser, which may merely be a matter of personal taste, but I would argue that there’s more to it. Through this visual aspect—and perhaps just as drastically—the themes indirectly modify the functionality of the browser. It is part of the GUI and strongly determines how a user interacts with the computer. I had to switch back to Firefox’s default theme immediately because it felt like it would take a long time to get used to this new visual appearance, and this would influence my familiar browsing experience and transform it into something new, not to mention strange. I readily concluded that it was not worth investing time in this and changed the theme back to its default. These themes serve some very specific user-‐needs, and therefore appeal more to the advanced users I encountered on the forum who have a strong desire to modify the GUI to their exact specifications. Moreover, as I discuss later, the need for extensions is strongly connected to the perceived vulnerability of a web browser. Firefox contains built-‐in security features that can be altered by installing add-‐ons, which then serve as an extension of Firefox’s capabilities, to further increase benefits and reduce risk by preventing computer damage and privacy infringements. These extensions are a means to

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control and manage data, and also to interact with it in ways that allow for an improved, individualised browsing experience. Within these extensions, it is possible to alter a particular functionality of the browser (e.g., the size of a window or a button, or the colour of certain folder) simply by adding a few lines of programming language (code). Figures 5, 6, and 7, show examples of these possible changes.

Figure 5 Firefox may look like this...

The issue of preventing computer damage and privacy infringements— specifically by installing a certain extension called Adblock Plus—and why this is so important became an important element in the discussion when one of the interlocutors directed attention to the problem of ‘malware’. This is an abbreviation for ‘malicious software’, which is designed to harm or secretly access a computer system without the owner’s informed consent. The word is a general term used by computer professionals to mean a variety of different hostile, intrusive or annoying software or program codes. This particular interlocutor described an event in which his computer was infected with malware while using Internet Explorer, and he made a comparison between certain security functionalities in Internet Explorer and Firefox, where the latter is considered to be superior with respect to aspects of

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vulnerability. In addition, there was mention of a supposedly higher level of vulnerability to malicious software when using the Microsoft Windows OS compared to the Mac OS. This point resonates with David Pogue’s comparison of the Mac OS and the Windows OS mentioned earlier.

Figure 6 ... Or like this

I installed Adblock Plus myself and, other than a whole list of settings to ‘customise the customiser’, so to speak, it simply blocks the advertisements on a web page; for example, like those found on the Berlingske newspaper’s website, b.dk. From an auto-‐ethnographical perspective, this was an interesting experience in the sense that, despite my heavy browsing habits (several hours a day, almost daily), I never really felt the need for such a function in my own browser; advertisements just never bothered me. As mentioned in the auto-‐ethnography, my main computer experience is with the Mac OS, which is considered superior in terms of security when compared to the Windows OS; also, I have never personally experienced technical vulnerability with respect to advertisements. The extent to which advertisements negatively influence the browsing experience—that is, to the point of being disruptive and requiring an extension like Adblock Plus—strongly depends on the websites one visits. I had a Flash blocker installed for a year, which also cleans up unwanted content from the web pages visited to an extent. However, this was not done out of a desire to solely block user-‐disturbing advertisements; there are other benefits related to not displaying Flash-‐created content on a website, such as

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increasing the loading speeds of websites and extending the battery life of a portable computer. Not long before the start of this internet ethnography, I made Berlingske’s website my home page. Coincidentally, this website had one particularly annoying advertisement that wasn’t Flash-‐based, so the Flash-‐blocking software couldn’t prevent it from appearing. It kept on sliding up and down when I scrolled up and down the page; I couldn’t scroll away from it. After installing Adblock Plus, this ad disappeared. This case of serendipity turned into a powerful experience that enabled me to achieve a greater understanding of what my interlocutors were talking about. Here, I benefited from my outsider’s perspective; I was an outsider unfamiliar with what my interlocutors consider a prime reason to use Firefox—namely, the possibility to customise the browser with software extensions. This enabled me to further my understanding of how someone’s daily experience of browsing the internet might differ from my own. It also showed me how the browser’s (software) vulnerability can negatively influence the browsing experience, and how this vulnerability can be decreased by installing a software extension; in this particular case, Adblock Plus.

Figure 7 Firefox's visual appearance without any modifications; or the way it looks for most users

Now, how do these aspects of browser vulnerability and customisation as a strategy to decrease this vulnerability relate to another negative effect of this vulnerability—namely, the more disruptive experience of having one’s computer 62

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infected by malicious software? This point also appeared to be closely related to the advertisements found on websites. Thus, advertisements represent two negative aspects of a browser’s vulnerability: First, as we’ve seen, they hold the potential to disturb the daily user experience; second, they may serve as carriers of malicious software and, as such, may be capable of damaging one’s computer or infringing on one’s privacy. Probing into the meaning and manifestation in daily life of having one’s computer infected—an occurrence not difficult to defamiliarise from since I’ve never experienced it myself—the following discussion unfolded. One of the interlocutors refers again to the benefit of installing Adblock Plus: (…) in the years that I've been running Firefox with AdBlock Plus and a modest software firewall, the rate of infections on my machines went from *daily* to maybe once every 6 months. That was another big annoyance with IE was that the ads were pumping so much malware into my machines that I was having to reformat and reinstall Windows every few months (...) (online discussion, 22-‐3-‐2011)

Advertisements are thus designated as being the main carriers of malicious software and computer viruses. A “software firewall” is an additional way to protect one’s computer system that’s not related to the web browser, but instead protects the computer as a whole from unauthorised access through its network connections. “To reformat and reinstall Windows” needs to be seen as a highly inconvenient disruption of the user-‐experience because it requires technical knowledge beyond the level of the common everyday user, as well as time—often several hours—to get things back to the way they were. Further, it may entail losing data if the user lacks a backup copy. The second major source of risk was attributed to email. Presuming that one’s level of tech-‐savviness is an important factor in determining the context in which software vulnerabilities become manifest, I added the following questions to the discussion: “To what extent do you think that the level of tech savvy plays a role in becoming a victim of security issues with a web browser? Does Firefox offer a more stable and safer browsing experience for all those levels (from the person who only uses a computer to browse the internet and email to the expert)?” (online discussion, 22-‐3-‐2011) One of the interlocutors attributed a higher importance to

