Perspectives on the postdigital

Introduction

The term postdigital has in recent years been applied across a range of disciplines, with a range of contradictory meanings ascribed to it. This article seeks to map the various definitions, deployments and appropriations of the term, alongside undertaking a consideration of the underlying issues that the terms postdigital and postdigitality are understood to partially address, whilst situating these debates within several strands of contemporary scholarship surrounding digital technology and culture. Questions pertaining to the postdigital compel us to contemplate and consider the ways in which the contemporary technocultural milieu affects and impacts constructions and perceptions of time and space, with particular reference to pre-existing discourses of cyberspace, virtual reality and ubiquitous computing. Finally, these debates converge with discourses surrounding the agencies of organized inorganic matter (Stiegler, 1998: 49) and the modes of secondary agency (Mackenzie, 2006) specific to software-governed computational systems, thereby relating postdigital perspectives to existing literature surrounding posthumanism (Badmington, 2000; Braidotti, 2013; Hayles, 1999; Wolfe, 2010). Exploring the postdigital consequently entails focusing upon ways that contemporary urban spaces not only feature an increasing volume of interactions between humans and software but are functionally dependent upon the existence of semi-automated systems of organized inorganic matter resonating with the exposition of Code/Space presented by Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge (2011) which forms a productive framework with which to approach these phenomena.

In addressing these issues and questions, this article seeks to shift discourses pertaining to the postdigital beyond defining a contentious descriptor, instead considering how questions surrounding the entanglement of technology, culture and social change involve the non-linear evolutionary process, which Bernard Stiegler (1998: 177) has described as epiphylogenesis:

In nonartificial life, nontechnical, nonarticulated by the différance of différance, all summation of epigenetic events is lost for specific memory with the loss of the individual who was their support. In the case at hand, life conserves and accumulates these events. This conservation determines the relation to the milieu and the whole process of selection of mutations, notably those taking place at the cortical level. Consequently, the hypothesis can be formulated that here, in apparent contradiction of the laws of molecular biology, epigenesis exerts a powerful countereffect on the reproduction of the species, channelling or conditioning an essential part of the drive of selection. In this case, the individual develops out of three memories: genetic memory; memory of the central nervous system (epigenetic); and techno-logical memory.

From this perspective, humans are effectively inseparable from their relationships with technologies, as technology forms the exteriorized, intergenerational form of memory, which is a necessary precondition for the formation of culture. The impacts of evolving technologies on the plastic structures of human neurobiological systems entail that this exterior technical milieu impacts the development of the individual organism as well as structuring its environment, blurring the lines between exterior and interior milieus in a manner that rebukes dualistic ontologies. A Stieglarian position, then, contends that contrary to Donna Haraway’s (2006) famous manifesto, we have always been cyborgs, meshworks of biology and technology. Consequently, questions surrounding the (post)digital technologies, which are increasingly ubiquitous within urban spaces, become pivotal to grasping contemporaneous modes of epiphylogenesis, which in turn inform debates surrounding the contested politics of contemporary technocultural assemblages.

Structurally, this article begins by mapping the multiplicity of meanings, which have been ascribed to the term postdigital across and within numerous distinct areas of both academic scholarship and journalistic prose. These definitions encompass applications of the trope of postdigitality, which refer to (1) a return of the analogue or move beyond discrete samples, (2) the revelation of seams and artifices within the otherwise smooth spaces of the digital, (3) the historical phase of technocultural development occurring after the digital revolution, (4) the rematerialization of digital technology and its integration into urban environments and (5) a way of escaping the fetishization of newness and upgrade culture. Rather than seeking to uncover a singular and ‘truthful’ or ‘correct’ definition of the term, I will proceed by contrasting a range of the productive contradictions inherent in these contemporaneous deployments, and using this material as a departure point to further consider some of the pertinent issues raised by such discussions, contrasting elements of the vernacular and scholarly rhetorics surrounding the postdigital with insights from numerous existing apertures that explore digital technoculture, including digital humanities, software studies, digital studies (following Stiegler’s usage of the term) and media archaeology.

