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

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Paul Dourish (Chancellor's Professor of Informatics, University of California, Irvine)

The Stuff of Bits

An Essay on the Materialities of Information

Paul Dourish (Chancellor's Professor of Informatics, University of California, Irvine)

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English

MIT Press
01 November 2022

Advertising & society; Human-computer interaction

An argument that the material arrangements of information-how it is represented and interpreted-matter significantly for our experience of information and information systems.

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.

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.

By: Paul Dourish (Chancellor's Professor of Informatics University of California Irvine)
Imprint: MIT Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
Weight: 369g
ISBN: 9780262546522
ISBN 10: 0262546523
Pages: 256
Publication Date: 01 November 2022
Recommended Age: From 18 years
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

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.