Technologies are never merely material but are actively made sense of through phenomena such as discourse and imagination. As sci-fi books and movies, interface metaphors or blueprint texts, different forms of imagining shape how we make sense of past, present and future innovations. Deconstructing such discourses and positioning them in historical contexts gives important insight into the materiality, meaning, and morality of technology.

But how do we study this? What theoretical and methodological options are there to assess both the matter of imagination and its real (and not wishful) implications? This blog is an initiative of Nathalie Fridzema (PhD Student at University of Groningen) and Anya Shchetvina (PhD Student at Humboldt University).

We treat "Matter of imagination" as an open-format working group that attempts an inventorisation. We focus on collecting, structuring and commenting on existing frameworks and track ongoing developments in this field. The main focus is on complex digital networked technologies (internet, its offsprings, precedents and alternatives) with occasional steps to related or overlapping fields.