Mapping the term

The diverse scholarly fields in which the term postdigital has been utilized include music, architecture, design, art, advertising, photography, e-learning, marketing, media studies and film studies, with applications and definitions of the term being as disparate as the disciplinary areas in which they are located. One of the earliest usages of the term postdigital is found in the work of Robert Pepperell and Michael Punt who in 2000 co-authored a book entitled The Postdigital Membrane: Imagination, Technology and Desire. Pepperell and Punt’s version of the postdigital centres upon concerns that the continuum of reality is increasingly envisaged as being decomposable into discrete binary units:

The term Postdigital is intended to acknowledge the current state of technology whilst rejecting the conceptual shift implied in the ‘digital revolution’ – a shift apparently as abrupt as the ‘on/off’ ‘zero/one’ logic of the machines now pervading our daily lives. (Pepperell and Punt, 2000: 2)

Whilst a general concern regarding the digital as a material instantiation of dualistic logic is interesting, as is their explicit rejection of the notion of a digital revolution, Pepperell and Punt’s definition of technology as ‘The tangible expression of desire motivating human imagination to modify reality’ (2000: 7) is problematic insofar as it removes humanity and human desire from a material situation in which technology is always and has always been embedded (Kittler, 1999; Stiegler, 1998, 2010).

Whereas Pepperell and Punt exemplify a scholarly appropriation of the term postdigital to gesture towards a paradigm that goes beyond the discrete samples of binary code, which compose the digital, the term is appropriated in a homologous form within mainstream discourses of technology, such as Tim Carmody’s ‘Embracing Uncertainty: Making Quantum Computing Work’, a Wired magazine article that explores the potential of quantum computing, a technology predicated upon the ability of qubits (quantum bits) to be in more than one state at any time, allowing for parallel calculation. Going beyond discrete samples of zeros and ones in this manner leads Carmody (2010) to conclude ‘Maybe quantum computing will help push us into a post-digital paradigm, closer to the analogue world of our past than the digital one we know now’.

The term postdigital is similarly mobilized in vernacular technocultural debates by James Bridle (2010) who claims that the book is a postdigital medium, cryptically pointing towards another version of the postdigital as a return of the analogue. Ironically, however, if we understand the term digital to refer to discrete samples (its technical definition), then one of the book’s key innovations over previous technologies of textual inscription such as the scroll and the mural was its digitality – the way in which it provides discrete spatial samples (pages), which afford alternate modes of access and indexing to reading text in a linear manner.

A clearly differentiated deployment of the term postdigital can be found within academic literature exploring music. Here, the term postdigital has been applied by Kim Cascone (2000) to refer to artworks which are:

Concerned with foregrounding the flaws inherent in digital processes. This valorisation of what previously would have been seen as noise: a by-product, bearing an external relation to the work, would be one of the characterising marks of a post-digital aesthetic.

This argument, which emanates from a rejection of what Ian Andrews (2002) claims are ‘the familiar digital tropes of purity, pristine sound and images and perfect copies’, seems somewhat unintuitive, given that the history of digital media production has not consisted of creating perfect copies but of learning complex data processing workflows based on codecs (compressor/decompressor algorithms) (Mackenzie, 2008), which are typically lossy processes whereby data are encoded in a manner that enacts a compromise between size and quality. Whilst this may be especially true of video streams, where uncompressed high-definition files are not commonly captured (outside of multimillion dollar Hollywood productions), used for editing, or delivery, this is still frequently true within music, where the lossy MP3 file format is far more commonly encountered than lossless formats such as free lossless audio codec.

Another usage of the term postdigital arises within the field of architecture, where Neil Spiller (2009, p. 95) argues that:

Post-digital architecture is not architecture without any digital component … [it is] an architecture that is very much a synthesis between the virtual, the actual, the biological, the cyborgian, the augmented and the mixed. It is impossible, anymore, to talk of digital architecture as a binary opposition to normal real-world architecture.

