In this work, and intersecting through both Manovich and Galloway, I am most interested in the way these three writers think about and engage the topic of open source / open sourcing, and the way that this becomes a metaphor for media, humans, and society.

In the computer industry, strictly speaking, open source refers most generally to computer programs in source code which is made available to the general public for use and modification in accordance both with its original design and outside of such. Open source is built on a collaborative model, decentralized, peer production model.

Galloway extends this concept to “all aspects of cultural and aesthetic life,” including tools, texts, bodies, and social milieus (377). Looking back to Manovich’s text, Galloway suggests that the emergence of new media occurs at a time when the old brick-and-mortar society was giving place to the digital age, and with it the new age’s impulse to open source everything and where information, desire, and capital “wants to be free” (378). (I’m not convinced of this.) Ultimately, it is about new ways of structuring information.

Manovich ends his work by invoking open source as a “metaphor from computer culture, new media transforms all culture and cultural theory into an “open source” (334).

For Chun, software—free or otherwise—“participates in structures of knowledge-power” (21). Here, however, open source (or free) does not enable one to escape certain power structures; it simply causes us to engage with these structures in different ways. Paradoxically, the open source paradigm “amplifies the power of source code both politically and technically.” While open source represents a democratization or opening up of computing, it also leads paradoxically to moments both of liberation and obfuscation. Ultimately, this is one or many “contradictions and ambiguities” (45). In fact, this—and many other ambiguities—imply “a rigorous engagement with software makes new media studies more, rather than less, vapory” (21).

It is this sense of ambiguity and paradox that runs through Chun’s work. I don’t believe that it is solely coincidence that Kelly uses the word ‘paradox’ in her discussion of Galloway’s response to Chun.

The greatest paradox of all is Chun’s claim that a “rigorous engagement with software makes new media studies more, rather than less, vapory” (344).