10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17285
The concept of “digital circulation”, together with the idea of “social life of digital things”, is highly evocative. Yet science and technology studies have not addressed it in depth to date. This introduction looks at the major converging dimensions examined in the papers in the first part of a special issue focusing on the notion of digital circulation. Specifically, if focuses on digital circulaton’s material ontology and on the infrastructures that sustain the processes of circulation, seeing them as pivotal points in theoretical considerations aimed at bridging science and technology studies, media and communication studies and other neighboring fields. This introduction also provides an overview of the articles that make up this issue of Tecnoscienza.
application/pdf
2038-3460
17285
1
en
Alessandro Delfanti
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
infrastructures
Digital Circulation: Media, Materiality, Infrastructures. An Introduction
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
7
Editorial
2016-07-08
2023-06-20
2016-07-08
2023-08-07
7-15
TS
Alessandro Delfanti
2016/07/08
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17285
7
University of Toronto
2038-3460
1
infrastructures
en
15
Digital Circulation: Media, Materiality, Infrastructures. An Introduction
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17285/16147
7
                                                                  Guest Editors’ Introduction

Digital Circulation: Media, Materiality,
Infrastructures. An Introduction

Gabriele Balbi                       Alessandro Delfanti                 Paolo Magaudda
     USI-Lugano (CH)                     University of Toronto (CAN)      Università di Padova (IT)



     Abstract The concept of “digital circulation”, together with the idea of
     ‘social life of digital things’, is highly evocative. Yet science and technology
     studies have not addressed it in depth to date. This introduction looks at
     the major converging dimensions examined in the papers in the first part of
     a special issue focusing on the notion of digital circulation. Specifically, if fo-
     cuses on digital circulaton’s material ontology and on the infrastructures
     that sustain the processes of circulation, seeing them as pivotal points in
     theoretical considerations aimed at bridging science and technology studies,
     media and communication studies and other neighboring fields. This intro-
     duction also provides an overview of the articles that make up this issue of
     Tecnoscienza.

     Keywords: Digital circulation; media; communication; materiality; infra-
     structures.

     Corresponding author: Paolo Magaudda, Dip. Fisppa, Università di
     Padova, Via Cesarotti, 10/12, 35123 Padova, Italy. Email:
     paolo.magaudda@unipd.it.




1. A Double Special Issue on ‘Digital Circulation’

    This issue of Tecnoscienza is the first part of a special double issue
devoted to an interdisciplinary exploration of the notion of ‘digital circu-
lation’. This notion is highly evocative and frequently adopted in science
and technology as well as media studies yet its development has remained
largely generic. To cite a single example, Adrian McKenzie (2005) used
the notion of circulation in vague terms to address the fact that the crea-
tion of meaning has not been as central as patterns of circulation through
software versions, distributions and reconfigurations in the case of the
Linux operating system. David Beer (2013) introduced the notion of cir-
TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
7 (1), pp. 7-15 - ISSN 2038-3460
www.tecnoscienza.net                                    2016
8                                                            Tecnoscienza – 7 (1)

