Digitisation

Theories and Concepts for Empirical Cultural Research

Gertraud Koch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317238911
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In recent years, digital technologies have become pervasive in academic and everyday life. This comprehensive volume covers a wide range of concepts for studying the new cultural dynamics that are evident as a result of digitisation. It considers how the cultural changes triggered by digitisation processes can be approached empirically.  The chapters include carefully chosen examples and help readers from disciplines such as Anthropology, Sociology, Media Studies, and Science & Technology Studies to grasp digitisation theoretically as well as methodologically.

Part I
Coded culture

1 Cultural techniques, practices, programmes

How to study the anthropo-logic of digitisation

Carsten Ochs

Introduction

It has become somewhat of a truism by now that each and everything is transformed by digitisation, be it politics, the economy, or society (at least, if the latter is not anyway conceived as being in the process of dissolution; Faßler 2009).¹ We may presume, then, that culture and cultural analysis will not remain unaffected, too. While the question of how to come to analytical terms with processes of digitisation has been on anthropology’s agenda for quite a while now, recent sociotechnical developments have further increased the urgency of finding fruitful answers. What are the premises to set out from? Are we to act on the assumption that digitisation marks an epochal rupture, the repercussions of which are now to be analysed? Or should we rather come from the myriad local micro-practices, e.g., from digitisations in the plural? Or perhaps the distinction between micro- and macro-perspectives implicitly alluded to here is mistaken right from the outset?

Whereas digitisation obviously raises old questions in new terms, the general public’s discourse as well as the social sciences’ and humanities’ diagnoses in recent decades have tended to rather take an ‘epochal rupture’ view. Numerous otherwise excellent analyses stemming from this era aim at spelling out the actual characteristics of the digital age (see Castells 2001, Lash 2002, Galloway 2004, Baecker 2007, Faßler 2009, 2014). However, it is precisely the ‘epochal view’ that has raised criticism recently. Ruppert, Savage, and Law, for instance, hold that

[o]ne influential approach imparts intrinsic properties to the digital, which is imagined to grow and unfold so that its qualities become more widely disseminated. The suggestion that the digital marks a profound, epochal, rupture in social change is familiar. (…) However, a re-reading of many of these seminal texts a decade later suggests that they treat information technologies and the digital in a derivative way. Rather than offering novel arguments about its revolutionary capacities, reflections on the innovatory character of the digital tend to reflect concerns with epochal change originally developed in the context of other kinds of claims.

(2013: 26)

Just like in other fields of research, also in the one of digitisation, sustained scrutiny on the researchers’ side seems to result in a differentiation of aspects relevant to the phenomenon, and, subsequently and consequently, in the pluralisation of the research object.² Such differentiation obviously is accompanied by a shift of research perspectives towards empirical microanalyses and diagnoses (Savage et al. 2010, Ochs 2012, 2013, Ruppert et al. 2013).

This chapter aims at contributing to the development of a theoretically sound anthropological research perspective on digitisation processes that can be put into operation empirically. Thus, it pursues methodological intentions by seizing the recent relativisation of epochal diagnoses as a suggestion to provide a conceptual equipment that is able to account for both, the relativised view (‘epochal rupture’) and the relativisation (digitisations in the plural). My hope is that it eventually becomes clear that the analytical frame to be developed allows for shifting from micro- to macro-perspectives on digitisation, while preventing breakage between these seemingly incommensurable views. By so doing, I attempt to theoretically elaborate ‘glocal’ anthropo-logic of digitisation that I identified in prior work (Ochs 2013).

Now, what exactly is the term ‘anthropo-logic’ meant to designate in this methodological context? To begin with, the approach presented here is situated mainly within two research traditions. The first is the one that J. Dewey (1995: 15) has called ‘empirical naturalism’ or ‘natural empiricism’, turning explicitly against the separation of humans and their experience of nature. The second tradition is that of André Leroi-Gourhan’s Anthropology of Technology, an approach that can be easily tied to empirical naturalism insofar as it strives to develop a biology of technology, which conceives of the social as being based upon, but still independent from, the zoological realm (Leroi-Gourhan 1993: 188). The perspective established here thus forms part of a broader movement within the social sciences and humanities, which tends to conceive of culture as something that emerges by interacting with processes traditionally dubbed ‘biological’ and ‘technical’ – however, without reducing culture to a mere function of these processes. What is at stake, consequently, is the development of a research pragmatics allowing to fruitfully take up and combine multifaceted knowledge (Beck 2008), such as biological and technical, without necessarily ending up in biological reductionism nor technological determinism. In other words, while the task of cultural analysis is to harness those overlapping areas of expertise that may be shared with other disciplines, it must not misconceive culture as a function of biology or technology, if it is to prevent conceptual inaccuracies.

