Proprietary systems for coordination and communication- content management- have been in place for corporations and government institutions, at a cost in the tens of thousands, for at least 4 decades (Campbell-Kelley, 2003, 4). This situation, combined with Microsoft’s condensate market share, should encourage us to think of software in the contemporary period in relation to what Stanley Deetz calls “systematically distorted communication”(1992, 173). Where, without explicit manipulation or a conscious desire to control or deceive, a system (a corporate hierarchy, for example) can produce a situation in which some interactants (employees, customers) are conceptually disempowered.
A systemic distortion occurs that consists of “an interactionally determined reduction of certain experiences to other ones outside the intentional awareness of the interactant. The core issue is the way certain experiences and identities are preemptively preferred over equally plausible ones” (ibid, 174). The dominance of one operating system, for example, shapes a users subsequent software choices and creates a cascading effect requiring layers of licensed software. Fortunately, this process is gradually overcome by programmers writing open source software that can perform in a proprietary environment, and even out perform closed source competitors.
The more subtle danger then these layers of interdependant softwares is the perpetuation of an illusion of incomprehensibility. The term “fear, uncertainty, and doubt” or FUD is used to describe tactics of obfuscation employed in the software industry. One important contemporary example are the numerous studies financed and organized by Microsoft claiming to prove that open source software is less secure or more expensive then their own alternative. FUD attempts to orient public discourse away from a detailed or complex understanding of a question, and though they are famous for it, it is certainly not a tactic unique to Microsoft or to the proprietary side of this equation.
The question is, what organizational systems enable processes that limit or obfuscate the kinds of conversation that would successfully negotiate these inevitable attempts at distortion