The Stuff of Bits: An Essay on the Materialities of Information
Paul Dourish, "The Stuff of Bits: An Essay on the Materialities of Information "
English | ISBN: 0262036207 | 2017 | 256 pages | PDF | 2 MB
English | ISBN: 0262036207 | 2017 | 256 pages | PDF | 2 MB
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.