Living in a networked world means never really getting to decide in any thoroughgoing way who or what enters your “space” (your laptop, your iPhone, your thermostat . . . your home). With this as a basic frame-of-reference, James J. Brown’s Ethical Programs examines and explores the rhetorical potential and problems of a hospitality ethos suited to a new era of hosts and guests. Brown reads a range of computational strategies and actors, from the general principles underwriting the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which determines how packets of information can travel through the internet, to the Obama election campaign’s use of the power of protocols to reach voters, harvest their data, incentivize and, ultimately, shape their participation in the campaign. In demonstrating the kind of rhetorical spaces networked software establishes and the access it permits, prevents, and molds, Brown makes a significant contribution to the emergent discourse of software studies as a major component of efforts in broad fields including media studies, rhetorical studies, and cultural studies.

James J. Brown, Jr. is an Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Digital Studies Center at Rutgers University–Camden. His teaching and research focus on rhetoric, writing, new media, and software studies.

 “Jim Brown’s work is a critical contribution to the growing body of scholarship studying software as a cultural form. Ethical Programs exposes the way computer programs—typically understood as strictly utilitarian tools—in fact embody, structure, and project a sense of ethics in networked environments.”
—Mark Sample, Davidson College

“James J. Brown Jr. is without question one of the most sophisticated theorists working in the rapidly emerging field of digital rhetoric today. Not many writers can knowledgeably combine readings of continental philosophy, close interpretation of lines of computer code and data analytics, and commentary on Internet policies and practices; yet Brown does so expertly and confidently. This book is a must read in for scholars of digital culture interested in the politics of protocols. With examples that range from Wikipedia entries to updates from the Obama campaign website, the reader grows to understand not only how software promotes particular arguments but also how it advances an ethical agenda endowed with considerable nuance that must by necessity expand our understanding of conflict and hospitality.”
—Elizabeth Losh, University of California, San Diego

“Ethical Programs offers digital studies, rhetoric and composition, computers and writing, and new media an important work on the question of hospitality. Brown demonstrates that hospitality is at the core of network interactions—particularly where exploits, political campaigning, wiki editing, and other activities occur.”
—Jeff Rice, University of Kentucky