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what he termed being “internet street-‐smart” than to a level of tech-‐savviness. A perhaps slightly moralistic, but undoubtedly effective, strategy for dealing with the vulnerabilities of advertisements and email was eloquently expounded as follows: People need to start equating opening a link or email as opening their front door. The first thing you should always do when you receive a link is hover over it with a mouse and look at the status-‐bar to see what url [website address] the link leads to... that's like looking through the "peep hole" in the door. If I see a link that looks suspicious, such as having a bizarre-‐looking domain, or misspellings in the domain-‐ name, I immediately do a Google search on the domain name to get some info on it. I consider this to be the equivalent of "looking out the window" to get a really good look at who's on the other side of the "door". Even if the message comes from one of your close friends or relatives, that doesn't mean you should trust it. There is always a chance that their email or Facebook has been zombified and is taking instructions from someone else... so always check the url. Even if an email claims to be from an official website like eBay...look around at the email...if you see spelling errors, or if the return address doesn't look right, or any suspicious links, delete it. EBay is a huge corporation, they will NOT be sending you emails with multiple spelling or punctuation errors, but phishers will. (online discussion, 22-‐3-‐2011)

“Domain name” can be simply understood as the internet address to which one ‘surfs’. These addresses can be very long, and the strategy presented by the interlocutor can help to counteract the vulnerability of the web browser as a technical system. Merely clicking on a link that leads to a malicious website may lead to one’s computer becoming infected by a virus; this is illustrated later with the empirical example of ‘MACDefender’. Furthermore, it must be noted that the nature of this malicious software has changed over the years, which may indicate that it has transformed into a more invisible but bigger threat than ever before: Honestly, these days the really good ones don't let you know of their presence. The old days of creating malware just to make people's computers act crazy are mostly over. There are still some infections that do things like redirect your browser to sites you didn't request, change your search engine to one that only leads to infected pages, and create popups that demand you install virus protection software that ends up actually being a virus. But these days the worse ones are silent but deadly, for instance keyloggers run in the background and steal keystrokes so the creator

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has access to all of your logins and passwords. Doesn't sound like much trouble until you think about your bank account, your credit card number, and if you access student loan or tax information you may have typed in your social security number. Trojans act as gateways than install more serious viruses. Bot-‐nets are huge networks of machines enslaved to a master which are used to distribute infected emails, spam, or to preform [sic.] denial of service attacks on servers. By the time you notice your computer acting weird, you may already be seriously infected and spreading infections to other machines. A great many of these rely on exploits specifically lurking in older versions of IE and in older Windows operating systems.... but as those systems become less and less common the methods are bound to change. (online discussion, 23-‐3-‐2011)

The following qualification perhaps moves toward establishing a connection with a more positive connotation of technological vulnerability: What can be a benefit under certain conditions? It was in answer to my question about how to guard oneself against the threat of serious security and privacy infringements, assuming that so-‐called anti-‐virus software may play a significant role in this: ALL Anti-‐virus software works using two basic ideas: 1. There is a list of known file names and process names that correspond to know viruses/worms etc. This is the way most anti-‐virus software works. 2. There are certain actions that are known to be related to malware/virus activity which can trigger the anti-‐virus software to block whatever program or process that launches those actions. But it is very important to realize that stopping malware is similar to stopping terrorists...there is a vast grey area between the Freedom of Speech and a Terrorist Threat, just as there is a vast grey area between legitimate use of certain methods and illegal uses that rely on the same methods employed by the legitimate programs. Because of that, anti-‐malware programs rely on the blocking of known, reported malware and the blocking of programs and processes related to them. The reason that I block basically *ALL* advertisements is because through experience I have learned that the vast majority of malware was delivered to my computers via advertisements. If the major advertisers could create guarantee that all of their ads were malware-‐free then I might change my mind, but as it stands there are huge corporations making obscene amounts of money off of infecting people with viruses and malware. And I cannot in good conscious [sic.] participate in such a system. (online discussion, 25-‐3-‐

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2011)

Whether or not the interlocutor’s point can truly be substantiated—that is, that large companies make a profit on willingly causing damage to people’s computers on a large scale—the most important insight from this quote is that software can be employed to counteract its own inevitable vulnerability. To take it a step further, technological vulnerability can be dealt with in ways that result in a benefit. Although this thesis doesn’t address the intricacies of F/OSS development, the following answer (by one of the participants in the thread about MozillaZine) needs to be included. It brilliantly summarises how the Mozilla Firefox community succeeds in exploiting its characteristic openness in a beneficial way, in the sense that—by means of a collective effort by the global user/developer community—its ongoing innovation process is secured. This results in what is arguably the most popular web browser in the world of a very high, if not the highest, possible product quality: The source code of Open Source software is open for analysis by people interested in web security just as equally as by people interested in hacking. Because of this, vulnerabilities can be discovered by anyone at any time and reported to the lead developers. If you actually peek into Bugzilla, you will discover that for the most part Open Source software development is not a smooth process. There is a great deal of disagreement and discussion that goes into every single tiny little detail. While it may seem from the outside like chaos and a waste of time, it does mean that almost every facet of a problem is considered and explored which can lead to novel solutions. Closed development environments can lack that kind of discourse and as a result they tend to "eat their own dogfood" which can mean that problems are ignored or simply undiscovered. (online discussion, 30-‐3-‐2011)

“Bugzilla” is the tool used by the Mozilla Firefox community to file so-‐called bugs like those that cause the web browser to crash, for example. These bugs can be filed, searched for and discussed, which ultimately leads to a technical solution—usually, a change in the code of the web browser so that this crash won’t occur in future releases (Bugzilla, 2011). This is a prime example of how the community of Mozilla Firefox collectively collaborates to continuously improve the web browser. The element of joint collaboration, made possible by the internet and exploiting 66

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technological vulnerability so that it results in a benefit, is completely lacking in what the interlocutor terms a “closed environment”; the example of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has been frequently mentioned. Further, the point made here by the interlocutor splendidly resonates with the ‘expert view’ as represented by Eric S. Raymond Linus’ law, which was mentioned in the last chapter in relation to von Hippel’s notion of an innovation community.

