The Materiality of Digital Objects

The final plenary speaker in this opening session at AoIR 2012 is Susanna Paasonen, who highlights the question of what the object of Internet research really is. This has often been described in terms of loss – loss of material aspects of research objects – as well as gain – the benefits of disembodiment.

Materiality in Internet studies involves the materials of Internet technology, but also the material conditions of global labour, money, commodity, and resource flows. Here, a focus can be on the conflicting aims of different actors. Second, much recent research has been focussed on the practices of representation and meaning-making, and also takes material culture seriously – focussing on issues of significance rather than processes of signification. Materiality is a dynamic and shifting entanglement of relations rather than simply the fixed properties of things, from this view.

Affect is important here. Affective attachments make things matter, and this is related to the intensity of such attachments. Facebook is not only a platform of social connection and identity work, but also circulates affect as a binding technique, in the constant search for affective intensity. Part of the seduction of the digital flows from the bodies depicted on screen as absent presences, making it impossible to decouple the semiotic from the material.

Digital objects materialise on screen as a result of the interplay of complex assemblages of content and software, and arrive with certain texture and grain. As they remediate previously existing media, such textures change; such different material incarnations facilitate different experiences and uses, and are accompanied by different contextual information. The different affective intensities which such incarnations engender deserve attention.