Speeding up, slowing down, breaking down: an ethnography of software-driven mobility

ABSTRACT

The dynamics of software – and thus also of its development – is an inherent part of the story of how mobilities are made and work. Building on this argument, this ethnographic study explains how navigation software development is caught in a constant culture of acceleration through commercial competition and shifting transport conditions, on the one hand, and a logic of routing and navigation based on creating the fastest route possible for its users, on the other hand. Behind this overall process of technological acceleration lies a multiplicity of forces – sometimes accelerating, but at other times slowing down, stuttering, moving in reverse, or completely coming to a halt in breakdown, shifting the pace of such technological progress. Bringing software development practice into the picture of how mobility systems work (or don’t work) allows us to understand the multiple temporal orders of speeding up and slowing down that push and pull at the fabric of our mobile infrastructures. Doing so will help us counter the popular discourse that our networked, seamless digital technologies are invincible. Based on an ethnography at ‘BerlinTech’, a large commercial navigation software company, this paper provides a multilayered understanding about the temporal forces fuelling our software driven mobility infrastructures.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultures of software development
• routing
• navigation
• ethnography
• infrastructure

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The temporal metaphor comes from Rugby, where a scrum is a sort of player-formation where players struggle to gain possession of the ball when it is tossed in among the team members (Cervone 2011). The term ‘sprint’ follows this sport-based metaphor.