This is notable for the way in which it ascribes a well-defined periodization in which there previously existed a perceived series of dualisms between the virtual and the actual, nature (biology) and culture (cyborgs), digital and real-world architecture, whose subsequent recombination is argued to be the hallmark of the postdigital. Spiller’s (2009, p. 99) version of the postdigital dovetails with aspects of posthumanism and ecologism in arguing that:

Post-digital design is relativistic, glocal, ascalar and constructed from a genius loci that does not just include anthropomorphic site conditions but also includes deep ecological pathways, mnemonics, psychogeography and narrative.

Broadly speaking this version of the postdigital can be understood as a rejection of the binary oppositions of digital/analogue, human/nonhuman, nature/culture, and virtual/real, instead seeking to create a discourse which composites these terms in order to consider how to collectively design architecture which is conducive to human and nonhuman ecologies flourishing. Whilst I have sympathy for the political connotations of such an ecologically inflected, anti-dualistic approach, there are serious questions to be raised regarding the notion that conventional conceptions of the digital pointed towards an immaterial and virtual realm, which effectively transcends and stands opposed to the real world. Whilst there have undoubtedly been particular narratives of digital technologies trumpeting such claims, these have always been deeply contested, in particular, via the strands of cybercultural studies which adopted an immanent materialism derived from the likes of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1977, 1987), Donna Haraway (2004) and Bruno Latour (1993, 2005).

A major strand of existing postdigital discourse originates in Nicholas Negroponte’s (1998) Wired article ‘Beyond Digital’, in which he declares: ‘Face it – the digital revolution is over’. Negroponte argues that there was a period from the early 1980s until the late 1990s/early 2000s, which could be adequately described as the digital revolution and that we have now passed this historical phase. This claim is repeated in places such as the Journal of Media Practice 2011 symposium entitled Postdigital Encounters, the Alphaville International Festival of Postdigital Culture, and the After the Bit Rush exhibition of postdigital artworks held at the MU Artspace in Eindhoven.

Claims for a post-revolutionary stabilization, however, appear somewhat contradicted by the increase in networked users, devices and data. From 1998 to 2012, a period that Negroponte contends to be after the digital revolution occurred, global Internet traffic grew from 12 petabytes per month (pb/m) to over 50,000 pb/m, over 4000 times the amount of traffic. Equally, global Internet user numbers grew from around 100 million users (2.5% of the then global population) in 1998 to over 2.75 billion users today. A homologous explosion can be seen in the number of globally situated, network-enabled devices, which has risen from around 250 million in 1998 to over 14 billion in 2014. The notion that there was a digital revolution and that it stopped in 1998 or 2008 appears untenable in light of these statistics.

Alongside the expansion of networked digital technologies over this period, there has been, and continues to be, a huge expansion of the realms of contemporary urban experiences, which are in some way mediated by varying forms of digital technologies. Recent developments in tablets, smartphones, wearable electronics, open-source hardware and other forms of pervasive, locative and associated mobile computing technologies and experiences involving sensor/actuator couplings, touchscreens and data harvesting algorithms hardly point towards a post-revolutionary stabilization of digital technoculture. Rather than a singular and totalizing digital revolution as posited by Negroponte, a more productive approach to such phenomena instead advocates recognizing the heterogeneity of these entangled epiphylogenetic changes, positing an ongoing series of molecular digital revolutions that continue to enact changes in heterogeneous ways across differentiated geographies.

The Alphaville Festival of Postdigital Culture and the After the Bit Rush exhibition are also noteworthy insofar as they provide numerous examples of what are demarcated as postdigital artworks. In many ways, what is most striking about these projects is their pronounced resemblance to existing forms of digital art. Postdigital artworks include forms such as projection mapping, Kinect-based installations, layered reality mobile phone apps, and mobile three-dimensional (3D) printing installations. Where these artworks identify themselves as a departure from digital art largely results from the ways in which they combine physical actions with digital technologies, bridging the imagined divide between the real and virtual or presenting a rematerialization of digital technology.

