The Stuff of Bits: An Essay on the Materialities of Information

248 Pages·2017·2.028 MB·English

by  Paul Dourish

Acknowledgments
A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
When I read a book, I always read the acknowledgments first; the glimpses
they provide of how projects emerged helps me place the work in context,
and I appreciate the more personal voice that many authors use there.
When I write a book, though, I write the acknowledgments last, partly
because the cast of characters grows as the book is written, and partly
because recalling and acknowledging my intellectual debts is a pleasure
that I like to leave as a treat for myself when the process is (nearly) over.
My students and postdocs, past and present, form the center of my intel-
lectual world. During the period of research and writing represented by this
book, that group has included Morgan Ames, Ken Cameron, Marisa Cohn,
Garnet Hertz, Leah Horgan, Lilly Irani, Silvia Lindtner, Katherine Lo, Lilly
Nguyen, Katie Pine, Noopur Raval, Miya Sylvester, Janet Vertesi, and Chris
Wolf. They were subject to various halting presentations and meandering
accounts of early versions of these ideas, and their feedback was invaluable.
More importantly, though, it is a genuine privilege and unparalleled joy to
witness their progress and their successes as researchers and scholars. I con-
tinue daily to learn an immense amount from them, and the opportunity
to do so makes my job the best in the world.
The work that culminates in this book—and particularly the writing
process—has unfolded in many places. Primary among these is my home
institution at the University of California, Irvine, with the remarkable col-
lection of colleagues there whose thinking focuses on society, culture, and
technology. These have included Tom Boellstorff, Geof Bowker, Simon
Cole, Martha Feldman, David Theo Goldberg, Gillian Hayes, Mimi Ito,
Peter Krapp, Liz Losh, George Marcus, Bill Maurer, Keith Murphy, Simon
Penny, and Kavita Philip. Melissa Mazmanian deserves special mention;
my first explorations of many of these topics arose in our collaborations,
and her thoughtful influence is felt throughout this book (the good bits,
at any rate).
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x Acknowledgments
The brief flowering of the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social
Computing in the period 2012–2015 provided a rich and engaging context
for aspects of this research. Among a list of people too long to mention, and
in addition to many of those listed above, I owe much to Jeff Bardzell, Sha-
owen Bardzell, Ian Bogost, Carl DiSalvo, Tarleton Gillespie, Steve Jackson,
Chris LeDantec, Helen Nissenbaum, Winnie Poster, Erica Robles-Anderson,
Phoebe Sengers, Eric Stolterman, and Malte Zeiwitz, as well as, of course,
partners from Intel, especially Ken Anderson, Genevieve Bell, Melissa
Gregg, and Scott Mainwaring.
The text of the book largely came together during my sabbatical year in
2015–2016. Over this time, I was generously hosted by a number of institu-
tions that offered not only peace and quiet to write but also stimulating
intellectual settings in which to work and think. For conversation and
provocation during my visit to the IT University of Copenhagen, I must
thank Pernille Bjørn, Marisa Cohn, Rachel Douglas-Jones, Christopher Gad,
Naja Holten Møller, Irina Shklovski, Brit Ross Winthereik, and Laura Watts;
I am also grateful for support from the Velux Foundation. For my stay at the
University of Melbourne, my home away from home, I am indebted to Kat
Franks, Frank Vetere, and Justin Zobel; the Russell and Mab Grimwade Mie-
gunyah Fund helped make this trip possible. During my happy months at
Microsoft Research New England, I had the good fortune to be working
alongside Andrea Alarcon, Nancy Baym, Sarah Brayne, Jennifer Chayes,
Kevin Driscoll, Tarleton Gillespie, Mary Gray, Caroline Jack, Butler Lamp-
son, and Lana Swartz; I’m also deeply grateful to others in the Cambridge
area who made us welcome, including Judith Donath, Fox Harrell, and
T. L. Taylor.
At workshops, conferences, symposia, and lectures around the world,
and in the teeming circuits of social media, I am fortunate to have been able
to discuss aspects of my emerging thinking with a stunning array of people
for whose insight, kindness, friendship, mentorship, example, critique,
inspiration, and provocation I am variously and overwhelmingly grateful.