culation in a more forthright way, as a starting point for an analysis of in-
tersections between popular culture and new media. He suggested that
our understanding of popular culture in the digital media realm should
not be archived without a consideration of the ways in which media as
objects and infrastructures influence this circulation. Specifically, he
claimed that it is precisely “by bringing to the fore the material dimen-
sions of everyday life, embodied in these infrastructures and data circula-
tions” that “we are able to see how culture and media combine and fold
into ordinary routine life” (Beer 2013, 2).
    But digital circulation should not be confined to studies of media and
cultural industries. ‘Digital’ and especially ‘digitization’ related processes
have constituted critical change in almost all realms of modern everyday
life enabling processes involving the circulation of content and meaning,
objects and technologies, competences and embodied knowledge to be
generally reconfigured. The analysis in this special double issue is not lim-
ited to the empirical sphere of media content. It attempts to develop the-
oretical connections between fields, concepts and approaches that have
been triggered by the rise of digitization processes and the emergence of
technology as an intrinsic infrastructure in modern times.
    An accessible introduction to an understanding of digital circulation
processes is the work of social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1986)
who highlighted the ways in which things acquire meaning and value
through a process of circulation between worlds, individuals and social
contexts exactly 30 years ago. Reflecting more recently on globalization
processes, Appadurai (2010) distinguished between “the circulation of
forms” (meanings and contents) and the “forms of circulations”, i.e. fea-
tures pertaining to content circulation trajectories including speed and
scale. While Appadurai is reflecting on the circulation of cultures rather
than media technologies, the consequences of this distinction for digital
circulation studies are clear: patterns of circulation represent a crucial
dimension in media cultures, as digital things – files, standards, data and
codes – have biographies and life trajectories, travel across different spac-
es and are governed by specific politics according to distinct forms of cir-
culation. Far from standardizing the meanings and materialities involved
in the circulation of things and objects, contemporary digital media-
driven society has added new layers of complexity to it. Thus, a founda-
tion perspective adopted in this special issue is that studying circulation
in contemporary societies means focusing on the nexus of digital material-
ities, techniques and infrastructures that generate an accelerated, global-
ized, and pervasive circulation scope. Contemporary social and cultural
flows are facilitated by digital technologies and these are in turn increas-
ingly embedded in everyday life and human relationships. Yet, a more
multifaceted understanding of the specificity of digital things and their
biographies is still needed.
    Focusing on digital circulation and the social life of digital things has
several further implications. One of them is that the politics of digital cir-
Balbi, Delfanti & Magaudda                                                   9
culation is shaped by power struggles in the digital realm, as regulation of
digital objects’ trajectories takes place in the institutional and political
spheres. Many of the supposed ‘revolutions’ generated by digital media
technologies are actually a matter of some kind of circulation, as in the
case of peer-to-peer networks, social networking sites or the digitization
of cultural items. Social and collective practices on the Internet rely heavi-
ly on exchange and social relationship circulation metaphors. Sharing, for
example, plays a center-stage role in multiple social media activities. It is
through the sharing of objects such as pictures or videos that social and
political relations are built and maintained and personal identities are
constructed in the context of continuous and pervasive connection. In
turn, this allows for shared meaning creation. Furthermore, the political
economy of digital technologies is based on the circulation of digital ob-
jects such as films streamed on Netflix, financial data used by trading bots
and personal social media data managed by web companies through
cloud computing. In the contemporary digital economy, value is created
through the circulation of bits.


2. Media, Materiality and Infrastructures

    If these phenomena have being studied extensively by media studies
and political economy scholars, science and technology studies approach-
es allow for a stronger analysis of the technological and material facets of
digital circulation. Contributing to an emerging thread of STS scholarship
on the subject, in this special issue we focus exactly on the study of the
material technologies that allow and sustain contemporary forms of digi-
tal circulation. Thus our privileged, even if not exclusive, focus is a specif-
ic terrain of connection between contemporary media studies and STS:
the material ontology of digital circulation and the infrastructures that
sustain it.
     The relevance of the materiality of social life can be considered a ma-
jor backbone of STS, at least since the work of – quoting just two
amongst many – Madaleine Akrich (1987) and Bruno Latour (1992) on
topics such as “technical objects”, missing masses” “non-human actors”
and other definitions that account, in the very end, for the active role
played by the “physical” within the social environment. In recent years,
the interest in the material dimension of media technologies has prompt-
ed what has been defined “material turn” in STS, but also in other per-
spectives and approaches including different branches of media and
communication studies (Gillespie et al. 2014), not to mention other disci-
plines such as anthropology, religion studies, and art history. As Leah
Lievrouw has traced in detail, the focus on the materiality of media tech-
nologies has represented a contested terrain of intersection between STS
and communication studies: “on the one hand, two decades of debates
have encouraged STS researchers to theorize technology as simultaneous-
10                                                           Tecnoscienza – 7 (1)