It should, however, be noted that the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ have always coexisted within a single plane of material reality, for example, games such as Dance Dance Revolution, House of the Dead and Space Invaders may have featured less technically innovative control interfaces, but they still involved a coupling of human and technical systems. Whilst bodies may have been less explicitly foregrounded throughout the production processes in some digital art, there has always been the strand exemplified by artists such as Stelarc and Sita Popat or the Japanese anime film Tetsuo, all of which explicitly focus upon cyborgian connectivity in digital assemblages, an area explored by Bernd Herzogenrath (2000) in The Question Concerning Humanity: Obsolete Bodies and (Post)Digital Flesh, another early application of the term postdigital. There are questions then regarding how postdigital art demarcates a departure from digital art and whether the term postdigital has any genuine analytical utility in this context beyond the post – signifying a trend within the marketing of particular artworks designed to connote that these works are newer than digital art and thus indescribably superior due to a general fetishism of the new within upgrade culture.

A related usage of the term postdigital, which homologously brings a virtual/actual tension into effect, is found in the work of Russell Davies (2011) who has been featured in publications such as the Guardian newspaper as a postdigital pioneer and argues that his application of the term was designed:

To suggest that a generation of business people and technologists should get over themselves. They were so proud of being the people that monetised the web that they couldn’t get past it, they couldn’t think about what was next. They thought they were the end of the revolution, they’d stormed the Winter Palace and they were starting to tidy up. Post Digital was a suggestion that, maybe, we needed to get over that and start thinking about the next phase, the phase where it got integrated into the world. What will we do, I was asking, when we can take all this connectivity for granted? When it’s no longer special or interesting? What will we build then?

The notion of being able to take a connected digital infrastructure ‘for granted’ is central to this version of the postdigital and requires some consideration. By taking things for granted we can stop approaching them as new, innovative and exciting and can move on to the ‘next big thing’, as Davies suggests. However, taking things for granted seems antithetical to the notion of critical academic analyses, which examine the ethics, politics, and agencies at work within the epiphylogenetic evolution of a technocultural milieu. Davies’ version of the postdigital resonates with Negroponte’s claim that soon digital technologies will be like air and water – things that have become invisible. Except of course that as academics examining digital culture, we have a specific interest in understanding these technologies whether they have been taken for granted by the wider public or not. Indeed, exploring public perceptions of relationships with technics is undoubtedly a strand of such scholarship. Air may be taken for granted and invisible to Negroponte, but it certainly isn’t for atmospheric chemists, meteorologists or climatologists.

Another key trope within Davies’ construction of the postdigital is the notion of integrating digital technologies into the world. However, taking this seriously means accepting the immaterialist rhetoric, which posits that until recently digital technology somehow existed outside of material reality in a virtual realm. A cursory examination of contemporary spaces (Greenfield, 2006; Kitchin and Dodge, 2011; Thrift and French, 2002; Van Kranenburg, 2008) reveals an enormous array of digital technologies without which contemporary urban spaces would effectively fail to function, resonating with the analyses of contemporary cities as Code/Spaces (Kitchin and Dodge 2011), but sharply diverging from the allegations of a real/virtual dualism we find in Davies’ account and elsewhere (Heim, 1993; Holmes, 1997; Rheingold, 1991, 1993; Sable, 2012). Indeed, there has long been a tradition of exploring human/computer interfaces and the material implications of our specific modes of interaction with digital computers such as carpal tunnel (Keir et al., 1999) and eye strain from display technologies (Blehm et al., 2005; Matula, 1981), clearly denoting the ways in which human interfaces with digital technologies have never been immaterial encounters that fail to affect human bodies (Boler, 2007; Dovey and Kennedy, 2007; Haraway, 2006; Hayles, 1999).

