#essay, January 29, 2025 [originally written in October 2020]
by Anya
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“All that is solid seems to melt in the cloud”
(Boomen, Lammes et al., 2009)
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“There is NO CLOUD - just other people's computers»
(Free Software Foundation Europe, 2018)
In the 1990s, at the early stages of internet history, discourses that emerged around it emphasized the novelty of the technology itself, possible practices of communication and self-expression, and “spaces” that are created through the internet usage. For example, John Perry Barlow ― internet pioneer, cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (and a former Grateful Dead lyricist) ― published the famous «Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace» in 1996, where he pictures the internet is a new space that transgresses national borders and other material redundancies of the old world:
“We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here. Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion”. (Barlow, 1996)
Claims about the brand new world appeared not only among techno-enthusiasts but also among social researchers. The internet as a new technology was perceived as something that creates another dimension of the social life, separated from the so-called «first reality». Howard Rheingold (1993) suggested the term “virtual community” to distinguish what was believed to be brand new social entities from the older ones. Both texts are examples of heavily metaphorized utopian narratives. The list of metaphors that emphasize the immateriality and newness of digital technologies does not consist only of «virtual communities» and «cyberspaces». Web surfers, global village, electronic frontier ― these metaphors were strongly embedded in the early scholarship on digital technologies' cultural meanings and social features (Boomen, 2014; Markham, 2003).
This distinction between “virtual” and “first” realities and the romantisised imaginary of the promising new world are the points in an argument with which scholars in the 2010s suggested a turn to the
At first glance, there is nothing new in the idea of digital materiality ― it is common sense that the internet is not just floating around in the air available on request. The internet needs buttons and touchpads, servers, transatlantic cables and technical support, the internet needs interfaces and infrastructure. But as Marianne van den Boomen notices (Boomen, 2014, p.13-15), underneath a think metaphorical level, this materiality often remains unseen and unrecognized ― we don’t know “who is the postman that brings us emails”.
Problematizing common sense, this text highlights the variety of ways in which digital materiality can be conceptualized. There is no ambition to overview all of them, but to show that while "virtuality" has received its fair share of critique, “materiality” of the digital in itself is also not something self-evident.
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Problematisation of digital materiality in Media Studies
During the 2010s more and more researchers in digital media studies began claiming that their field has experienced a shift to the new approaches that emphasized physicality and materiality (Boomen et al., 2009; Reichert et al., 2015; Casemajor, 2015). Simultaniously, nuanced approaches to the topic were developed.
The turn to materiality stems from several critical points. Firstly, the approaches that existed at the time were mostly linked to the theories of old media that were not effective and sensitive enough to address the digital. Among these approaches, Lammes et al. (2009) mention the performance arts, studies on literature, and cinema, while Bollmer (2015) also mentions studies on representation. The implementation of old theories in the developing field of new media studies caused a rise of the ideas of digital immateriality, beliefs that new media marked “a general transformation of atoms into bits (Negroponte 1995) and of matter into mind (Barlow 1996)” (Boomen, Lammes, et al., 2009) The influence of old media theories remained strong in the studies of digital technologies (Boomen, Lammes et al., 2009), even though new materialistic approaches to digital media started developing already in the mid-2000s. For example, Christiane Paul (2006) describes and opposes old approaches in studies of digital art. For conceptual art (e.g. Dada and Fluxus art movements) the idea of “dematerialization” of art object was of high importance. Following this tradition, art historians began observing digital art (e.g. net-art) as radically immaterial, instruction-based, and processual. Though the acknowledgment of this historical continuity is valuable, Paul argues that it is also misguiding. It ignores the hardware that makes art pieces accessible, “various layers of commercial systems and technological industry that continuously define standards for the materialities”, and available preservation strategies.
Secondly, the usage of old media theories resulted in what was called by Boomen, Lammes et al. (2009) a “digital mysticism”. The authors define it as “a special brand of technological determinism in which digitality and software are considered to be ontologically immaterial determinants of new media” (Idem, p.8). In other words, software, interfaces, code, and other elements of the infrastructure, via which the Internet is provided and functions, were either ignored or analyzed as something ephemeral in line with the opposition of «reality» and «virtuality». The bodies, politics, economy, geography were also largely ignored among social scientists and researchers from humanities. For example, Baruch Gottlieb observes this mysticism in modern discourses of digital economy:
“Today’s economy is often described as increasingly ‘immaterial’ where the costs of reproduction are ‘next to nothing’. Anyone who is not ideologically blinkered so as to confuse the quarterly corporate reports data with real processes going on in the world understands the offensiveness of the claims of immateriality. Climate change, institutional racism and sexism, resource wars all testify to the contrary”. (Gottlieb, 2018, p. 145)
Thirdly, the ignorance of the material features resulted in ignorance of the effects that specific features of technologies provide. For example, when we access an online meeting via Zoom and when we join it via Discord, these are two different ways of participation and communication, framed with very different assemblages of windows, sounds, tools, buttons, and icons that enable us to do some things and make it difficult to do the other ones.