These include Yoko Akama, Morana Alač, Panos Antoniadis, Liam Bannon,
Nic Bidwell, Jean-François Blanchette, Susanne Bødker, Sandra Braman,
Paul Carlile, Kate Crawford, Jon Crowcroft, Pelle Ehn, Ylva Fernaeus, Mat-
thew Fuller, Bill Gaver, Kim Halskov, Lone Koefoed Hansen, Kia Höök,
Heather Horst, Katherine Isbister, David Karger, Rob Kitchin, Ann Light,
Paul Luff, Adrian Mackenzie, Lev Manovich, Danny Miller, Wanda
Orlikowski, Sarah Pink, Alison Powell, Daniela Rosner, Christine Satchell,
Kjeld Schmidt, Jolynna Sinanan, Brian Cantwell Smith, Nicole Starosielski,
Jonathan Sterne, Lucy Suchman, Fred Turner, Anna Vallgårda, and Mikael
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Acknowledgments xi
Wiberg. Many have read parts of the text along the way and offered cri-
tiques and correctives that have improved it immensely. None bears respon-
sibility for its remaining failings.
Molly Steenson has been a longtime fellow traveler in materialist hinter-
lands. She was also an early reader of the draft manuscript—a hardship,
dear reader, not to be casually dismissed. I am uncertain whether I value her
intellectual brilliance or her friendship more, but I’m glad that I don’t have
to choose. Janet Vertesi gamely read the entire manuscript in the final
months of preparation, and her suggestions for how I might sharpen the
argument were characteristically astute, incisive, and generous.
At MIT Press, I continue to benefit from the insight and support of Doug
Sery, and the editorial and production support of Susan Buckley, Virginia
Crossman, and Margarita Encomienda.
And, saving the best for last, the inspiring Susan Hwang makes my
world go around. I am a lucky man indeed to go through life with you.
Thank you!
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1 Introduction: Information as Material
Chapter 1
I n t r o d u c t i o n
On November 16, 2015, the United States Air Force announced that it had
recently completed the third and final test of a B61-12 nuclear gravity
bomb. The B61-12 was designed as part of a program called the Life Exten-
sion Program, intended to update the US stockpile of nuclear weapons. The
weapon tested in the Nevada desert, though, did not itself contain any
enriched nuclear material. The test-ban treaties that the United States and
most other nuclear powers have signed since the 1960s do not permit actual
nuclear detonations. The cold-hearted Cold War calculus of deterrence,
however, demands that weapons continue to be designed and improved,
even if they can’t be detonated in tests. Alternative regimes for experimen-
tation, testing, and assessment need to be found.
The primary alternative for designing and assessing new nuclear weapon
designs is digital simulation (Gusterson 1996, 2001). By turning the math-
ematical descriptions of nuclear fission and fusion, material deformation,
the response of the environment to detonation events, and other relevant
factors into executable computer code, one can produce, in the form of a
computer model, an account of how a new or imagined weapon would
perform.
Historically, technologies of simulation have been deeply tied to military
needs. So-called Monte Carlo simulation techniques, which manage the
complexities of real-world modeling by employing random numbers to
explore the divergent paths of probabilities and assessing statistical likeli-
hoods of different outcomes, were initially developed by John von Neu-
mann and colleagues as part of the Manhattan Project (Aspray 1990).
Monte Carlo methods were eagerly taken up by those who saw in them
opportunities to explore scenarios as diverse as the movements of molecules
in a gas or the likely political responses to military crises (Ghamari-Tabrizi
2005; Winsberg 2010).
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2 Chapter 1
An algorithm or a formal procedural framework like the Monte Carlo
method is one of the key components for simulation technology, but only
part of the solution. One also requires a powerful computer system to run
one’s simulations. Indeed, the effectiveness of the simulation, by which I
mean the degree to which it can be put to use in particular contexts such as
weapons design, depends crucially on the capacities of the computer sys-
tem involved, and their match to the mathematical methods being imple-
mented. Algorithms make results possible, but implementations make them
feasible. Incorporating digital simulations into the process of weapons
design, therefore, depends on having sufficiently powerful computers.
At Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, those building the first
weapons were constrained by the material processes of uranium enrich-
ment. For contemporary designers, by contrast, material constraints on
design are more likely to be processing capacities of their computers. The
development of new computer architectures, from vectorization and array
programming in the 1980s to advanced high-speed interconnections for
large, distributed architectures today, frames the feasibility and possible
extent of digital simulation. Indeed, one could argue that the limits on
contemporary weapons design are those imposed by digital materials, not
radioactive ones.
It is worth stopping for a moment to contemplate this a little more
deeply. Where digital information was once being used to model and antic-
ipate goings-on in the physical world, it is here used to displace the world
that it purports to model. Where once nuclear and military strategists might
have worried over a “missile gap,” they might now look at the list of the
world’s most powerful supercomputers and worry instead about a simula-
tion gap.1 Nuclear weapon design has become, in a practical sense, an infor-
mation science.
