The Binary Black Box:

On Openness as a Concept to Democratize Technology and Facilitate User Participation.

by Stefan Verhaegh,

University of Maastricht (UM),

SJS.Verhaegh@student.unimaas.nl

We live in a world that’s getting digitized in an accelerating pace; a world where people become increasingly dependant on information and communication technology. The users of these new information technologies (in other words: almost all of us nowadays) can hardly influence, let alone control the development and use of the devices they depend on in their daily lives. When we want to live in a democratic information society, we have to look for models in which technology can be developed democratically, in a way that ordinary users can also influence the development process and the actual use.

I would like to quote Langdon Winner who stated a very important question on the direction of technological development: “What kind of world are we building here? As we develop new devices, techniques and technical systems, what qualities of social, moral and political life do we create in the process? Will this be a world friendly to human sociability or not?” (Winner 1991: 284)

In my master thesis I focus my research on software development, and the openness of this process to the user. I found that the common practice nowadays is that computer users use closed software, the digital equivalent of black box technology. Software programs are tightly sealed, and can’t be opened up to have a look inside. This leads to ‘vendor lock-in’ situations were consumers are totally dependant on the makers of software for the fixing of bug-fixing, the implementation of new features or the porting to new computer hardware. By creating a binary black box, all the power shifts from the consumer away to the producer of a particular technology.

The closed character of the most commercial software also leads to ‘consumer lock-in’ situations, in which a new technology with a slightly bigger user base than competing technologies, can take a dominant market share within a short time, which can be explained by economic theories on path dependencies. We all know the example of the dominant position Microsoft Windows nowadays takes in the field of operating systems.

Although having standards is usually a good thing, it’s a bad thing when the access to these standards are being exclusively controlled by only one commercial company, which values are only related to maximizing profits and increasing its share-holder value on the stock exchange. Living in a dictatorial digital monoculture we can’t control, isn’t particularly attractive and can even lead to the impoverishment of cultural diversity in the digital realm, lead to an expanding digital divide and create a higher vulnerability of our technological culture.

That’s why I would like to look for ways to provide users with more power to directly influence their digital life-world. In my master thesis I focus on open source and free software development as an example to look for new models, in which developers and users interact in a more balanced and more equal way. By looking at the way in which open software users and producers intimately work together, I found the notions of user and producer transgressing their traditional boundaries to become fluid categories. This transgression opens up new and interesting possibilities for user participation.

In my presentation I will propose openness as a guiding concept to think of new strategies that can put the user back in middle of the development process, by further analyzing the relation between socio-technological openness and its implications for the democratic quality of technology development and use.