Digital Devices : nine theses

The aim of the paper is to intervene in debates about the digital and in particular three kinds of framings: those that imagine the digital in terms of epochal shifts, or as representing a new era of mobility and flow, or as redefining life. Instead, we explore the lively, productive and performative qualities of the digital by attending to the specificities of digital devices and how they interact, and sometimes compete, with older devices and their capacity to mobilise and materialise social and other relations. Building on recent work at CRESC on the Social Life of Methods, we recommend a genealogical approach that is alive to the ways in which digital devices are simultaneously shaped by the social world, and can in turn become agents that shape that world. This calls for attending to the specificities of digital devices themselves, how they are varied and composed of diverse socio-technical arrangements, and are enrolled in the creation of new knowledge spaces, institutions and actors. Rather than exploring what large-scale changes can be revealed and understood through the digital, we argue for explorations of how digital devices themselves are materially implicated in the production and performance of contemporary sociality. To that end we offer nine theses under the following headings: transactional actors; heterogeneity; visualisation; continuous time; whole populations; granularity; expertise; mobile and mobilising; and non-coherence. Digital Devices: nine theses 3 Digital Devices: nine theses In the second industrial revolution, with its automation of the streams of information, the analysis of discourses has yet to exhaust the forms of knowledge and power. Archaeologies of the present must also take into account data storage, transmission, and calculation in technological media (Kittler, 1990: 369).