ly and inextricably social and material, to see both aspects as co-
determining”. On the other hand, communication scholars tend to as-
sume that “the physical, material features of technology are still more
likely to be explained as outcomes or products, of abstract social forces,
cultural discourses or economic logics” (Lievrouw 2014, 24). However,
this distance does not mean that media studies have not engaged seriously
with the physical and material dimension of communication. For exam-
ple, media historian Lisa Gitelman, who has focused in the phonograph
and the internet (Gitelman 2006) and more recently on paper documents
(Gitelman 2014). On the side of more philosophically-oriented media
studies, the work of Jussi Parikka on media archaeology (Parikka 2012)
and on the geology of media as a form of new materialism (Parikka 2015)
clearly moves in the direction of a more substantial integration of the
physical and technical dimensions of communication in the study of to-
day’s era of digitization.
    If data are stored in identifiable physical locations, networks that carry
them are so entrenched and tangible that some scholars have proposed to
put them at the center of reflection on digital media (Musiani et al. 2015).
For example submarine cables, which are in fact linked to the history of
electric telegraphy and colonialism, host 99% of the international Inter-
net traffic and will be extended over the next decades. With digitization,
space and geography acquire a second life. Towers for the collection and
distribution of rainwater have become ideal sites for mobile phone anten-
nas. Remote regions in Finland have been transformed from places of pa-
per processing into ideal areas to locate Google servers – enjoying low
temperatures and geographically strategic regions for efficient data distri-
bution. Natural paradises in Hawaii continue to be hubs for the flow of
data, from the first telephone cables laid in the Pacific Ocean in the 1950s
and 60s to the optical fibre for Internet traffic in the 21st century.
    The materiality of the digital is perhaps even more evident if we con-
sider consumption processes. Contrary to what claimed by the champions
of media convergence at the beginning of the 1980s, who predicted the
rise of a single technology that would include all media, our homes and
pockets are full of physical objects that allow users to enjoy digital con-
tents: portable and desktop computers, tablets, smart phones and watch-
es, televisions, USB memory cards, to name a few examples. Through
technological obsolescence, digital devices are assigned a predefined du-
ration and replaced by new models in a consumerist recursive process.
This does not mean that digital tools are built inaccurately or with sub-
standard materials. Rather they “grow old” for fashion reasons or because
of the erosion of their computing capabilities. A second aspect of digital
obsolescence is, once again, the second life of objects: fallen into disuse,
mobile phones or computers often travel from North America and Eu-
rope to poorer countries, where they find new users or are dismantled,
recovered, and their materials recycled.
Balbi, Delfanti & Magaudda                                                11
    As mentioned, another crucial dimension of the study of digital circu-
lation are technological infrastructures. In STS, the interest in the socio-
technical building and maintenance of infrastructures has being devel-
oped since the mid-’90, especially through the work of Star and Bowker
(1999; Star and Ruhleder 1996). This interest has evolved into a distinc-
tive sub-field of “information infrastructures studies”, aimed at under-
standing the dynamic processes sustaining and surrounding technical sys-
tems for information circulation in specific contexts such as public data-
bases, scientific and professional communities, and so on (Bowker et al.
2010). Different formulations, such as “inverse infrastructures” (Egyedi et
al. 2012), focus on the understanding of infrastructures for communica-
tion that are built “from below” by users and citizens.
     However, it is quite surprising that this sensibility toward the role of
infrastructures in information and communication technologies has not
percolated consistently in media and communication studies until quite
recently. One reason could be the lack of overlapping and cross-
fertilization between historical and sociological studies of telecommunica-
tions and similar studies on mass media. This is even more startling if we
consider that, since the mid ‘90s, Internet and network infrastructures
have rapidly and overwhelmingly acquired a centrality in our everyday
lives and within the media system. While internet infrastructures (from
cables to the cloud, from search engines to social networks and collabora-
tive platforms) turned into basic everyday tools, media scholars have only
rarely adopted an infrastructural sensibility to unpack how our lives are
embedded into their technical constraints.
    And yet from a media and communication studies perspective, the
view becomes richer. Communication studies have developed distinctive
perspectives to address the relevance of technical systems of communica-
tion, which have been historically addressed as “telecommunication net-
works”. This infrastructural heritage rooted in communication studies in-
cludes, for example, Armand Mattelart’s (1991) or Patrice Flichy’s (1991)
histories of communication, which begin from the building of the “optical
telegraphy” between Paris and Lille in France at the end of 18th and at the
beginning of the 19th century under the pressure of war and nation state
conflicts. However, scholars such as Flichy, Matterlart, but also Harold
Innis, James Carey or Manuel Castells, did not focus enough on the way
these networks had been technically and materially designed, implement-
ed and maintained. The “technical” here seems to be a reflection of polit-
ical, cultural and economic inputs, while its material and physical con-
straints and opportunities are left unexplored.
    Only recently a more fluid circulation between different perspectives
on media and communication infrastructures and networks has started to
flow across different disciplines and fields. A recent and relevant take on
the intersection between STS and media and cultural studies is the work
of media scholar Jonathan Sterne (2012) on the history of the mp3 music
format. In his book, Sterne unfolds some of the very technical bases of
12                                                           Tecnoscienza – 7 (1)