Information—most particularly, digital information and the processes
by which it is generated, collected, managed, distributed, and used—has
come to play such a pivotal role in all aspects of Western life that many
theorists have dubbed our contemporary condition an “information soci-
ety” (or similar terms, such as network society or knowledge society; Cas-
tells 1996; Webster 2006; Kline 2015). In many of these accounts, a key
feature of information is its dematerialized nature. Indeed, the shift to an
information society is often framed as a shift from material objects to
1. Computer scientist Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee leads a team
that maintains and publishes twice a year a closely watched list of the five hundred
fastest supercomputers.
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Introduction 3
digital equivalents on computer screens (as in online shopping, online
movie rentals, digital libraries, electronic newspapers, and digital health
records, for example). Technology pundits applaud this “substitution of
bits for atoms” associated with digital technologies and suggest that the
“future” will be fueled by some vague and ideal sense of digitality. In the
words of MIT Media Lab founder and indefatigable tech booster Nicholas
Negroponte:
World trade has traditionally consisted of exchanging atoms. … This is changing
rapidly. The methodical movement of recorded music as pieces of plastic, like the
slow human handling of most information in the form of books, magazines, news-
papers, and videocassettes, is about to become the instantaneous and inexpensive
transfer of electronic data that move at the speed of light. … This change from atoms
to bits is irrevocable and unstoppable. (Negroponte 1995, 2)
Gabrielle Hecht (2002) calls this kind of discourse “rupture-talk”; it frames
its topic in terms of major historical disjunctions and a radical breaking free
from the past. Even in this information-rich environment, however, the
physical world persistently makes itself felt. Networks are disrupted when
undersea cables are broken, and information is lost when cloud servers fail.
The microprocessor engineers whose work fuels the digital revolution find
themselves locked in daily struggle with the limits of physical fabrication
and the properties of semiconductor materials. More broadly, the informa-
tion that undergirds the “information society” is encountered only ever in
material form, whether that is marks on a page, electrons flowing through
wires, or magnetized segments of a spinning disk.
Increasingly, social scientists have begun to recognize these material
realities and have turned their attention to the intertwining of social phe-
nomena with the material world. Coming from various disciplinary back-
grounds, scholars argue that the social world manifests itself in the
configuration and use of physical objects and that the properties of those
physical objects and the materials from which they are made—properties
like durability, density, bulk, and scarcity—condition the forms of social
action that arise around them. Organizational scientists (e.g., Orlikowski
and Scott 2008), anthropologists (e.g., Miller 2005), sociologists (e.g., MacK-
enzie 2009), scholars in science studies (e.g., Suchman 2007), communica-
tion scholars (e.g., Ashcraft et al. 2009), information scientists (e.g.,
Blanchette 2011), political theorists (e.g., Bennett 2010), and feminist
scholars (e.g., Barad 2003) have begun to unpack the importance of the
specific material configurations of our informated world. Research like this
has been matched by an increasing interest in popular discourse in the
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4 Chapter 1
material manifestations of digital technologies, including the geographies
of internet infrastructures (e.g., Blum 2012) and the environmental conse-
quences of information processing (Tomlinson 2010).
It’s clear, then, that there are many different ways to interpret and
approach the topic of the materialities of information (Dourish and Mazma-
nian 2013). To start with, one might choose to focus on the material culture
of digital goods—examinations of the cultural currency of particular digital
products such as iPhones, USB sticks, or the Linux operating system kernel.
One might instead choose to take up the transformative materiality of digital
networks, examining the role that information and information technolo-
gies play in the encounter with space (e.g., Kitchin and Dodge 2011; Gra-
ham and Marvin 2001). Alternatively, a third conception might focus on
the material conditions of information technology production, proffering per-
haps a Marxian account of such topics as the economic conditions favored
by the speed, ubiquity, and manipulability of information rendered into
digital forms (e.g., Harvey 2006), and the labor, both skilled and unskilled,
to build technologies, encode information, maintain infrastructures and
facilities, and deal with increasing amounts of toxic e-waste (e.g., Pellow
and Park 2002; Irani 2015). A fourth approach is to explore consequential
materiality of information metaphors, examining the growing significance of
the metaphor of information as a keyword for speaking of cultural condi-
tions and its place in public discourse (e.g., Hayles 1999; Day 2008; Kline
2015).
This book is concerned primarily with a fifth construal of the materiali-
ties of information—the materialities of information representation. This
approach examines the material forms in which digital data are represented
and how these forms influence interpretations and lines of action—from
the formal syntax of XML to the organizational schemes of relational data-
bases and the abstractions of 1 and 0 over a substrate of continual voltage—
and their consequences for particular kinds of representational practice.
The prevailing mythology of information, as laid out by Claude Shannon
(Shannon and Weaver 1947), holds that it is an abstract entity, a property
of configurations of matter, so that a signal in a wire, a flag on a pole, or an
arrangement of tin cans might convey the same information, but the infor-
mation remains independent of that matter. In this book, I argue that the
material arrangements of information—how it is represented and how that
shapes how it can be put to work—matters significantly for our experience
of information and information systems.