Theorethically, this attention to the agency in digital media studies is strongly inspired by STS's interest in material agency and material semiotics. Interestingly, the application of, particularly, Latour’s works went beyond social sciences of the digital, and appeared, for example, in research in Human-Computer Interaction design, in which Fuchsberger, Murer, and Tscheligi (2013) suggested applying ANT to raise attention and sensitivity to material agency and to the connections between materials, designers, and users and thus provide better user interface design choices*.
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Digital materialisms
The turn from immaterial to digital materialism was developing simultaneously within different schools and traditions. In 2015 media scholar Natalie Casemajor distinguished six frameworks that approached this issue: the Berlin School of media studies, the field of software studies, the literary critique of electronic texts, the forensic approach, the ‘new materialist’ media ecology, and the field of Marxian critical studies.
Casemajor notices that some of these approaches observe technologies from both an interpretative and an engineering perspectives. The example is
“Media are conceptualized as inscription machines, but instead of focusing on alphabetical texts, they give special attention to the level of mathematics and the storage capacity of technical media: the way computers, but also older media such as typewriters, gramophones, or cameras, produce technologized memory, and therefore, produce history itself”. (Casemajor, 2015, p.7)
Being myself a Berlin-based media scholar, I was lucky to visit the Media Archaeological Fundus, maintained by Wolfgang Ernst (another important scholar of the Berlin school); a room full of media devices, from sound recorders to the first German TV. Commenting on the method of Berlin media archeology, Ersnt said that they try to strip the media pieces of all the design features, to not have the misleading connotations and look deeper into how the media is processing, structuring and organising sounds, light and images, etc. Casemajor compares Berlin media studies approach to those that are more semantic-oriented. One example is
Another example of a more semantics-oriented approach is
Beyond that, Casemajor distinguishes an approach based on
“The myth of a ‘dematerialised’ and ‘weightless’ knowledge economy tends to obscure the fact that computers are consuming vast amounts of energy and that many physical commodities need to be transported and sold for this economy to function... As a matter of fact, downloading a CD over the internet consumes 2.5 times more energy as buying it in a music store.” (Idem, p.13).
In comparison to neomarxist ideas, the
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What is materiality anyway?
In Natalie Casemajor’s review, the term “materiality” is taken for granted. She is not describing the definitions or particularities of what exactly is material in outlined frameworks. While defining materiality was not the main aim of her work, it would be a good scientific practice to recognise that the mentioned approaches are not just a reflection of how same ideas were developed simultaneously in various locations and by various authors. But that they are indeed implying quite divergent theoretisations of materiality. I want to focus on three of such, while the aim is not to develop an exhaustive classification but to illustrate and explore how instead of one all-encompassing approach there are different ontologies and scales of conceptualization at play. The tree approaches in question are:
(1) forensic materiality: a specific configuration of traces left by objects and events that make individual digital technologies unique (“New Media and the Forensic Imagination» by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum),
(2) digimat ― a societal, ecological and economic context in which technologies are embedded (“Digital Materialism: Origins, Philosophies, Prospects” by Baruch Gottlieb),
(3) sign-tool materiality ― a performative feature of digital entities that function as tools ans signs simultaneously (“Transcoding the digital: how metaphors matter in New Media” by Marianne van den Boomen)
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Forensic materiality: a unique configuration of objects and events
The first notion of materiality, which I suggest to distinguish, was introduced by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in his book “New Media and the Forensic Imagination” (2008). Based on criminology and literary studies of electronic texts, Kirschenbaum divided two types of materiality ― forensic and formal.