the development of this sonic technology and at the same time articulates
a political and culturalist interpretation. This allows him to coordinate in
a distinct way the micro dimension of the technical ground with a macro,
long-term, politically-oriented trajectory of the evolution of sound record-
ing technologies.
    A more recent contribution that brought the technical dimension of
infrastructures on the foreground of media studies is a volume edited by
Lisa Park and Nicole Starosielski, Signal Traffic. The book is explicitly
aimed at building bridges between STS infrastructure studies and other
approaches to the media, including environmental studies, urban studies
and affect theory. Moving beyond contemporary hegemonic views, in the-
se works media networks are not seen as decentralized, flexible and adap-
tive structures, but rather as the output of historically sedimented, techni-
cally resistant and politically crystallized processes, which remain largely
invisible within today’s liquid and cloud-based rhetoric about the role of
the internet in our societies.


3. The Contributions in this Issue

    The articles comprised in the first portion of this double publication
offer distinct takes on the issue of digital circulation and on the objects,
materialities and infrastructures involved in it. Each of them identifies
specific empirical terrain, exploring and expanding the circulation of ide-
as between STS, media and communication studies and other neighbor-
ing fields.
    Sergio Minniti’s Polaroid 2.0: Photo-Objects and Analogue Instant Pho-
tography in the Digital Age describes an exemplary kind of digital circula-
tion occurring between digital and analogue photographic media and
specifically focuses on the reconfiguration of instant photography in the
digital age. The article reveals the enduring presence of material objects
in emerging photographic practices thus refuting any separation between
‘old’ analogue and ‘new’ digital photographic practices. Minniti explores
the mutual influence between the digitization of photography and the re-
surgence of analogue objects and material artefacts within photographic
communities. Moreover, by working on technology and social practice
co-production, the article attempts to address the theoretical relationship
between STS, media studies and photographic history.
    In Plants as Digital Things: The Global Circulation of Future Breeding
Options and their Storage in Gene Banks, Suzana Alpsancar presents the
results of her research into two seed banks preserving both plant material
and information. The author shows that, through processes of digitization
and re-materialization, plants acquire value by becoming part of different
chains of circulation. The bottom-up circulation of plant material from
collectors to seed banks is coupled with the top-down diffusion of plant
data from the seed bank in digitized genetic information form. Yet while
Balbi, Delfanti & Magaudda                                                13
the digitization of plant data abstracts seeds from their material environ-
ment while allowing a broader circulation around the globe, this does not
equate to full materialization.
    In Strategies of Circulation Restriction in Whistleblowing: the Pentagon
Papers, WikiLeaks and Snowden, Philip di Salvo deals with the content
circulation restriction strategies used to block the dissemination of leaked
material in three famous journalistic cases: the Pentagon Papers (1971),
WikiLeaks (2006) and Edward Snowden (2013). His detailed description
of these strategies aims to shed new light on the topics of information cir-
culation on the one hand and (re)materialization on the other. Whistle-
blowers have always fought against forces, from government or from
business, attempting to silence them and restrict their circulation net-
works, forbidding physical access to sources in the analogue era and re-
stricting and limiting connections to sources in the digital era. What is
surprising, according to di Salvo, is the fact that even in the digital era
materiality matters and reappears: the physical destruction of the hard
drives on which digital documents were stored is just one example of the
ways in which Snowden was limited (with scant success).
    In A Different Kind of Story: Tracing the Histories and Cultural Signs
of Pirate Copied Film, Maria Eriksson focuses on piracy in the film indus-
try and related social anxiety concerning the circulation of ‘illegal materi-
al’. The author embraces a counter-intuitive narrative: pirate copies of
films help standardize technologies of circulation for digital movies and
contribute to innovating aesthetics and narratives. Standardization is an-
other traditional STS topic dealing with infrastructures: networks, objects
and ideas need to be standardized in order for them to circulate and thus
acquire new meanings. Whilst pirated copies are still generally viewed
negatively they are actually ‘ambivalent objects’ which often stimulate the
diffusion, sharing and popularity of specific films.
    The Scenario section provides an overview of recent work in the jour-
nalism studies field at the crossroads with digital circulation studies.
Christoph Raetzsch and Henrik Bødker (Journalism and the Circulation of
Communicative Objects) argue that circulation is becoming a critical con-
cept with which to analyze online journalism and, specifically, that digital
infrastructures are increasingly shifting attention from traditional players
(such as newsrooms or corporations) to journalistic practices, user per-
spectives, newspapers, (im)materialities and social meanings. The key
concept analyzed here is the ‘communicative object’. Journalism should
no longer focus on texts and styles (in a word: content), but rather on
how circulation sustains and creates techno-social structures.
    Finally, the issue ends with a new section called Crossing Borders
dealing with convergences and differences between STS and media stud-
ies in communication technologies studies. This section, entitled STS and
Media Studies: Alternative Paths in Different Countries, includes contribu-
tions on the dialogue between STS and media studies from three Europe-
an countries: Germany (by Cornelius Schubert and Estrid Sørensen),
14                                                               Tecnoscienza – 7 (1)