Figure 8 Visualisation of some of the perceived actors related to risks and benefits that result from technological vulnerability

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4. Opening up the vulnerability of technology in the community Having identified some of the constituents of software, technology, vulnerability, and the community, I would like to describe some of them in more detail. The first, and arguably the most important, constituent of the community as encountered on the MozillaZine forum is the user/developer who is able to ‘code’ in programming languages like HTML, CSS, C++, which are required to create software extensions for Mozilla Firefox; with these, the browser can subsequently be customised to an advanced user’s needs. These software extensions then transform the web browser’s technical capabilities to counteract aspects of its inevitable vulnerability, on the one hand; and on the other, they modify the user experience by changing aspects of the GUI. I’ve explicitly labelled the advanced users encountered on the MozillaZine forum as user/developers; they use the product Firefox, they have extensive technical capabilities and demands for how a web browser should be built and used, and they contribute to its product development.

Firefox user/developers regarded as ‘lead users’ To introduce the discussion on user-‐communities in the next section, I would like to draw upon von Hippel’s notion of ‘lead user’. It is useful to further our understanding of the Mozilla Firefox community, and how its users/developers transform the risk that results from its technological vulnerability into a benefit. In his discussion of “Development of Products by Lead Users”, von Hippel asserts that many users are also involved in the modification or development of products (von Hippel, 2005a, p. 4) . I’ve shown that this qualification applies to the user/developers encountered in the Mozilla field. Regarded that way, these user/developers contribute to Firefox’s innovation: They’re innovative user/developers. Von Hippel then points out the definition of ‘lead user’, and I assert that the user/developers who served as interlocutors here embody some of those characteristics as well. “[Lead users] are ahead of the majority of users in their populations (…), and they expect to gain

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relatively high benefits from a solution to the needs they have encountered there” (ibid.). Furthermore: Since lead users are at the leading edge of the market (…), one can guess that many of the novel products they develop for their own use will appeal to other users too and so might provide the basis for products manufacturers would wish to commercialize. This turns out to be the case. A number of studies have shown that many of the innovations reported by lead users are judged to be commercially attractive and/or have actually been commercialized by manufacturers. (ibid.)

So, by being a piece of F/OSS software and enabling its users/developers to freely modify its source code—thereby profiting from the innovations of what one could call a ‘lead user’—Mozilla Firefox makes it possible to counteract the technological vulnerability of its web browser, and to actually transform the resulting risk into a source of benefit. The creative potential that’s unleashed with help from its lead users may also be seen, at least partially, as an explanation for Firefox’s overwhelming success, being a serious competitor to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer6. Bear in mind that IE isn’t created by a non-‐profit organisation but by a large profit-‐ driven multinational company, and IE isn’t F/OSS but closed and proprietary. Its innovation takes place in what’s called a ‘closed environment’. The third browser mentioned in this thesis, Safari, has a much smaller user base, which has led Apple to make its engine WebKit F/OSS. Having a user/developer base like that of Mozilla Firefox is a cost-‐effective strategy for a company like Apple, which doesn’t need to have large teams of paid software developers to ensure its ongoing innovation process, product development and increasing market share. Such a strategic move— which also resonates with Eric S. Raymond’s discussion of Linus’ Law, below—by a large and powerful multinational like Apple also testifies to the potential of F/OSS in general, and the strategy for dealing with technological vulnerability so that it results in a benefit (as exemplified by and successfully implemented by Mozilla Firefox) in particular. Whether Microsoft ultimately makes IE’s source code F/OSS remains to be seen. 6 On the site http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp, it states that in June 2011, 23.3% of its users browsed on Internet Explorer and 42.2% on Firefox. These figures aren’t completely accurate but provide an idea of how popular IE and Firefox are.

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Some risks that result from ‘technological vulnerability’ From the concept of lead user and a few examples of the possible benefits resulting from managing technological vulnerability in a certain way, let’s move on to some examples of its inevitable risks. As we’ve seen, technological vulnerability takes a concrete form as malicious software; advertisements on websites and emails were pinpointed as being the main carriers. Malicious software is then held responsible for two risks that result from Firefox’s vulnerability: computer damage and privacy infringements. Although it may be said that both aspects are extensive and complex actor-‐networks in and of themselves—consisting of computer networks, servers, web hosts, hackers, malicious code, various versions of different kinds of operating systems, web browsers etc.—I can illustrate the first risk with an empirical example that arose from the field; a case of serendipity where I personally experienced the negative effects of malware up-‐close for the first time. One evening last May, a friend called me on Skype and claimed that her brand-‐new Apple iMac computer had been infected with a computer virus. Unaware that there was actually a major malware attack on Mac computers happening at that moment, and in disbelief that something like that could actually happen to a Mac, I quickly assumed my former role as an Apple technical-‐support representative. Via Skype chat, I assisted her in removing the program she claimed to be a virus, and this was successful. In the following days, I read news on the technology website MacNN that ‘the unthinkable’ had actually happened. As an aside, one must bear in mind that, in the 10-‐year history of Mac OS X—of which I myself have been using the OS for seven years—I had never experienced my computer becoming infected with a virus, nor had I known of any other Mac user who experienced this. MacNN reported that the particular piece of malware was called MACDefender, and it transformed both itself and a user’s computer after a user unknowingly clicked on a link to a malicious website. On this website, a download is initiated, and under certain circumstances, the user then sees an installation program. If the user isn’t aware of the threat and installs this program, the computer is subsequently infected (MacNN, 2011c). The malware depended on “user gullibility”, as MacNN called it, and the controversy lasted for about a month on the web. Apple’s tech-‐support technicians 70

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were brought into the matter and, reportedly, they were not allowed to assist customers who called in about their infected computers, even though many were requesting this service (MacNN, 2011b). The attack was of such a large scale that, as a powerful, multinational company, Apple was forced to react; ultimately, it had to instruct thousands of its tech-‐support employees to assist customers who called in about removing the malware (Electronista, 2011a). Apple even had to come up with a software patch to protect millions of Mac users against future MACDefender attacks (MacNN, 2011a). Reportedly, the scam was linked to a Russian website called Chronopay. Two of the malicious websites that users were directed to after clicking on the malicious link were traced and connected to their owner, who was reportedly an employee of Chronopay (Electronista, 2011b). The fact that he denied involvement isn’t of importance here; the example is merely meant to show the complexity and scope of actor-‐networks that consist of heterogeneous elements, which are drawn together in a single case of a successful malware scam. And this one was relatively innocent, attacking the generally “invulnerable” technological system of an Apple computer and its software, and requiring the user to actively trigger the effects of the malicious software. The other risk, ‘privacy infringement’, is a bit more difficult to catch. However, one needs to think about, for example, what one of the interlocutors termed ‘keyloggers’. This is a way to remotely hack (i.e., gain unauthorised access) into a computer or server, and then steal personal data like passwords, credit card and Social Security numbers. In contrast to the potential effects of malware to cause computer damage, keylogging happens without the user noticing it. In the case of keylogging, whether or not the procedure for stealing this data is the same isn’t clear. But a recent example is that the enormous gaming network Sony Playstation was hacked, resulting in the theft of the email addresses, names, physical addresses and possibly credit card numbers of 77 million customers (Wingfield, Sherr, & Worthen, 2011). To relate privacy infringements to our example of Firefox: A bank or other confidential account (a Danish example is NemID) in which some form of user verification is necessary to access that account can be hacked using similar hacking methods via a web browser.

