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The Stuff of Bits: An Essay on the Materialities of Information
Abstract
An argument that the material arrangements of information—how it is represented and interpreted—matter significantly for our experience of information and information systems. Virtual entities that populate our digital experience, like e-books, virtual worlds, and online stores, are backed by the large-scale physical infrastructures of server farms, fiber optic cables, power plants, and microwave links. But another domain of material constraints also shapes digital living: the digital representations sketched on whiteboards, encoded into software, stored in databases, loaded into computer memory, and transmitted on networks. These digital representations encode aspects of our everyday world and make them available for digital processing. The limits and capacities of those representations carry significant consequences for digital society. In The Stuff of Bits, Paul Dourish examines the specific materialities that certain digital objects exhibit. He presents four case studies: emulation, the creation of a “virtual” computer inside another; digital spreadsheets and their role in organizational practice; relational databases and the issue of “the databaseable”; and the evolution of digital networking and the representational entailments of network protocols. These case studies demonstrate how a materialist account can offer an entry point to broader concerns—questions of power, policy, and polity in the realm of the digital.
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“Nostr and Farcaster embed a politics of sovereignty, privileging user control even at the expense of relative ease of use [36].”
From Seeing the Politics of Decentralized Social Media Protocols (2026) · cites this paper as [36]
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Thomas, P. N. (2022) · doi:10.1093/oso/9780192857736.003.0001
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Bellanova, R., Burns, R., Mignot-Mahdavi, R., Plantin, J., Aradau, C., & Blanke, T. (2024) · Political Geography · doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103115
Thomas, P. N. (2022) · doi:10.1093/oso/9780192857736.002.0003
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Thomas, P. N. (2022) · doi:10.1093/oso/9780192857736.002.0004
Thomas, P. N. (2022) · doi:10.1093/oso/9780192857736.002.0005
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Metadata
- Authors
- Dourish, P.
- Corresponding author
- Dourish, Paul
- Venue
- The MIT Press eBooks
- Publisher
- The MIT Press
- Published
- 2017-04-28
- OpenAlex
- W4230940151
- Cited by
- 132
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 21 · 2025: 20 · 2024: 16 · 2023: 19 · 2022: 16 · 2021: 15 · 2020: 8 · 2019: 11 · 2018: 6
- FWCI
- 8.58
- Type
- book
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- The MIT Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Cybernetics and Technology in Society
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Management Information Systems › Information Systems Theories and Implementation
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Science Applications › History of Computing Technologies
- Keywords
- materiality of information, digital representation, information systems, emulation, virtual machines, relational databases, network protocols, digital networking, materialist theory, digital society
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