Media as Material: Information Representations as Material Foundations for Organizational Practice

Abstract

Abstract: Through a confluence of different disciplinary interests and trajectories, questions of the materiality of digital media and information technologies have recently come into relief. There are several different strains of work under this broad umbrella and it is valuable to distinguish between the varied concerns. This paper has two objectives. First we begin by teasing apart and describing five related ways to conceptualize the materiality of digital goods. Our goal in this is to provide a typology for delineating current streams of research and language for analysis. Second, we unpack one of these conceptions in terms of socio-technical systems and organizational practices. Specifically, we analyze the role of digitization and simulation, or the materiality of digital representation, in order to shed light on how social and organizational systems respond to, create practices around, and develop delineating logics about digitally rendered data. An Anecdote One day, in the period when I (Dourish) was working as computer system manager for a university research center, a data tape arrived from the United States. It contained a

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