The concept of formal materiality emphasizes the symbolic nature of digital entities. When we operate files, browsers, windows, zoom meetings, we mostly work with symbols that correspond to some invisible software. Formal materiality of objects can sometimes be misleading, as it doesn’t necessarily correspond to the underlying technological processes:
"Formal materiality is perhaps also the lingering perception of some genuine material residue — however misplaced — which presents, like sensation in a phantom limb, when one cannot quite accept the exclusively formal nature of a digital process; for example, the vague sense of unease that attends me after leaving my desktop music player application on Pause for hours on end, something that would harm a physical tape system because of the tension on the reels." (Idem, p.13)
The core idea of forensic materiality is that the physical features of every part of a digital device or digital file are to some extent unique. “No two things in the physical world are ever exactly alike” (Idem: 10). For example, individual unique traces of bits can be observed with the help of magnetic force microscopy in criminology. But the idea of forensic materiality works on different levels ― it is not necessary a tool to observe only micro-level of bits, we may study forensic materiality also looking at ―
“...everything from labeling a diskette, which situates electronic textuality amid other technologies and practices of writing (indexing and cataloging, longhand, adhesives, the felt-tip pen), to the contours of the keyboard and mouse that make their bodily marks felt in the ongoing pandemic of repetitive strain and white-collar work injuries, to the growing crisis of e-waste.” (Idem, p.10-11).
Forensic materiality is not a substantial feature of objects; it is a combination of different features that a specific object received through its unique history of interactions with other objects under the force of some external conditions. This path and connected interactions could be studied retrospectively, by observing the object itself, it’s traces and features.
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Digimat ― the broad societal, ecological and economic context
The second way of approaching materiality could be illustrated by the book “Digital Materialism: Origins, Philosophies, Prospects” published in 2018. In this book it’s author, Baruch Gottlieb, develops a digital materialistic perspective. In doing so, Gottlieb combines Marxian critical studies with post-humanistic ideas and the notion of the Anthropocene.
As mentioned above, Kirschenbaum provides a clearly outlined notion of forensic materiality that constitutes unique context and features of every digital technology or entity. Just as Kirschenbaum’s approach, Gottliethe concept of forensic materiality is very sensitive to diachronic and synchronic context and connections of digital technologies to other objects. However, if Kirschenbaum focuses on the micro-level, Gottlieb is zoomin out to see the macro forces and bigger infrastructures, like the "nation-scale power grid, network cabling including submarine cables, server farms and data-centres". (Gottlieb, 2018, p. 128).
Attention to the macro-level results in a different method. While the idea of forensic materiality is based on practices from criminology and implies a possibility to empirically observe and “read” digital traces, digimat's method implies not just empirical observations, but theorethisation and extrapolation, as not material traces are in focus, but material systems. The political positioning of the book is explicitly neomarxist, meaning that, for example, analysis of blockchain technologies is inseparable from the issues of labour conditions:
"Cryptocurrencies cannot mitigate or challenge capitalist exploitation, they intensify. Firstly, on the level of hardware, they are offensively energy-expensive and wasteful, crunching useless math for the equivalent of the tap of a notary’s stamp. Besides the blatant disregard for environmental sustainability, the computer hardware production chain is a trail of blood and tears, of unacceptable and unfair labour conditions. More dependency on cryptocurrencies will only exacerbate humanitarian problems endemic to the digital economy." (Idem, p. 168)
In contrast to Kirschenbaum’s framework, Gottlieb’s “digital materialism” goes far beyond uniqueness of each individual technological artifact. In Gottlieb's approach individual digital technologies are only a manifestation of the industry, labour conditions, social inequality, ecological extractivism and other systems arranging distribution of material resources within the society. Materiality for Gottlieb is, thus, understood in a Marxian tradition as the economy and its practices of technologies production, distribution and usage combined with an Anthropocene perspective ― the industry of digital technologies are embedded in the ecology and environment and thus advanced technologies are not something that is opposed to natural ― nature nowadays also consists of technological waste, gathering of necessary resources for the industry, etc.
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Sign-tool materiality: a performative feature of digital objects
The third framework, developed in a book “Transcoding the Digital” by Dutch media scholar Marianne van den Boomen (2014), concentrates on a very different type of materiality. Both Gottlieb and Kirschenbaum look at things that are external to specific digital objects. In contrast, Boomen looks inside the computers and tries to find digital materiality in the performative work of icons and interfaces.