In discourses surrounding e-learning and education, David White (2009) has approached postdigitality as a way of ‘escaping the kingdom of the new’, going beyond approaches based upon exploring the newest platforms, software and trends, instead focusing upon broader sociocultural questions. According to the 52Group’s (2009: online) ‘Preparing for the Postdigital Era’ document:

The postdigital frees us to think more clearly and precisely about the issues we face, rather than become tied to an obsession with, and the language of, the new. It allows us to take a broader approach to the challenges and opportunities we face. Removing the focus on the digital leads us to see the division between the ‘digital’ have and have-nots not in terms of their lack of access to digital technology, but in terms of their lack of access to economic, social and political power.

This version of the postdigital articulates concerns that discourses surrounding various aspects of digital technologies and media are perpetually caught up within the ever accelerating time frame of software and hardware development, entailing that reflexive and critical scholarship gives way to simply keeping abreast of the latest digital trends and tools. Such research agendas based around the economic, political and cultural potentials of new technologies and platforms become deeply implicated within the neo-liberal consumer culture of perpetual upgrades, as opposed to the modes of critical research traditionally associated with media and cultural studies. Seen in this light, White’s version of the postdigital is a call to action to abandon the fetishization of the new, which is clearly present in calls to move onto the next big thing and to instead embrace scholarship focused upon performatively shaping social structures along more egalitarian lines.

In summary then, the term postdigital has been claimed to point towards a departure from an understanding of the digital as novelty and also towards considering what the next big novel form based on digital technologies might be. It has been used to suggest a move beyond technologies built upon discrete samples and as a way of thinking about particular technologies predicated upon discrete samples. It has been applied as a way of describing what happens when digital technology breaks down and becomes visible, and of exploring what happens when digital technology is taken for granted, is ubiquitous and effectively becomes invisible.

What is interesting about the conceptual contradictions and lack of clarity around the applications of the term postdigital is the way in which these incongruities might be a way of refocusing attention onto examinations of the digital. Debates around how to define the digital were legion when ‘new’ media were new (e.g. Aarseth, 1997, 2003; Lister, 2002; Manovich, 2000), but questions surrounding whether we understand the digital as media built from discrete samples, or the looser vernacular application of digital as something unspecified relating to digital computers and/or binary code, have somewhat faded from view in contemporaneous, academic and vernacular commentaries, which assume digital technologies and culture as a given. This lack of focus and specificity is something that is brought to the surface by the incoherence of contemporary discourses around the postdigital.

Digital hypermaterialism

Having considered a range of ways that the term postdigital is currently mobilized across academic and vernacular discourses, this article now turns towards an exploration of the underlying conceptual issues that relate to the various discourses encountered thus far. Integral to these discussions are the relationships between digital technologies and space and particularly the notion that although previous digital technologies were virtual entities that inhabited cyberspace, they have now begun to leak out into the real world. Whereas this somewhat uncritical vantage point is adopted by numerous postdigital advocates, this article contends that engaging with a range of positions associated with academic analyses of technology, space and culture presents productive alternative apertures with which to apprehend the ways that digital technologies affect spatial relationships.

Thinking about the proposed virtual/real dualism (as opposed to the Deleuzian assemblage of virtual and actual, Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 112–116) involves engaging with historical ideas around virtual reality, a notion that largely came to define how people imagined the future evolution of the Internet alongside tropes such as the information superhighway (Miller, 1995), virtual communities (Rheingold, 1993, 1995; Wellman and Gulia, 1999) and cyberspace (Dodge and Kitchin, 2000; Lessig, 1999; Lévy, 1999). Whilst these concepts, which posit that virtual spaces are distinct and separate from ‘meatspace’, have always received a certain amount of criticism as they remove the material connections between humans and technological interfaces (Baym, 1998; Jones, 1995, 1998), they nonetheless maintained a position of prominence whilst the dominant visible mode of human/computer interactions functioned at relatively fixed locations (primarily the office or the home) with desktop or laptop computers that had to be physically wired into networks. More recently though, as smartphones, tablets, e-readers and other mobile computing platforms have become increasingly commonplace, connectivity has become wireless and increasingly ubiquitous via Wi-Fi, Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave AccessWiMAX, Bluetooth and cellular 3G and 4G networks, and the integration of sensor/actuator couplings between mobile and pervasive computing devices and environments has grown the idea that computational technologies somehow exist in a separate virtual space, somehow segregated from the rest of the material world, has gradually become less and less intellectually viable. One outcome of this has been the emergence of relatively uncritical reflections that such developments demonstrate a rematerialization of the (previously virtual) digital.

