Software Studies: A Lexicon
Source: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262062749/software-studies/ ↗
Forty short entries by different authors, each defining a concept central to the cultural life of software: algorithm, code, interface, loop, variable, installation, and others.
Fuller assembled contributors from media theory, computer science, art, and philosophy, producing a reference work that treats software neither as a purely technical domain nor as a metaphor but as a material practice with its own aesthetics and politics.
The entries range from the historical — tracing the genealogy of specific programming constructs — to the speculative.
The lexicon format works because it refuses a single grand theory and instead maps the field through multiple, sometimes contradictory perspectives.
It effectively defined "software studies" as an academic discipline and remains the best entry point for anyone approaching software from the humanities.
Central argument
Fuller and his contributors argue that software is not a neutral technical substrate but a cultural and political material with its own aesthetics, histories, and power relations. By defining foundational concepts — algorithm, interface, loop, variable — through lenses drawn from media theory, art, philosophy, and computer science simultaneously, the lexicon collectively asserts that software must be studied as a practice that shapes and is shaped by culture, not merely as a tool that executes instructions. The implicit thesis is that understanding software requires multiple, sometimes incompatible frameworks, and that no single discipline owns the object.
Critique
The lexicon format, while intellectually honest about the field's plurality, also shields the work from having to resolve the tensions it surfaces: forty entries by forty contributors can map a terrain without ever having to commit to what software studies actually explains or predicts. More substantively, the collection's grounding in 2008 software culture — largely desktop, pre-cloud, pre-platform-economy — means its conceptual vocabulary struggles to address the operational realities of algorithmic systems at scale, where the politics of software are less in the code's aesthetics and more in data pipelines, infrastructure ownership, and deployment decisions that no single author controls.
Why it matters for product
A CPO who internalises the book's core move — treating software constructs as cultural and political artifacts, not just technical decisions — gains a sharper lens for evaluating product choices that appear purely technical but are actually normative: how a recommendation algorithm surfaces content, what a notification interface implies about user attention, or what a metric definition silently encodes about user value. The lexicon's structure also models something useful for product leadership: the idea that a shared vocabulary across disciplines (design, engineering, research, policy) is itself a strategic asset, and that investing in definitional clarity across teams is not pedantry but the precondition for coherent direction.