The Stuff of Bits

An Essay on the Materialities of Information

Paul Dourish

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Computer Science
• eBook ISBN:
  9780262340137
• Subtopic: Human-Computer Interaction
• Index: Computer Science

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Information as Material
• 2 The Landscape of Materialities
• 3 Finding the Material in the Virtual: The Case of Emulation
• 4 Spreadsheets and Spreadsheet Events in Organizational Life
• 5 No SQL: The Shifting Materialities of Database Technology
• 6 The Materialities of Internet Routing
• 7 Internets and Othernets
• 8 Prospects and Conclusions
• References
• Index