Boomen acknowledges Kirschenbaum’s work and his notion of formal materiality, but criticises it for the fact that it reduces digital signification to formal and physical traces. And, as the result, his approach ignores media-specific interfaces and the conceptual metaphorical level. Her books tries to close this gap by including a material semiotics perspective and combine an analysis of conceptual and symbolical aspects with physical aspects and performativity of digital objects.The book itself is dedicated to the variety of metaphors through which people make sense of digital media. Boomen argues, combining material semiotics perspective with the conceptual theory of metaphor by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), that metaphors are the basic mechanisms to understand and address digital technologies. The work that is done by various digital technologies (computers, smartphones, drivers, servers, browsers, etc.) is ultimately complex and black-boxed, usually even for developers and programmers. To deal with this complexity, specific semantic tools are needed, and Boomen claims metaphor to be such a tool. Metaphors help to perceive digital as something that is divided into various entities, and to make sense of processes that occur inside the gadgets. Metaphors function both as sense-making frames and disciplinary social-organizing artifacts. Boomen distinguishes different types of metaphors: those embedded in software, those implicated in discursive metaphors about the Internet and New Media in general, and digital-material metaphors which are of the most interest to us here.
In the first two chapters of the book, Boomen observes digital objects as performative material metaphors and develops a specific understanding of materiality. She makes a critical point that researchers who work with metaphors understand them as “conceptual transferences of meaning, not as material translations embedded in wider material networks” (Boomen, 2014: 22). Boomen argues that material metaphors organize ways of reading, referring, and interpreting, and they also configure social and cultural praxis.
But what is a material metaphor? The core idea of the concept is that different digital entities work as “sign-tool objects” ― such objects combine both the possibility of carrying meanings and features of material tools. As signs, digital objects have a specific form, visual (icons that look like envelopes, trash bins, documents, buttons) or as words (“movies”, “pdf files”, “mails”, “web sites”), they show people how to think about them and what can be done with them. As tools, they can be manipulated and used, and they have their effect, they change something or transform themselves.
For example, when we interact with the document icon we activate a specific set of bits and bytes, but we can’t see what is happening inside the laptop or PC, we only see the document icon (which usually looks like a piece of paper with text). But we do not just think that it looks like a piece of paper; it is also a “bounded, delineated document”, and we handle it accordingly (Boomen, 2014: 49), supposing that interaction with the sign will lead to the experience similar to interaction with analog documents (reading, writing, editing, etc.).
Thus, “document icon” has different levels of materiality: 1) it has materiality as a sign ― visual or textual form, which has a specific design; 2) it has materiality as a tool ― it opens the document if we click on it, the work of document icon is a performative action that leads to a physical and psychological experience for a user, 3) and also this icon has materiality as a visible, static gateway ― the icon is associated with MS Word or another text editor, and is linked to a specific file on the hard drive, so the icon works as a promise to the user that all this (invisible) material infrastructure is at hand for our use.
This sign-tool type of materiality is conceptualised with the notion of performativity. Art historian and art critic Johanna Drucker (2013), criticized Kirschenbaum by drawing attention to the fact that digital entities are not stable, they have a performative nature. Analyzing performative nature means taking into account what digital entities do, how do they exist in action, and not only what they are ontologically. Boomen, in turn, makes an argument about the performative aspect of sign-tool digital objects by observing how it becomes visible upon breaking:
“...confusion can occur when it comes to performative acts by material metaphors. Can you safely cancel a document (in the print dialog box) without deleting it completely? Would dropping a disk in the trashcan (of a Mac) indeed lead to the ejection of the hardware object, or will the information on it be erased?” (Boomen, 2014, p. 56).
While we, digital media scholars and not-anymore-inexperienced computer user, get used to the common metaphors, Boomen's examples might sound a bit naive. But metaphors keep being introduced for new or rebranded digital technologies, and their practical consequences are still misleading. If ChatGPT is called artificial intelligence, does it mean it can think and understand what I tell it? If I store my files in the cloud, does it mean it is decentralised? One can answer these questions with a bit of information search, but on the surface level, metaphors guide our perception of practical possibilities.
Back to Boomen; performativity then is a term to describe the connection between meaning and action (and vice versa). When we look at signs and manipulate them (trashcan, disk icon), we easily understand the level of meanings, linking these signs to things we already know. But the processes that are underlying these signs are black-boxed and available to us only through such actions.