In contrast to discourses of immaterial labour (Berardi, 2009; Hardt and Negri, 2000, 2005; Lazzarato, 1996), cognitive capitalism (Vercellone, 2007) and the creative class (Florida, 2012), which collectively work to remove contemporary technological assemblages from the productive process through their emphasis on immateriality and virtuality, Bernard Stiegler (2008: 112) forcefully contends that such notions contribute towards a mystification of the underlying material processes through which technocultural change occur:

In terms of everyday life, we are not a part of a dematerialization at all but rather, quite to the contrary, a hypermaterialisation: everything is transformed into information, which is to say into states of matter by the intermediaries of materials and apparatuses, and it is this which makes everything controllable at the level of the nanometer and the nanosecond. This process leads to a considerable expansion of increasingly accessible states of matter which carry form, which is henceforth able to work in the infinitely small and the infinitely brief. As a result, matter is becoming invisible.

Indeed, claims pertaining to the alleged immateriality of digital technology are particularly dangerous when contrasted with the range of detrimental ecological and social impacts incurred throughout every stage of the life cycle of contemporary digital technologies (Cubitt, 2011; Maxwell and Miller, 2012; Parikka, 2012a; Taffel 2012).

Perhaps a more productive approach towards technocultural assemblages involves considering the specific materialities mobilized in producing contemporary ensembles of networked information and communications technology distributed throughout urban Code/Spaces (Kinsley, 2013). This means paying attention to specific materials – such as the important role of coltan in the miniaturization of mobile phones, alongside exploring coltan’s role in the enduring conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo – but also understanding the protocols, codes and technologies that are integral to the creation of pervasive wireless networks, which enable the Internet of Things and smart objects in everyday life, technologies and protocols such as Wi-Fi, high-speed downlink packet access, near field communication, radio-frequency identification and global positioning system. Such a movement, then, requires a shift from thinking about the rematerialization of the digital to the evolution of specific materialities associated with digital assemblages.

This shift involves considering the materiality and agencies of software – thinking about what code is, how it is produced and what it does. These activities are central to recent developments in the fields of software studies (Fuller, 2008; Manovich, 2008; Wardrip-Fruin, 2009) and the computational turn in the digital humanities (Berry, 2011, 2012). Paying close attention to the ways in which algorithmic manipulation, automation, numerical representation and modularity – specific affordances arising from the material encoding of information as binary code – presents a productive method of examining how assemblages of information and communication processing hardware and software, alongside humans and other agents, collaboratively produce space and culture. However, when thinking about concepts such as algorithms, automation, numerical representation and modularity we are firmly in the realm of the digital – indeed, many of these terms were pivotal to early ways of understanding languages of new/digital media from the late 1990s/early 2000s (Manovich, 2000; Lister, 2002) and these same foundations continue to underlie contemporary digital assemblages.

Postdigitality presents one way of approaching the study of systems dependent upon digital technologies; however, software studies present an alternative approach, which specifically focuses upon questions relating to the materiality of code. Whilst software studies are too recent an emerging field to be considered a stable body of work and have produced insightful and useful material, there is currently a tendency within certain quarters to overemphasize the centrality of software to digital assemblages. A prime example is Manovich’s (2008: 15, original emphasis) contention that software not only adds a new dimension to our culture but that:

Our contemporary society can be characterized as a software society and our culture can be justifiably called a software culture – because today software plays a central role in shaping both the material elements and many of the immaterial structures which together make up ‘culture’.

The danger of ascribing centrality to any feature of the massively complex globalized networks of hardware, software, content, humans, natural resources, techniques, knowledge and legal, political and social structures, which can be understood as comprising ‘culture’ or ‘society’, is that this immediately relegates other nodes to the margins.