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Opening up the vulnerability of technology

Browser customisation by means of Adblock Plus As we’ve seen, one of the benefits of the Mozilla Firefox browser’s inevitable vulnerability is Adblock Plus, an example of browser customisation. How is this software extension constituted? I’d like to highlight three possible entrances. First, from within Firefox, Adblock Plus can be searched for and found by navigating to the so-‐called ‘add-‐ons manager’. An ‘add-‐on’ and ‘extension’ are essentially one and the same; the only difference is that it is called an add-‐on before installation, and afterward it functions as an extension. In the add-‐ons manager, among other things, one can see its software version number, and a short description of what it can do: Ads were yesterday! Adblock Plus allows you to regain control of the Internet and view the web the way you want to. The add-‐on is supported by over forty filter subscriptions in dozens of languages which automatically configure it for purposes ranging from removing online advertising to blocking all known malware domains. Adblock Plus also allows you to customize your filters with the assistance of a variety of useful features, including a context option for images, a block tab for Flash and Java objects, and a list of blockable items to remove scripts and stylesheets. (Adblock, 2011)

It also shows the name of the developer, Wladimir Palant, a ‘contribute’ button with which one can donate $5.00 to the developer, a link to Adblock Plus’s website and a rating system that goes up to five stars. Adblock Plus has received a five-‐star-‐rating based on 2,435 reviews. Second, by clicking on the developer’s name, one gets specific information about Wladimir Palant. There’s no picture of the man, but there’s reference again to the Adblock Plus website, his job title of ‘add-‐ons developer’, the date when Wladimir became a member of the community, and a short description of him: I am a software developer and have been playing with Mozilla software since 2003. I absolutely love the way it can be extended to do just about anything and I make use of that. So I create extensions and occasionally fix issues in the Mozilla source code (mostly I just try to file good bug reports however). After working on several applications based on Mozilla’s XULRunner my main job these days is developing Adblock Plus. (Adblock, 2011)

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Opening up the vulnerability of technology

Finally, there is the Adblock Plus website, which is available in nine languages. The headline reads: “Adblock Plus—for annoyance-‐free web surfing: block all ads automatically, no distractions; browse faster and safer; fully customizable—you are in control; easy to contribute, report issues when you see them” (ibid.). Then there’s a big button that allows a user to install Adblock Plus and an award saying that Adblock Plus won the about.com Reader’s Choice Award in 2011. Most notably, there’s a one-‐minute YouTube video in which the software extension’s benefits are explained as well as how to install it. To emphasise the impact of a seemingly unimportant, tiny piece of software, the voice-‐over in the video claims that Adblock Plus is used by millions of people. This number is further substantiated by an official statistical website published by Mozilla, where it says that there are more than 13 million active users as of 14 July 2011 (Mozilla, 2011b).

Figure 9 An important software extension in Firefox: the Adblock Plus icon

The Mozilla Firefox community regarded as an ‘innovation community’ To test my hypothesis that the Mozilla Firefox community is a good example of a user/developer community—where lead users contribute to an ongoing process of innovation by exploiting the benefits that result from the vulnerability of software—I once again turn our attention to Eric von Hippel, who examines the sources of innovation, and his notion of ‘innovation communities’ (2005b). Von Hippel shows that user innovation is “drawn together by innovation communities” (ibid.: 93). Thus, there’s an element of coherence to his interpretation of the community concept, which is comparable to Lysloff’s position as mentioned earlier. According to von Hippel, this process of drawing together is necessary because he considers it likely that the phenomenon of user innovation is “widely distributed”, and not just the result of the efforts of only a “few prolific user-‐innovators” (ibid.). Von Hippel proceeds by drawing upon Eric S. Raymond—computer programmer, author and unofficial spokesperson of the F/OSS movement—to make (for our purposes) an interesting analogy between innovation communities and F/OSS. Raymond discusses

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Opening up the vulnerability of technology

Linus’s law in the improvement and correction of written programming language. This can be a very costly process; however, Raymond argues that this task can be performed at much lower costs when many software user/developers work together on the task, as in a community of user/developers—keep in mind the example of Safari’s F/OSS engine WebKit mentioned earlier. Furthermore, this large community of user/developers with heterogeneous skills would perform the task more efficiently and faster because of the likelihood that a certain mistake in the programming language (bug) would be quickly matched with the user/developer who has the right skills to repair it (ibid., p. 94). Thus, von Hippel concludes that user-‐innovation is widely distributed; that is, many users contribute with a few and very different innovations each. Furthermore, these innovations are freely revealed by the user-‐innovators. To facilitate this process of revealing innovations to other user-‐innovators, the importance of innovation communities comes into play. These are defined by von Hippel as follows: I define “innovation communities” as meaning nodes consisting of individuals or firms interconnected by information transfer links which may involve face-‐to-‐face, electronic, or other information. These can, but need not, exist within the boundaries of a membership group. They often do, but need not, incorporate the qualities of communities for participants, where “communities” is defined as meaning “networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support, information, a sense of belonging, and social identity”. (Wellman et al. 2002, p. 4, in: von Hippel, 2005, p. 96)

Relating von Hippel’s interpretation to the intellectual positions discussed earlier in the chapter on the community concept (chapter two), it may be said that his stance perhaps comes closest to Bakardjieva’s notion of ‘Virtual Togetherness’, which incorporates the definition of what supposedly constitutes a real-‐life, close-‐knit, ‘authentic’ community, but is not limited to such a narrow definition. It is arguably even broader in scope than—and contrary to—Bakardjieva’s proposition directed at the phenomenon of user-‐innovation. Seen in the light of an ANT critique, von Hippel’s position may be regarded as an example of a preconceived social assemblage, which the analyst needs to avoid taking as a point of departure. However, by acknowledging Mozilla Firefox’s self-‐description as a community, by 74

