The big soft­ware defect story of the past cou­ple of days is def­i­nitely Vassar’s acci­den­tal send­ing of accep­tance noti­fi­ca­tions to sev­eral stu­dents. It’s a great exam­ple of one of the con­se­quences of putting an algo­rithm (and indi­rectly, a pro­gram­mer), in charge of dis­sem­i­nat­ing infor­ma­tion. On the one hand, I’m sure this saved Vas­sar a lot time and per­haps a job or two, com­pletely elim­i­nat­ing their need for post and paper. On the other hand, they’ve adopted a sys­tem that is going to fail from time to time, and not in grace­ful ways that paper does, but in big, dra­matic, and unpre­dictable ways.

The unpre­dictabil­ity of soft­ware defects is one of the most inter­est­ing prop­er­ties of soft­ware as a medium. It’s inher­ent com­plex­ity means that even the peo­ple who develop it are going to have a hard time know­ing what part of the sys­tem will fail and how dra­mat­i­cally. In fact, if the devel­oper fol­lows best prac­tices by mod­u­lar­iz­ing the sys­tem and enabling it to scale grace­fully, it will actu­ally guar­an­tee that the fail­ures will be more dra­matic: whether it’s a list of 1, 100, or 1,000,000, I’m sure the Vas­sar noti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem algo­rithm will do the exact same thing.

I won­der how soft­ware might be built to bet­ter account for the sig­nif­i­cance of the infor­ma­tion it trans­mits and com­putes. At the moment, I sup­pose this is cap­tured in the soft­ware tests that teams per­form. Per­haps a bet­ter way might be to tag the data that moves through soft­ware sys­tems and prop­a­gate things like the con­fi­dence, cred­i­bil­ity, and integrity of data as algo­rithms munge and manip­u­late it.

A few days ago in the NY Times, there was a story reflect­ing on Amber Case’s idea that we are all cyborgs, using a wide range of tools for both phys­i­cal and men­tal mod­i­fi­ca­tion. The key idea in the story is lament­ing the loss of mem­o­ries that have phys­i­cal embod­i­ments, such as a pho­to­graph that has both mean­ing in what it con­tains, but also mean­ing in it’s phys­i­cal con­tainer. In con­trast, the dig­i­tal pho­tographs of today still have their mean­ing, but the con­tainer is mean­ing­less, because it’s vir­tual. It could just as eas­ily be opened on one of a hun­dred photo view­ing appli­ca­tions and dis­played in an infi­nite num­ber of ways and devices.

To me, the divorce of infor­ma­tion from embod­i­ment is one of the most pow­er­ful but sub­ver­sive aspects of soft­ware as a medium. It under­lies nearly every major change in indus­try cur­rently under debate, includ­ing music, print, libraries, pub­lish­ing, jour­nal­ism, movies, and every other kind of media. But the ques­tion that I still puz­zle over is whether this divorce is a nec­es­sary part of pre­serv­ing the power of com­put­ing. Does the abil­ity to change a photo’s con­tainer require that the con­tainer doesn’t have mean­ing? Or, put another way, do peo­ple ascribe mean­ing to their cell phones and dig­i­tal photo frames, even though they can now dis­play any photo in the world?

An inter­est­ing case of this hap­pened a few months ago when my iPhone’s USB port died and I could no longer charge it. It had a few iden­ti­fi­able scuffs on it, and I cer­tainly had a mem­ory for all of the places that I’d been with it and all of the pho­tos I’d taken with it. But when I exchanged it for a nearly iden­ti­cal replace­ment phone, it only felt for­eign for a few days. In fact, some­times I mis­take it for my old phone. This spe­cial case of an iden­ti­cal but dif­fer­ent con­tainer is an inter­est­ing ones, because it speaks directly to the ques­tion at hand: what mean­ing, if any, is there in phys­i­cal objects, other than our mem­o­ries of them?