The general thrust of the argument unfolded below is thus clarified. The methodological equipment for the analysis of the anthropo-logic of digitisation, in the sense just specified, will be proposed and explained in detail. From the discussion so far follow three conditions this equipment has to fulfil so as to count as robust and coherent: first, it shall be able to integrate ‘epochal’ and ‘micro’ perspectives; second, it shall allow for fruitfully taking up technological and biological knowledge; and third, to pass as methodology, it must be possible to empirically put the equipment into operation. To achieve these three goals, I will proceed as follows:

In the section Digitisation as a cultural technique, digitisation is conceptualised as a cultural technique and thus analysed in an utmost abstract way. Doing so means to theorise the formal, general, and comprehensive characteristics of the modus operandi, which can be identified throughout the great variety of all the empirically observable digitisation processes. This can be done, or so I will claim, via conducting a cultural analysis of the techno-mathematical principles of the cultural technique of digitisation.

As was mentioned in passing, the virtual modus operandi of the cultural technique of digitisation is empirically only existent insofar as it is actualised as practice. Hence, in the section Actualising cultural techniques: operational chains/practices, the perspective is reversed and the lens turned from the abstract towards its concrete practical instantiation. Accordingly, it will be argued that digital practices may fruitfully be analysed as the translation of abstract cultural techniques into concrete operational chains ‘here and now’.

Having said this, the question arises, how does such translation exactly occur? Programming practices deals with this question and attempts to provide a precise theoretical answer, thus approaching the core of the methodology proposed here. As will be explicated, the translation of the digital modus operandi is accomplished by generating and inscribing cultural programme and scripts. It is important to emphasise that cultural analyses of digitisation must be able to empirically and analytically account for the different modes of inscribing scripts. To make this possible, and to thus render the proposed methodology sufficiently differentiated, I will introduce biological knowledge at this point into the theoretical framework.

As stated above, to make the theoretical considerations count as full-blown methodology, it must be possible to put them into empirical operation. Hence, the equipment specified so far will be put to the test in the section How to make a programme run.

Digitisation as a cultural technique

When investigating the anthropo-logic of digitisation, it is a prerequisite to specify the object of research: what shall be put to scrutiny under the rubric of ‘digitisation’? The term ‘digital’ usually points to particular modus operandi, namely to processes that feature binary-digital logic. Precisely speaking, ‘digital’ means that a given system only knows discrete and unambiguous states (Schreiner 2009: 209); ‘binary’, moreover, indicates that the system only knows two such states, conventionally presented as 1/0 (ibid). Expressions, such as ‘binary-digital’ or ‘digital’, thus refer to systems of human (mathematical wizards) or non-human origin (computers) that operate on the basis of binary-digital calculations, so as to accomplish a great diversity of tasks. Having said this, ‘digitisation’ refers to two kinds of processes: first, to the integration of elements featuring binary-digital logic into (thus far) analogous processual trajectories. For instance, if someone replaces their mechanical alarm clock by one that operates digitally, this amounts to integrating a material artefact measuring time and raising alarm on the basis of binary-digital calculations into the processual trajectory ‘sleeping-waking up-getting up’. In this case, ‘digitisation’ means replacing an analogous with a digital entity. However, the term also concerns, secondly, the invention of binary-digital operations from scratch that have no analogous precursors. Such is the case, for example, when it comes to search engines on the web – it is rather difficult to find an analogous archetype for those operations. Thus, when I use the terms ‘digital’, ‘digitisation’, and so forth from now on, I refer to processes featuring binary-digital fractions in the sense just specified: processes that feature, amongst others, binary-digital modus operandi.