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maintaining an ANT-‐inspired stance on conducting a symmetrical analysis, and after having opened up parts of it via an ANT-‐approach, I’m reluctant to reject that it is fruitful to regard Mozilla Firefox as an innovation community from the perspective of innovation theory. Even when omitting any form of face-‐to-‐face contact, which undoubtedly also takes place in the software-‐creating community of Mozilla Firefox, von Hippel’s stance makes sense when narrowed down to Firefox’s capacity to innovate. Throughout this thesis, I’ve given numerous examples of how user/developers electronically connect with each other to freely reveal information, and thereby facilitate an ongoing innovation process. Moreover, there are indications that this doesn’t only happen online. There is reference made to a vibrant offline, real-‐life community as well. This aspect, even though it hasn’t been addressed in my thesis, is also captured by von Hippel’s notion of ‘innovation communities’. There’s much more to say about F/OSS and user-‐innovation, but first, with brief reference to von Hippel, I intend to underline the observations from my fieldwork; specifically, that inevitable technological vulnerability as exemplified by the web browser Firefox results not only in risk but also in a benefit, and to examine how that’s achieved. Second, by relating innovation theory and von Hippel’s concepts of ‘lead user’ and ‘innovation community’ to the findings of my research, it serves as a suggestion for how the results of this thesis could be applied in a fieldwork-‐driven project, conducted to deliver concrete solutions to an organisation or company. This relation to von Hippel and innovation theory is especially relevant in a Danish context. In particular, I have in mind the recent five-‐year period from 2005 to 2010 in which user-‐driven innovation (UDI) was part of Denmark’s national strategy to compete in the area of user knowledge, in an effort to promote Denmark’s success in the global marketplace. This strategy was defined in the belief that this particular form of innovation, as opposed to traditional forms of manufacturer-‐centred innovation, would fit Danish society better than to compete on price, for example. In this period, a total of 400 million DKK was granted to many major Danish research institutions to conduct a wide variety of projects with a focus on UDI (Jensen, Forthcoming 2011). I would specifically like to mention the current research alliance TempoS (performing Temporary Spaces for UDI), which involves the

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University of Copenhagen (notably, the department of Ethnology), the Technical University of Denmark and the Danish Design School; in this research project, von Hippel’s ideas form part of the background and hypothesis (TempoS, 2010).

Browser culture

Conclusion

Conclusion I began by situating this thesis, in some influential, intellectual characterisations of technologically advanced, rich, and mostly western countries. I have drawn attention to the immense cultural impact of software on hundreds of millions of people’s everyday life. At the same time it has been my observation that a direct focus on the cultural importance of software in the field of Applied Cultural Analysis is not very prominent. Therefore, I have argued for the need to develop a dedicated focus and theoretical approach to software in analyses of culture. To make this possible, a symmetrical approach, that can be found in the field of STS, is required. For, a symmetrical approach enables to simultaneously study aspects of the technological actor that constitutes software, and the ones that could be termed social and cultural, whether they’re humans or non-‐humans. The field of STS provides this symmetrical approach as it continuously tries to overcome the technology-‐society dichotomy, by showing that they’re in fact intertwined and not strictly separated. Hence, the choice for theorists coming from the field of STS, like Bijker and Latour, and their theoretical approaches of the social construction of technology (SCOT) and actor-‐network theory (ANT). I’ve taken my point of departure from two seemingly very different, but at the same time, convergent conceptualisations of culture. I termed these conceptualisation one, which characterises the culture of technologically advanced, rich and mostly Western countries as ‘software cultures’; and conceptualisation two, which calls the same category of cultures a ‘technological culture’. Proceeding with the first conceptualisation, I made a case for the mutual methodological relevance of two relatively new scientific disciplines: Software Studies and Applied Cultural Analysis. I’ve argued that, instead of requiring that cultural analysts learn how to code in order to maintain the capacity to make sense of contemporary culture, the field of Applied Cultural Analysis would actually contribute to the field of Software Studies by refraining from doing exactly that. I’m of the opinion that doing Applied Cultural Analysis without knowledge of code could prioritise software in various

Browser culture

Conclusion

contexts as a focal point of analysis, and in that way, could generate new and relevant insights by means of ethnographic studies of software practices. Examples of these practices are found in the user experience of software, and a user’s interactivity with software. Some of the reasons to consider interdisciplinary approaches between Software Studies and Applied Cultural Analysis are: the ubiquity and pervasiveness of software in technologically advanced, rich and mostly Western countries; its unprecedented function as a global communication tool; the almost absolute dependence that the above-‐mentioned countries have on software; the cultural specificity of software; and its contemporary influence on culture. Moreover, an interdisciplinary approach that integrates the methodologies of both Software Studies and Applied Cultural Analysis offer new and interesting possibilities for research on the intersection of these disciplines. It holds the potential to move from more traditional ethnographies of Human Computer Interface and Computer-‐ Mediated Communication, to a dedicated and more direct focus on a specific piece of software. Doing this will result in an increased mutual appreciation of both traditions’ merits. To emphasise, the field of Applied Cultural Analysis may be more sensitive to the cultural impact of software by increasing its awareness of the consequences

for

culturally-‐dependent

notions

like:

online/offline,

remoteness/closeness, materiality/immateriality, space/place etc., to name just a few. In addition, to do this, technology needs to become firmly rooted in ethnological and cultural analytical discourse. Having identified the convergence between ‘a software culture’ and ‘a technological culture’ with the empirical example of Mozilla Firefox, I transposed the notion of ‘technological vulnerability’ into the realm of software, and modified the meaning of a ‘technological system’ accordingly. The next move was to show that negative effects of technological vulnerability aren’t only technical in nature, and that they don’t only result in risk but also in a benefit. Reflecting on my fieldwork, I tried to show that the web browser Mozilla Firefox is a good example of the highly consequential practice that is technology. With more than 400 million users worldwide, it is a global phenomenon that transcends different cultural contexts, but at the same time, isn’t able to escape these differences. The consequences of this

