The Internet and the Material Turn

Abstract

The notion that the internet is an immaterial ' cyberspace', a virtual world, separate from the material world, was pervasive in the early social science scholarship on this technology (Miller and Slater, 2000: 4–5, see also Casemajor and Taffel in this issue), and such dualistic thinking still persists today. This special issue invites the reader to think differently about the internet: it draws its inspiration from the material turn, which repudiates such dualisms in favour of a monism that does not separate nature and culture, matter and ideas (see for example Van der Tuin and Dolphijn, 2010). This issue's genesis however did not start with such metaphysical considerations, but rather from a personal encounter in the field. I was conducting an ethnographic investigation into online video makers, beginning in 2010, where I was trying to understand how and why they adopted specific internet technologies to distribute their videos. 1 My initial entry into the ethnographic field was framed by the literature on online video available at the time, which focused largely on the social ties that emerged between video makers and their audiences. While many of the video makers I researched were indeed engaged in such social interactions online, my interviews and observations also revealed that most of them were having a great deal of difficulty getting the different technologies to work the way they wanted them to. I initially dismissed these difficulties as background 'noise', however as time went on I began to realise that frustration with a failed software upgrade, concerns about disruptions caused by a denial of service attack, complaints about takedown notices generated by bots on YouTube, and criticisms of Facebook's algorithm for filtering posts were important clues to understand-ing the nature of the processes my informants were engaging in as they distributed their videos online. In my search for theoretical tools with which to re-enter the ethnographic field and make sense of this problematic entanglement of humans and machines, I came across the literature on new materialism. While I finally settled upon an assemblage theory approach, which drew upon both Actor-Network Theory and Manuel DeLanda's reading of Deleuze and Guattari, I wondered about the theoretical roads not taken: what insights might other new materialist theories bring to our understanding of internet technologies? This special issue provides some preliminary answers to that question. In her contribution, Nathalie Casemajor points out that 'the great variety of traditions, intel-lectual trajectories and emerging trends that could qualify as 'materialist' prevents picturing what is now labelled a 'material turn' in digital media studies as a homogeneous movement'. To help us make sense of this complex landscape, she provides an overview of six different theoretical frameworks for thinking about digital materiality: Friedrich Kittler's interest in the material structures of technology, analysed as both hardware and as logical structures; software and platform studies which focuses on the programmable nature of digital objects;