[Linganth] Paula Bialski on Middletech

[Ilana Gershon]

  Dear Colleagues,
I am so pleased to announce that there will be a CaMP reading group with
Paula Bialski  as the featured author in two weeks.    March 27th -- Friday
at noon east coast time.

Paula Bialski offers us chapter 2 and the introduction for context. Please
read as much as you can, but do feel free to join us even if you haven't
managed to read everything.

The readings can be found here:

Chapters 1 and 2:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1A3Y74RNqmkKYWqLzHC1hsLoAtZDyUlnk/view?usp=sharing

The meeting will be at noon to 1 pm east coast time - Friday, March 27th
and can be reached by clicking on this Zoom link:

  https://iu.zoom.us/j/949202698 <https://iu.zoom.us/j/949202698>

Looking forward to seeing you all virtually,

Ilana

Press blurb: Contrary to much of the popular discourse, not all technology
is seamless and awesome; some of it is simply “good enough.” In *Middle
Tech*, Paula Bialski offers an ethnographic study of software developers at
a non-flashy, non-start-up corporate tech company. Their stories reveal why
software isn’t perfect and how developers communicate, care, and compromise
to make software work—or at least work until the next update. Exploring the
culture of good enoughness at a technology firm she calls “MiddleTech,”
Bialski shows how doing good-enough work is a collectively negotiated
resistance to the organizational ideology found in corporate software
settings.

The truth, Bialski reminds us, is that technology breaks due to
human-related issues: staff cutbacks cause media platforms to crash, in-car
GPS systems cause catastrophic incidents, and chatbots can be weird.
Developers must often labor to patch and repair legacy systems rather than
dream up killer apps. Bialski presents a less sensationalist, more
empirical portrait of technology work than the frequently told Silicon
Valley narratives of disruption and innovation. She finds that software
engineers at MiddleTech regard technology as an ephemeral object that only
needs to be good enough to function until its next iteration. As a result,
they don’t feel much pressure to make it perfect. Through the deeply
personal stories of people and their practices at MiddleTech, Bialski
traces the ways that workers create and sustain a complex culture of good
enoughness.
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