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Conclusion

massive use of Mozilla Firefox—just like technology in general—cannot only result in benefits; there are risks as well. I included the concept of the community for two main reasons: First, Mozilla Firefox perceives and promotes itself as being a community; and second, ‘community’ is a hotly debated concept in both the social sciences and the humanities, where ethnographic fieldwork is an important part of data collection. In establishing a reflexive ethnographic understanding of how Mozilla Firefox is, in fact, regarded as a community, I refrained from taking a different point of departure than its own self-‐description, in order to remain faithful to a symmetrical approach to the field. By giving an overview of six different intellectual positions on the community concept, I tried to show that a symmetrical approach is both possible and worthwhile; with this, I then moved to the core of my analysis, which draws upon elements of actor-‐network theory. This move opened up the possibility to deepen our understanding of both the technological aspects as well as the social/cultural aspects of the Mozilla Firefox community. It showed that it is fruitful to regard the Mozilla Firefox community as a heterogeneous actor-‐network that comprises both humans and non-‐humans. While the more classic interpretations of the community concept may be very suitable for analyses with respect to the social/cultural aspects of the community, they’re less capable of including the technological elements. Hence, the reason to employ ANT as the core of the presented analysis. To analyse the socio-‐technical relations between the encountered heterogeneous actors, I have adopted a multi-‐modal approach to conducting online fieldwork, that consists of three parts. To suit the high pace of the fieldwork component in the thesis, and to account for the absence of an offline approach, I started by including myself as a relevant actor in an approach that incorporates elements of analytic auto-‐ethnography. In the absence of an offline approach to complement the online fieldwork, I believe this strategy increased the ethnographic authority of the account, and also resulted in a larger amount of empirical data that is more profound than it would have been without the use of this strategy. Subsequently, the online field was entered and constituents of the Firefox community were identified: the Mozilla.org website, an open source research program named Test Pilot, a Q & A department, the Nightly Builds, Minefield,

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Drumbeat and the Board of Directors of Mozilla-‐Europe. This second part of the ethnography generated furthermore new insights on technological vulnerability, with regard to it being related to the overall quality of the product Firefox. It offered a glimpse of how so-‐called ‘tracking cookies’ are an important element of the technological vulnerability of a web browser. It demonstrated the different degrees of ‘openness’ of software; in the sense that IE is entirely closed, Firefox entirely open, and Safari takes position in between these two poles. Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, it led me to finding my interlocutors who played a major role in the third part of the ethnography: the overt participant observations. In the second and third parts of my fieldwork, I ‘followed the actors’ in an attempt to open the conceptualisations of a software culture, a technological culture, technological vulnerability and the community. I tried to become a member of the community under examination and, by doing so, to combine elements of analytic auto-‐ethnography with ANT to once again strive for symmetry; in this way, I hoped to learn as much as possible from the actors I encountered, complemented by my own expertise and life experiences related to computers, the internet, software and web browsers. I eventually found the user/developers in the community, and it appeared that they possessed extensive technical skills; they were also able to write code that could modify the Mozilla Firefox web browser to a significant degree. This higher level of ‘tech-‐savviness’ is related to having a preference for a F/OSS web browser like Firefox, and its capacity for drastic browser customisation. This customisation is then related to vulnerability in several ways. For example, it offers two kinds of benefit. The first is that, as shown in the empirical example, it offers the ability to block advertisements that disrupt a user’s experience on websites. Aside from being disruptive, some advertisements are also designed to be carriers of malicious software. So, by blocking all advertisements, the risk of encountering malicious software is offset as well. This is quite significant because getting malicious software on one’s computer creates a risk for both computer damage and privacy infringements. The benefit of browser customisation was subsequently shown as an example of how to deal with the inevitable technological vulnerability of a web browser. Browser customisation leads to a different and—as perceived by my interlocutors—a better and safer user experience, compared to 80

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using a closed and proprietary web browser like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. A F/OSS user/developer community that creates software extensions to make browser customisation possible was shown to result in a benefit because it deals with vulnerability differently than the development practices of closed and proprietary software. I’ve attributed a great deal of importance to the role of the user/developers in the Mozilla Firefox community because it is their job to create the software extensions that are so unique to the Firefox web browser. They use the product themselves and have the required technical abilities; in that way, they contribute to Firefox’ product development. I demonstrated the usefulness and relevance of von Hippel’s concept of ‘lead user’ in a discussion of these user/developers, which can be qualified with this notion. In addition, regarding the user/developers that way shows that they are, in fact, innovative user/developers. They are also a major element in counteracting the technological vulnerability of Firefox, and the success of the web browser—in terms of the large number of users—can for the most part be attributed to them. Next, I discussed some possible constituents of malware, which is certainly part of the inevitable risk that results from the technological vulnerability of Firefox, with the example of the recent massive malware attack by MACDefender. Moreover, I provided a more detailed analysis of the software extension Adblock Plus, which is a good example of the important element of Firefox’s browser customisation. Finally, I discussed von Hippel’s notion of innovation communities, connecting back to my earlier chapter about the community concept and moving forward to establish a link with innovation theory; with this, I included a reflection on how the findings of my research could be applied. In this thesis, I’ve demonstrated that the Mozilla Firefox community can, in fact, be regarded as an innovation community. In addition, I showed that the concept could be put into a critical perspective when the core of the analysis is ANT and, at the same time, it can be maintained if one remains faithful to a symmetrical analytical approach. Even more so, when the concept of innovation community is re-‐examined after an analysis of the empirical example, it becomes clear how the community is actually constituted. Therefore, I reached the conclusion that it is a worthwhile concept in

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relation to the Mozilla Firefox community. I illustrated this point with examples from Denmark’s national innovation policy and current Danish innovation research.

Suggestions for further research The results of this thesis could obviously have been different, but they can’t be changed, as they represent what emerged from the actor-‐networks encountered within this specific period of time, and with the specific actors involved. However, some brief reflections on what hasn’t been addressed could certainly be included. Some suggestions for further research would be, first of all, a sensitivity toward different geographical contexts. In this thesis, there has been a focus on what could be roughly termed ‘the Anglo-‐Saxon’ context. This applies to the interlocutors who provided the empirical material, the Mozilla website itself, the companies and online social networks discussed, and not in the least, the theories that I’ve drawn upon. There are, however, possibilities for a more targeted focus: for example, to look at a Danish or an Italian Mozilla community, if the analyst takes one of the local websites as a point of departure. Second, photographs of real-‐life offline events that show large groups of ‘Mozilla people’, or as they describe themselves: ‘Mozillians’, are scattered around the official Mozilla websites. These suggest the potential to conduct traditional offline fieldwork, which could be combined with online techniques that mutually complement each other. Third, a study of the sensitivity toward the political/ideological aspects of the Mozilla community could be interesting and worthwhile to pursue. Who actually speaks of a community—and why? What are the interests undoubtedly involved? To what ‘public good’, as they proclaim themselves, is the community actually contributing? The last suggestion that I would like to make concerns the probably endless possibilities for approaching the Mozilla Firefox community with perspectives from visual ethnography. Since I’m not familiar with this field of specialisation I refrain from making detailed suggestions. However, having observed many Mozilla websites in the past six months I can’t avoid mentioning this point. I’ve given a few examples of the numerous graphics that can be found on dedicated Mozilla websites and they

