Socio-technical deliberation about free and open source software:: Accounting for the status of artifacts in public life

This essay investigates the rhetorical practices of socio-technical deliberation about free and open source (FIOS) software, providing support for the idea that a public sphere is a socio-technical ensemble that is discursive and fluid, yet tangible and organized because it is enacted by both humans and non-humans. In keeping with the empirical shift manifest in recent public sphere scholarship and Bruno Latour's idea that socio-technical deliberation is characterized by the inscription of non-humans, I describe the rhetorical manners in which volunteer citizens define and mobilize a mundane artifact-a web site- in a deliberation over the value of FIOS technologies for their government-funded project. Through inscription of the web site as a rhetorical resource and as the embodiment of their disposition toward computer technologies, the volunteers formed and expressed competing understandings of the role of FIOS technologies in sustaining a public sphere. I argue that these competing views are consequential, for they link technical artifacts and political agents in practice, by way of aspirations, obligations, and forms of authority. Furthermore, by claiming a form of agency for technologies in the public sphere, the proponents of F10S technologies are inviting scholars of the public sphere to question the status assigned to technical artifacts in their investigations and theories of the public sphere.