Manovich’s notion of the immaterial structures of a software society diverges sharply from Stiegler’s more nuanced account of how specific (hyper)material technocultural formations are prerequisites for Code/Spaces to be constructed. Stiegler’s line of argumentation here resembles the convergent thinking found within Manuel Castells’ (1996, 2007) delineation of contemporary societies as network societies reliant upon distributed information networks comprising assemblages of microelectronics, optoelectronics, software, fossil fuels and humans, alongside other biotic structures and non-human agents. Indeed, distributed networks are topological structures that have no centre, only nodes and connections; from this vantage point, software cannot be described as central or as the definitive feature of these networks.

Although software does play a crucial role in contemporary societies, this role is a relational one that is entirely dependent on a series of other equally crucial areas, such as human attention and reliable sources of electrical energy, silicon and other essential materials for constructing digital architectures. Digital materiality includes the materiality of software but must also go beyond code to explore the broader technocultural assemblages that software is dependent upon.

Another series of questions raised by (post)digital discourses surround materiality and agencies of organized inorganic matter. Approaches such as actor-–network theory (Latour, 2004, 2005; Law, 1998), media ecology (Fuller, 2005; Parikka, 2007; Taffel, 2013) and posthumanism (Braidotti, 2013; Hayles, 1999) challenge the humanist/social constructivist notions that agency exclusively resides in human subjects and is exercised over objects. Indeed, many of these approaches expend considerable effort in reconceptualizing ways that power and agency reside in a relational or networked capacity between the human and non-human, organic and inorganic. Software/computational devices provide an interesting case study here due to the manner in which they automate processes, providing what Adrian Mackenzie (2006: 8) has termed ‘secondary agency’. Digital assemblages thus present a useful example, which not only highlights the fact that non-human actors within these networks possess forms of agency but evidences particular ways in which the specific agencies associated with executable code departs from alternative forms of non-human agency.

From cyberspace to controlling Code/Spaces

Whereas the notion of cyberspace or virtual space as divorced from actual spaces can be considered academically indefensible and functionally dead, if we approach the notion of cyberspace somewhat differently, it can still point towards pertinent issues. The prefix cyber comes from the Greek term kybernetes, meaning steersman. The term was appropriated in the 1940s by an interdisciplinary group of scientists who dubbed their area of study cybernetics, which is the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine, with steersmanship provided as an example of a feedback-based control system. Reconceptualizing cyberspace, as a reference to controlled space or the control of space, resonates with Gilles Deleuze’s (1992) characterization of contemporary societies as societies of control, in which the distinct spaces and subjectivities of the Foucauldian disciplinary society are superseded by constantly modulating, computerized spaces of control.

Control over space is exercised by hierarchical groups as evidenced by the use of technologies including closed-circuit television, mosquitoes and the drones used to conduct modern warfare (Crogan, 2013), but space can also be collectively and creatively reconfigured by individuals and community groups using pervasive computing technologies. Open Wi-Fi meshworks (Mackenzie, 2011), self-replicating 3D printers (Sells, 2009), peer-to-peer cryptocurrencies (Maurer et al., 2013) and open-source hardware (Bauwens, 2010; Kostakis, 2013) present opportunities to build digital cultures outside the walled gardens of corporate capitalism, positing ways in which contemporary public spaces can be contested in new ways and means by which the economy of contribution proposed by Stiegler (2010) can move beyond the realms of information and software and into building ethically orientated technocultural environments.

Additionally, there are questions relating to infrastructure and control pertaining to data ethics and privacy issues as highlighted by the revelations over the governmental surveillance schemes exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013. Questions of who holds your data when it is stored in the cloud and what they do with it – be it exploitation for commercial purposes, or turning data over to governments without notifying users – alongside enduring issues surrounding governmental and national security agency-related data access are of huge importance when considering the ethical and political implications of the contestation over control of contemporary computational assemblages.