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Conclusion

give a very limited idea of the many colourful and rich illustrations, if that’s the right word. The most interesting one is perhaps the Test Pilot, mentioned above. To illustrate how visual elements possibly could lead to relevant ethnographic insights an anecdote from the writing process of this thesis follows. In one of the final drafts I described the test pilot as being a dog, while it actually represents ‘the Firefox’ wearing pilot gear. It was the proofreader who told me about this quite important difference between a ‘dog’ and ‘a fox’ (which obviously is supposed to represent ‘the Firefox’). I can easily imagine that a competent visual ethnographer is able to do much more; i.e. analyse the cultural meaning of these graphics. Questions like, who are the designers behind these graphics and how do they operate regarded from a cultural perspective, can very well be raised. What do socio-‐technical relations look like from the perspective of visual ethnography? How are the kind of graphics that they design related to the free and open source software community? Or even, what role does software play in creating these graphics? Finally, to allude to the title of my thesis, if I were to come up with an alternative conceptualisation of ‘our culture’, aside ‘a software culture’ or a ‘technological culture’, I would say that we live in ‘a browser culture’. We collectively and continuously ‘browse’ through all aspects of our culture, and we use a web browser to do this. The fact that we browse is a part of our culture, and could perhaps be regarded as a social aspect, whereas the fact that we employ the tool of a web browser, could be regarded as the technical aspect of this culture. Together they comprise a multitude of socio-‐technical relations that can be found almost anywhere at any time. Seen from this perspective, and as I’ve demonstrated, ‘technological vulnerability’ takes on a new and important meaning.

Browser culture

A glossary of key terms

Appendix: A glossary of key terms7 Bug (E.g., software bug) The common term used to describe an error, flaw, mistake, failure or fault in a computer program or system that produces an incorrect or unexpected result, or causes it to behave in unintended ways. Bugzilla The tool used by the Mozilla community to file, discuss and fix bugs. C++ One of the most popular programming languages, which is applied to systems software, application software, high-‐performance server and client applications, and entertainment software like video games. Code Used in a colloquial sense to mean ‘programming language’. Cookie (e.g., HTTP cookie, web cookie or browser cookie) Used by an origin website to send information to a user’s browser, and for the browser to return the information to the origin site. The information can be used for authentication, identification of a user session, user’s preferences, shopping-‐cart contents or anything else that can be accomplished through the storage of text data. CSS Cascading Style Sheets is a style-‐sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics (i.e., the look and formatting) of a document written in a mark-‐up language (see HTML). Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML. Domain name 7 The definitions in this glossary are derived from http://www.wikipedia.org/. Therefore, despite careful selection, their accuracy cannot be guaranteed. This glossary is meant to increase the intelligibility of the text for an audience not necessarily familiar with all the computer jargon. The amount of keystrokes that this glossary represents is not included in the total amount of keystrokes stated on the cover page of this thesis.

Browser culture

A glossary of key terms

An identification label that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control on the Internet. Domain names are hostnames that identify Internet Protocol (IP) sources, such as web sites. F/OSS Free and Open Source Software. Facebook A social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. As of July 2011, Facebook has more than 750 million active users. Users may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, post content and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Firewall A device or set of devices designed to permit or deny network transmissions based upon a set of rules; it is frequently used to protect networks from unauthorized access while permitting legitimate communications to pass. Many personal-‐ computer operating systems include software-‐based firewalls to protect against threats from the public internet. Flash A multimedia platform used to add animation, video and interactivity to web pages. Flash is frequently used for advertisements, games and flash animations for broadcast. GUI or UI A type of user interface (UI) that allows users to interact with electronic devices that use images rather than text commands. Hacking Using a computer to gain unauthorized access to the data in a system. HTML HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-‐blocks of web pages. Hyperlink or link A reference to a computer document that the reader can directly follow by clicking on it, or that is automatically followed.

Browser culture

A glossary of key terms

IRC Internet Relay Chat is a form of real-‐time internet text messaging (chat) or synchronous conferencing. It is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums called channels, but also allows one-‐to-‐one communication via private message as well as chat and data transfer, including file sharing. Java Currently one of the most popular programming languages in use, particularly for server-‐client web applications. LinkedIn A business-‐related social networking site, mainly used for professional networking. Mac OS X (10), 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, etc. A series of Unix-‐based operating systems and graphical user interfaces (see GUI or UI) developed, marketed and sold by Apple Inc. Macintosh or Mac A series of several different types of personal computers that are designed, developed and marketed by Apple Inc. Operating System (OS) Software that consists of programs and data; it runs on computers, manages computer hardware resources and provides common services for execution of various application software. Patch A piece of software designed to fix problems with or update a computer program or its supporting data. This includes fixing security vulnerabilities and other bugs (see bug), and improving the usability or performance. PDF An open standard for document exchange. This file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 is used for representing documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. Each PDF file encapsulates a complete description of a fixed-‐layout flat document, including the text, fonts, graphics, and other information needed to display it. Phishing

Browser culture

A glossary of key terms

A way of attempting to acquire (to “fish” for) sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Pop-‐up A computer window that requires that users interact with it before they can return to operating the main application, thus disrupting the workflow on the application’s main window. Also, pop-‐up advertisement: A form of online advertising on the World Wide Web intended to attract web traffic or capture email addresses. Pop-‐ups are generally new web-‐browser windows that display advertisements. Skype A software application that allows users to conduct voice and video calls and chats over the Internet. Trojan A destructive program that masquerades as a normal application (“a Trojan horse”). The software initially appears to perform a desirable function for the user prior to installation and/or execution, but then steals information or harms the system. Troubleshooting A specific set of procedures to identify and resolve computer problems, usually performed by IT professionals. Tweet See Twitter Twitter An online social networking and micro-‐blogging service that enables its users to send and read text-‐based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as “tweets”. Virus A computer program that can copy itself and damage a computer. Wiki A website that allows for the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser. Windows ’95, ’98, 2000, XP, etc. A series of operating systems produced by the Microsoft Corporation.