This framework is an example of a very specific approach to materiality of the digital. Boomen is less interested in the material world outside the gadget, but suggests an insightful approach to digital entities as a combination of symbols and tools. This understanding of materiality ― digital entities as sign-tools, can be theoretically and conceptually helpful for emerging disciplines that try to work with digital entities as physical objects. For example, for digital anthropology, it could help to approach digital culture as something similar to material culture. An attempt to do that was suggested, for example, by Vili Lehdonvirta (2010), who observed goods in video games as something similar to goods in offline economies, but didn’t develop any conceptual framework about the features by which one could compare digital objects to material objects (in traditional anthropology).
Boomen’s framework could be useful for two purposes. Firstly, to outline the boundaries of digital entities that, as Boomen suggests, are mostly framed by metaphors. As Boomen argues, such metaphorical framing gives us an opportunity to interact with digital entities in a very similar way we interact with physical objects. And secondly, to address three different levels of materiality ― some of them could be more easily compared to offline material cultural practices, others may require different approaches.
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Between matter and meaning
By brushing over these three examples, we see how for media studies materiality is not something clearly present to us empirically but requires theoretical and methodological framework to engage with it. It is less of a matter of fact, and more a matter of concern. All three books, reviewed in this piece, approach materiality in their own way. And all of them answer the question “what is material?” in their own way.
The notion of forensic materiality treats as material physical uniqueness of each individual digital object that is shaped by its biography which could be traced back via close forensic examination. Digital materialism emphasizes structures that distribute resources ― including environmental ― and constitute the industry of digital technologies. Sign-toolness of digital-material metaphors is the feature of digital entities that is similar to physical objects. While digital entities are still different by their nature and features, partly digital objects resemble physical objects and work both as tools, signs and metaphorical objects that promise the interaction with an object-to-become.
Focusing on van den Boomen's work, I find it curious how in her approach the domain of physical matter and the domain of sense-making are not seen as two opposing or even separate domains ― an opposition regularly appearing in discussions between technodeterministists and social constructivists. While for Kirschenbaum the meaning is in the object themselves and thus requires empirical work, van den Boomen pays attention to the thick semiotic level that is positioned between users and technologies, which users barely can avoid. Maybe the concept of sign-tools can even be more sharp concept to use instead of "affordances", which is both very sticky and highly critisised in STS and media studies, adding a more nuanced sensitivity to what exactly guides user's actions, and why it is not "just" materiality on its own. The turn to materiality in the 2000s-2010s emerged as a critical turn. But the notion of what exactly is material and how it should be approached is still an open question. Of course, the variety of answes is not and should not be limited to a closed list, but we need to acknowledge that while we can't speak about the immaterial internet anymore that easily, we also can't just refer to the materiality as an empirical common sense. What is needed is a further development and implementation of frameworks that guide researchers on what particular material features to look at, how to compare digital objects to other objects and how to approach digital technologies as something that is not out there, in a virtual world, but here, among us.
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References
Barlow, J. (1996). A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. Retrieved from https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
Bollmer, G. (2015). Technological Materiality And Assumptions About ‘Active’ Human Agency // Digital Culture & Society, 1(1).
Boomen, v. d. M., Lammes, S., et al. (Eds.) (2009). Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology. Amsterdam University Press.
Boomen, v. d. M. (2014). Transcoding the Digital: How Metaphors Matter in New Media. Institute for Networked Cultures.
Casemajor, N. (2015). Digital Materialisms: Frameworks for Digital Media Studies // Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 10(1). p. 4-17.
Drucker, J. (2013). Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface // DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, 1(7).
Free Software Foundation Europe. (2018, October 29). There is NO CLOUD - just other people's computers [project advertisement]. Rethrieved from https://www.facebook.com/thefsfe/posts/1143810792451158
Fuchsberger, V., Murer, M., & Tscheligi, M. (2013). Materials, materiality, and media // Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '13). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, p. 2853–2862.
Gottlieb, B. (2018). Digital Materialism: Origins, Philosophies, Prospects. Emerald Publishing Limited.
Herzogenrath, B. (Ed.). (2015). Media matter: the materiality of media, matter as medium. New York : Bloomsbury Academic.
Kirschenbaum, M. (2008). Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lehdonvirta, V. (2010). Online spaces have material culture: goodbye to digital post-materialism and hello to virtual consumption. Media, Culture & Society, 32(5), p. 883-889.
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Notes and comments
* Another interesting fact is that ANT influenced Media Studies far beyond the reassessment of approaches to digital technologies. The idea of the «medium» (which is a core term for many media theories) itself was reinvented with regards to different non-human actors, for example, ecological factors such as water, ground, electricity etc. (Herzogenrath, 2015).