As an illustrative example, consider the case Paul Edwards (2011) raised
in his study of climate science, where he notes the problems faced by the
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Introduction 5
US National Weather Records Center in storing meteorological data on
punch cards in the early 1960s. The center’s concern was not that it had
more data than it might be able to process, but that it might have more data
than the building could physically support. One gigabyte of data on punch
cards weighs more than thirty-five tons. The point is not simply that this is
a lot, although it certainly is. Instead, note that the specific material instan-
tiations of the data have implications for where it can be stored (and there-
fore for the kinds of institutions that can afford to house it), for how quickly
it can be moved from place to place, for how easily elements can be accessed,
and so on. In turn, this shapes our ideas about the kinds of questions that
can be asked of data, the sorts of information we have available to us, and
what we assume is worth collecting. Transformations in storage media play
out as reconsiderations not simply of the availability of information, but
also of the institutional auspices under which it can be collected and man-
aged, its lifetime, the temporalities of access, its resistance to change, and
even what we think of as being practical as a data set in the first place.
JoAnne Yates (1993) makes similar arguments in her account of the emer-
gence of scientific management and related phenomena around the novel
technology of vertical (hanging) filing systems in the early twentieth cen-
tury. The same set of documents, physically arranged in a new way, become
available for drastically new forms of manipulation and use.
Materials and their properties play a pivotal role in the production of
new objects and experiences. Philosopher and educator Donald Schön
characterized design as a reflective conversation with materials (Schön
1984, 1990). This evocative phrase immediately calls to mind some quint-
essential examples of creative production. One can picture the potter shap-
ing a vase with her hands as it spins on the wheel, molding the clay but also
responding to its capacity to hold its form. One can picture the carver find-
ing how best the grain and the shape of the wood can accommodate a
desired artistic goal. On a teaching tour in Taiwan a few years ago, my hosts
took me to see a prized exhibit in the National Palace Museum. The Jadeite
Cabbage is a sculpture in jadeite of a piece of bok choy in which the color
variation in the mineral has been perfectly matched to the variegation of
colors in the cabbage, and the flaws and fissures in the stone have been
incorporated into the veins and ribbing of the vegetable (and even to a
grasshopper depicted as hiding in the leaves). One can picture the “reflec-
tive conversation with materials” through which the sculptor came to
match artistic goals and the materials at hand.
What does it mean to adopt Schön’s perspective in the realm of the digi-
tal? What are the materials with which the designers of information
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6 Chapter 1
systems find themselves in a reflective conversation? Chip designers need
to concern themselves with the layout of logical units on silicon, and hard-
ware designers need to pay attention to the propagation of timing signals
from one part of a computer to another: material constraints abound.
While it’s no surprise that people designing hardware deal with material
constraints, I want to draw attention to how even software designers and
developers have a sense of a “conversation with materials.” Throughout
this book, I argue that software and digital information—the ultimate “vir-
tual” objects, the poster children for the triumph of bits over atoms—have
a material dimension in the interactional processes of their construction
and use. Programmers understand the ways in which digital structures can
resist their will, every bit as much as clay, wood, or stone. They recognize
that different programs and program designs fit more or less easily on dif-
ferent platforms, just as different sculptures or carvings are more or less
easily accommodated or executed in different substrates. Materiality—the
nature of the substrates and the properties that constrain and condition the
designerly encounter—is at the core of each experience.
The topic of this book is the nature of the material encounter with the
digital that Schön’s phrase identifies. That said, asserting or demonstrating
the materiality of the digital gets one only so far. My concern is with the
specific materialities that digital objects exhibit. Accordingly, my topic here
is not the materiality of information but the materialities of information.
The materialities of information are those properties of representations and
formats that constrain, enable, limit, and shape the ways in which those
representations can be created, transmitted, stored, manipulated, and put
to use—properties like their heft, size, fragility, and transparency. I main-
tain that understanding the role of digital information in social and cul-
tural contexts requires that we start from the ground up and attempt to
understand the specific ways in which the digital is already material.
Material Consequences of Representational Practices
Students of human–computer interaction or the cognitive science of nota-
tions are familiar with an example that illustrates the consequences of rep-
resentational materialities—doing arithmetic with Roman numerals.
Basic arithmetic is, of course, about numbers; numbers are what we add,
subtract, divide, and multiply. But our ways of performing arithmetic are
often not so much about numbers as about numerals. That is, we don’t
simply perform arithmetic on abstract numbers; we manipulate the sym-
bolic representations of those numbers. This becomes very clear when we
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