Where does this modus operandi descend from? Generally speaking, digitisation processes take advantage of the binary-digital processing principle of the Universal Machine as specified by Alan Turing (1936). The theoretical specification of this machine still serves as the prototype of present-day stored-program computers and is consequently considered the foundation of today’s computer technology.³ Now, examining the Universal Machine’s modus operandi in terms of cultural analysis, what attracts attention is the abstract and formal specification of the principle. Turing was apparently concerned with the development of a ‘theory of computable numbers’ that initially was applied to the theoretical Entscheidungsproblem in mathematics. The resulting processing principle turns out to be abstract insofar as it is abstracted from any actual situation in space-time. This is precisely what allows for claiming the universal validity of the principle: its abstractness results in its potential for universal re-localisation. Whereas the process of specifying and spelling out the principle in a mathematically sound way was still a culturally specific one, this process was situated within a specific socioculturally coined space-time; the goal of the exercise was to gain universal validity right from the outset. In this sense, as is always the case when it comes to producing scientific knowledge, the generation of the principle concerns ‘the ways in which the local and the heterogeneous are combined to create knowledge with status of timeless and universal truth’ (Akrich 1992: 205). Abstract specification in this sense may be considered as a precondition to the universal validity of some principle; nevertheless, such validity has to be produced and cannot be presupposed from the outset.⁴ A modus operandi, such as the one of the Universal Machine, is therefore not about discovering universals that are existent a priori, but about systematically increasing the scope of local principles. Hence, abstractness is a sine qua non, but still not a sufficient condition for universal validity thus understood.⁵

Digitisation, for the time being, designates the formal application of the abstract modus operandi of the Universal Machine. Still, though, classifying the principle as abstract and formal does not exhaust the listing of its defining traits. S. Krämer and H. Bredekamp argue in a media theoretical account of the Universal Machine that the latter’s conceptualisation is indeed similar to a range of mathematically equivalent approaches that were known at the time. However, the concept sets itself apart above all by its potential to bridge the gap between the symbolic and the technical, or physical world, and thus, between software and hardware, ‘by showing that there are universal Turing machines capable of imitating every special Turing machine because the codes of the latter can be inscribed – that is, programmed – onto the strip of the universal machine’ (Krämer & Bredekamp 2013: 23).

Hence, the abstract principle becomes operational, i.e., gains the potential to be put into actual, concrete, material operations that respond to its logic. It may possibly be translated via programming into more specific applications, and thereby inscribed into material apparatuses. In turn, those specific applications feature less abstractness, precisely because of their very specificity. So, while any software programme that controls the operations of some computer follows the same binary-digital logic specified as the Universal Machine, actual applications of this modus operandi are specifically tailored to particular situations that can be located in space-time.⁶ It is therefore the very abstractness, formality, and operational character of the principle that enable actual computer operations to occur in the most diverse forms. In other words, the Universal Machine is potentially universal as its universal simulative potential, via programming, can be put to specific uses; whereas the ‘universality’ of the binary-digital principle is due to its culturally non-specific character.⁷

These remarks lead to a fourth trait of this modus operandi. If the processing principle as such proves to be culturally non-specific, while at the same time being empirically existent only in culturally specific ways, it gains a virtual status. As a potentiality, it is not in opposition to the real but to what is empirically actualised, just like scripture: it is downright impossible to come across scripture-as-such, for empirically one may only encounter scripting operations, or utilisations of scripture.⁸ However, as it is possible to deduce from those actual operations, the defining traits of the (unobservable) virtual modus operandi of scripture, the latter still can be analysed: the ontological status of scripture is revealed in the uses to which scripture is put (Krämer 2005: 52).

Hence, similar to scripture, the binary-digital modus operandi of the Universal Machine may be conceived of as cultural technique: the cultural technique of digitisation. In this section, four defining traits of this technique were identified:

• abstract (abstracts from any concrete situation in space-time),

• formal (or more precisely: potentially to be formalised; the explicit formulation in Turing 1936),

• virtual (it empirically occurs only in specific, actualised form), and

• operational (i.e., pote...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: digitisation as challenge for empirical cultural research
• PART I Coded culture
• PART II Doing digital culture
• PART III Approaching the world digitally
• PART IV Concepts of culture revisited
• Index