France (by Romain Badouard, Clément Mabi and Guillaume Sire) and It-
aly (by Alvise Mattozzi). This section explores the opportunities and dif-
ficulties involved in the specific intellectual and institutional contexts in
which this dialogue takes place.
    Together with the articles to be published in the second installment of
this special double issue of Tecnoscienza planned for next December, the
work presented here contributes to expanding the STS’s continued navi-
gation towards different empirical lands and new theoretical harbors.



References
Akrich, M. (1987) Comment décrier les objectés techniques?, in “Techniques et
   culture”, 9, pp. 49-64.
Appadurai, A. (ed.) (1986) The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Per-
   spective, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Appadurai, A. (2010) How Histories Make Geographies: Circulation and Context
   in a Global Perspective, in “Transcultural Studies”, 1, pp. 4-13.
Beer, D. (2013) Popular Culture and New Media, London, Palgrave.
Bowker, G. and Star, S.L. (1999) Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Conse-
   quences, Cambridge, Mit Press.
Bowker, G., Baker, K., Millerand, F. and Ribes, D. (2010) Toward Information In-
   frastructure Studies: Ways of Knowing in a Networked Environment, in J.
   Hunsinger, L. Klastrup and M. Allen (eds.) International Handbook of Inter-
   net Research, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 97-117.
Egyedi, T.M. and Mehos, D.C. (eds.) (2012) Inverse Infrastructures. Disrupting
   Networks from Below, Cheltenham and Northampton, MA, Edward Elgar
   Publishing.
Flichy, P. (1991) Una histoire de la communication modern, Paris, la Decouverte.
Gillespie, T., Boczkowski, P. and Foot, K. (eds.) (2014) Media Technologies. Es-
    says on Communication, Materiality, and Society, Cambridge, Mit Press.
Gitelman, L. (2006) Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture,
   Cambridge, Mit Press.
Gitelman, L. (2014) Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents,
   Durham, Duke University Press.
Hu, T.-H. (2015) A Prehistory of the Cloud, Cambridge, Mit Press.
Latour, B. (1992) Where are the Missing Masses. A Sociology of a Few Mundane
   Artefacts, in W.E. Bijker and J. Law (eds.) Shaping Technology, Building Socie-
   ty, Cambridge, Mit Press, pp. 225-258.
Balbi, Delfanti & Magaudda                                                        15
Lievrouw, L.A. (2014) Materiality and Media in Communication and Technology
    Studies: an Unfinished Project, in T. Gillespie, P. Boczkowski and K. Foot
    (2014), pp. 21-52.
Mattelard, A. (1991) La communication-monde. Histoire des idées et des stratégies,
   Paris, Le Découverte.
McKenzie, A. (2005) The Performativity of Code. Software and Cultures of Circula-
  tion, in “Theory, Culture & Society”, 22 (1), pp. 71-92.
Musiani, F., Cogburn, D.L., DeNardis, L. and Levinson, N.S. (eds.) (2016) The
  Turn to Infrastructure in Internet Governance, London, Palgrave.
Parikka, J. (2012) What is Media Archaeology?, Cambridge, Polity Press.
Parikka, J. (2015) A Geology of Media, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota
    Press.
Parks, L. and Starosielsky N. (eds.) (2015) Signal Traffic. Critical Studies in Media
   Infrastructures, Urbana, University of Illinois Press.
Star, S.L. and Ruhleder, K. (1996) Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design
    and Access for Large Information Spaces, in “Information Systems Research”, 7
    (1), pp. 111-134.
Sterne, J. (2012) Mp3. The Meaning of a Format, Durham, Duke University Press.