Browser culture

A glossary of key terms

Worm A self-‐replicating malware computer program that uses a computer network to send copies of itself to other nodes (i.e., computers on the network); it may do so without any user intervention. YouTube A video-‐sharing website, created in February of 2005, through which users can upload, share and view videos.

Browser culture

References

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Hickman, L. A. (2001). Philosophical Tools for Technological Culture: Putting Pragmatism to Work. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hine, C. (2008). Virtual Ethnography: Modes, Varieties, Affordances. In N. Fielding, R. M. Lee & G. Blank (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Online Research Methods (pp. 257-‐271). Los Angeles: Sage. Huygen, M. (2007). Terug naar de jaren zeventig is al fataal. NRC Handelsblad. Jensen, T. E. (Forthcoming 2011). A Comparative Study of Three User-‐Driven Innovation Projects. Krsul, I. V. (1998). Software Vulnerability Analysis. Purdue University, Lafayette, IN, USA. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-‐Network-‐Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lysloff, R. T. A. (2003). Musical Community on the Internet: An On-‐line Ethnography. Cultural Anthropology, 18(2), 233-‐263. MacNN. (2011a). Apple Security Update 2011-‐003 protects against MAC Defender. Retrieved 14 August, 2011, from http://www.macnn.com/articles/11/05/31/snow.leopard.to.automatically.up date.definitions/ MacNN. (2011b). Apple tells reps not to remove malware amid outbreak. Retrieved 14 July, 2011, from http://www.macnn.com/articles/11/05/19/first.major.malware.attack.on.ma cs/ MacNN. (2011c). 'MACDefender' malware targets Mac users via web links. Retrieved 14 July, 2011, from http://www.macnn.com/articles/11/05/02/attack.dependent.on.user.gullibili ty/ Manovich, L. (Forthcoming 2012). Software Takes Command: The MIT Press. Microsoft. (2011). License Terms. Retrieved 9 July, 2011, from http://www.microsoft.com/About/Legal/EN/US/IntellectualProperty/UseTer ms/Default.aspx Miller, D. (2011). Tales from Facebook. Cambridge: Polity. Miller, D. (Ed.). (2005). Materiality. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Mozilla. (2010). State of Mozilla: A Competitive World. Retrieved 29 July, 2011, from http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/annualreport/2009/a-‐competitive-‐ world.html Mozilla. (2011a). About Mozilla. Retrieved 25 March, 2011, from http://www.mozilla.org/about/ Mozilla. (2011b). Adblock Plus Statistics Dashboard: Add-‐ons for Firefox. Retrieved 15 July, 2011, from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-‐US/statistics/addon/1865 Mozilla. (2011c). Firefox notices. Retrieved 20 June, 2011, from http://www.mozilla.com/en-‐US/legal/privacy/notices-‐firefox/ Mozilla. (2011d). History of the Mozilla Project. Retrieved 19 May, 2011, from http://www.mozilla.org/about/history.html Mozilla. (2011e). How can I help Test: QMO-‐quality.mozilla.org. Retrieved 16 August, 2011, from http://quality.mozilla.org/docs/misc/how-‐can-‐i-‐help-‐test/ Mozilla. (2011f). Mozilla Drumbeat: People and Projects making a better Web. Retrieved 1 August, 2011, from https://www.drumbeat.org/en-‐US/

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Mozilla. (2011g). Mozilla Labs Test Pilot. Retrieved 1 August, 2011, from https://testpilot.mozillalabs.com/faq.php Mozilla-‐Europe. (2011). European Mozilla Community Blog. Retrieved 19 May, 2011, from http://blogs.mozilla-‐europe.org/ MozillaZine. (2011). Firefox user/developer forum. Retrieved 14 August, 2011, from http://forums.mozillazine.org/ Nowotny, H. (2003). Introduction booklet for conference. Paper presented at the Cultures of Technology and the Quest for Innovation. Pogue, D. (2009). Mac OS X Snow Leopard: The Missing Manual. Sebastopol: O' Reilly Media. Postill, J. (2008). Localizing the internet beyond communities and networks. New Media & Society, 10(3), 413-‐431. Rheingold, H. (1993). The virtual community: homesteading on the electronic frontier (2000 ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Rose, N. (2006). Governing "Advanced" Liberal Democracies. In A. Sharma & A. Gupta (Eds.), The Anthropology of the State: A Reader (Vol. 9, pp. 144-‐162). Malden: Blackwell. Stewart, K., & Williams, M. (2005). Researching online populations: the use of online focus groups for social research. Qualitative Research, 5(4), 395-‐416. TempoS. (2010). Project description: TempoS-‐performing temporary Spaces for user-‐ driven innovation. Retrieved 4 August, 2011, from http://www.tempos.dk/upload/institutter/man/dsf%20projektbeskrivelser/t emporary%20spaces%20-‐%20project%20description%20-‐%20corrected%20-‐ %2023%20february%202010.pdf Tönnies, F. (2002). Community and Society (C. P. Loomis, Trans.). Devon: Dover. Valentino-‐de Vries, J. (2011). Firefox Maker: 'Do Not Track' Likely To Be Regulated. http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/03/14/firefox-‐maker-‐do-‐not-‐track-‐likely-‐to-‐ be-‐regulated/ van 't Hof, C., van Est, R., & Daemen, F. (Eds.). (2011). Check in / Check out, The Public Space as an Internet of Things. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers. von Hippel, E. (2005a). Democratizing Innovation. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. von Hippel, E. (2005b). Innovation Communities Democratizing Innovation (pp. 93-‐ 106). Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Walther, J. B. (1995). Relational Aspects of Computer-‐Mediated Communication: Experimental Observations over Time. Organization Science, 6(2), 186-‐203. Wellman, B., Boase, J., & Chen, W. (2002). The Networked Nature of Community On and Off the Internet.Unpublished manuscript. Willim, R. (2010). När nätet växer: om algoritmiska och irreguljära metoder. Nätverket, 17, 34-‐38. Wingfield, N., Sherr, I., & Worthen, B. (2011). Hacker Raids Sony Videogame Network. Retrieved 14 July, 2011, from http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240527487037781045762873625037 76534.html?KEYWORDS=sony+playstation+scam