Digital Material

DIGITAL MATERIAL
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INTRODUCTION

Digital Material : Tracing new media in everyday life and technology

Intro- from the virtual to matters of fact and concern

At the beginning of the 21st century, computers are so widely distributed and used, yet we still call them ‘new media’ Some of the old spell still haunt the discourse about the so-called new media. Which new questions arise merge when new media are taken for granted, and which puzzles are still unsolved?
‘’’’’Is contemporary digital culture indeed all about ‘you?’ or do we still not phatom the digital machinery and how it constitutes as ‘you’?’’’’’

Popular discourse of the logo’s framed new media chiefly as possessing new and amazing qualities. Hypertext virtual reality and cyberspace were predominant buzz words. They announces a new frontier of civilization wether from an optimistic utopian perspective – pointing to the emergence of virtual communities, new democracy, and a new economy – or from a more pessimistic and dystopian angle – with warnings against the digital divide, information glut, and ubiquitous surveillance.

‘general transformations of atoms into bits’ and of matter into mind. These lines of reasoning were characterizes by what we may call digital mysticum, a special brand of the technological deternism in which digitallity and software are considered to be ontologically immaterial determinants of new media.

New media frames as ‘hyper’ ‘virtual’ and ‘uber’

Though this kind of discourse was criticized right from the start as a specific ideology (barbrook and Cameron – 1995), it proved to be persistent, and traces of it can still be discerned in the current academic discourse. When new media appeared on the radar of media and communication studies, the initial attempts to ground digitally consisted of remediating theories from the study of ‘old’ media, such as the performance arts, literature, and cinema, or even taking ‘remediation’ itself as the regulative mechanism of digital media.

The complexity of digital code is necessarily black boxed in the user-friendly interfaces, and this makes assumptions of mysterious immateriality hard to exercise. ((((real and material in effect, not in fact]]]]]] the paradox of immateriality. The simple use of the plural turned the immaterial, the realm of abstract thought, into palpable parts of something that is, although it cannot be touched, an inseparable part of the material world.

Software cannot exit by itself but I intrinsically embedded in physical data carriers – as stuff which may defy immediate physical contact, yet which is incorporated in materiality rather than floating as a metaphysical substance in virtual space. Society made durable – digital cultures.

The age of disembodied, immaterial virtuality and cyberspace is upon us, and therefore we are compelled to think about material objects – Mitchell. The contributions cover different areas of digital culture, but they all endorse a material understanding of digital artefacts by situating their objects of research in a dispotif that comprehends the dynamic connections between discourses, social appropriating and technological design.

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