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

by Paul Dourish

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 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  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.

Genres: Technology, Philosophy

258 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 28, 2017

About the author

Paul Dourish is Chancellor's Professor of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction and coauthor of Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing, both published by the MIT Press.

Reviews

[Ed Summers · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I grow up I want to be like Paul Dourish.

[Alexander Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

To be honest, a lot of this book is fairly obvious. Although there is some interesting history here of how we have implicitly been speaking of information as disjoint from their storage devices or behavior as becoming disembodied from the objects of behavior using simulations for metrics, I don't think the people studying these things directly are really losing sight of the fact that they are talking about material things, or the material things they are discussing.

In fact, I think the people who are forgetting these things are humanities scholars themselves. In that sense, this book is a reminder for humanists, humanistic, and the humanities scholarship broadly that bodies are real, tangible things that help organize the information seen virtually... not a warning to science scholarship.

That said, this book brings in some interesting cases of showing this. Thus, the book is more about classifying areas of contention for those who wish to believe we can be disembodied. Specifically the emulator discussion was fascinating as a particularly elusive case for the untrained. But, that said, the rest of this book was relatively obvious.

[Jordan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wanted to like this book, but it doesn't quite deliver what it promises. Has a very solid lit review of the "material turn" in media studies that's worth reading though.

[Bryan Dosono · Rating 5 out of 5]

By unpacking various arrangements of information as representational strategies (e.g., emulations, spreadsheets, databases), Dourish posits that "digital representations are formal; their forms are what matter, and forms are material in the ways in which they can and cannot be used," and succeeds in articulating the material implications of information.

[Harry]

Great introduction and lit review of material studies along with valuable case studies of the socio-technical (spreadsheets, databases). Fell a bit short for me on the "so what"— I wasn't totally convinced that Dourish had to say was all to different than others who look at the physicality of information infrastructure.

[Maksim Prokhorov · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a novice to anything programming related, this was a really hard to comprehend book. The thesis was interesting but was difficult to follow. This read will probably more useful to someone already in the fields of digital Rhetoric and computers

[Tim Gorichanaz · Rating 3 out of 5]

A close and technical look at various substrates of information, with a particularly valuable introductory chapter

[Benjamin Kass · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seriously would not have expected to find discussions of Powerpoint/Excel and networking protocols so interesting.