Control over Code/Spaces then becomes a terrain of struggle between various actors, which presents an avenue for further investigation. Thus far many of the approaches to these areas originate from cultural geography and ubicomp/human–computer interaction (HCI) and present material in ways that are quite different to the types of analysis traditionally carried out within media and cultural studies – there has been description and theorization, but little in the way of detailed qualitative or ethnographic analyses are user centric – exploring the ways that people experience and understand these contemporary spaces.

Back to the digital future

Whilst postdigitality, software studies, cultural geography and HCI present particular apertures onto contemporaneous technocultural milieus, an additional suite of approaches that provide useful ways of approaching these issues are associated with the digital humanities, digital studies and media archaeology. By means of a conclusion, I wish to consider the utility these methods present in order to further highlight some of the conceptual issues present within the often uncritical celebration of digital technology, which dominate vernacular conceptions of the postdigital.

Digital humanities is a field that has undergone several iterations, having initially revolved around the large-scale digitization of existing resources, a second wave of scholarship centred upon creating and adopting new tools and technologies designed to present new ways of conducting humanities research in ways that were not previously possible. David Berry (2011, 2012) has recently outlined an emerging third wave of digital humanities, which he terms the computational turn and which reflexively focuses upon code, software, digitality and materiality. What is noteworthy here is the manner in which a research field evolves, from initially focusing on the newness of digital technologies and the process of becoming digital to a more nuanced and reflexive engagement with issues raised by digital technoculture, raising questions around computation, code, automation and the new types of materiality, methodologies and epistemologies that arise from living within this technocultural milieu.

Whilst digital humanities research presents significant areas of overlap with postdigital approaches, much of the focus within digital humanities research is upon creating and/or utilizing software to conduct new forms of research, many of which implement ways of conducting quantitative research in areas where previously only qualitative research was possible. The aim of making social science research a real quantitative science has been a long unrealized aim for a particular fragment of the field, however, reducing the richness and diversity of cultural activity to data sets stands in opposition to microethological, ethnographic and other qualitative approaches. That is not to suggest that cultural analytics fail to present productive or meaningful methods and results, only that the methodological approach and the types of insight they consequently present tend to substantially depart from those historically associated with media and cultural studies.

Digital studies is the term adopted by Bernard Stiegler and Ars Industrialis to describe their interest in and engagement with the ways in which networked digital technologies are changing multifarious facets of contemporary society, as exemplified by Stiegler’s (2012) insistence that digital studies must become ‘the new unifying and transdisciplinary model of every form of academic knowledge’. Stiegler’s positions around the hypermateriality of digital technologies and the need for sustained engagements with their transformative epiphylogenetic impacts on human attention and technosocial structures of care resonate with some of the thematics of the postdigital, but with an emphasis that what is in fact at stake here are the affordances of digital technologies and digital cultures. Whereas the term postdigital points towards an after-the-digital – whether that is understood as an after-the-digital revolution as in Negroponte and Davies’ versions, or after digitality as in quantum computing or a return to the analogue – digital studies posit that we are only just entering the digital age and that whilst there will continue to be rapid changes to various elements of our technocultural infrastructure, processes aligned with the digital – the application of discrete units, frequently realized as binary code, within an expanding range of microelectronics devices – will continue to be pivotal to comprehending the specific affordances, techniques and potentialities for positive social and ecological ethico-political actions.

A final area of contemporary research that presents an interesting avenue for discussion regarding the issues arising from the concepts mobilized surrounding the concept of the postdigital is media archaeology. Whereas postdigital discourse presents a teleological perspective whereby media progress from pre- to postdigitality, from analogue technologies to digital ones, from mainframe computers to smartphones and from virtual spaces to layered realities, media archaeology presents an alternative perspective that foregrounds ‘a way of studying recurring cyclical phenomena that (re)appear and disappear and reappear over and over again in media history, somehow seeming to transcend specific historical contexts’ (Huhtamo, 2011: 64).

Whereas it can be all-too-easy to portray contemporary technics as the obvious and sole result of a singular historical evolution, which culminates in a celebration of upgrade culture and the new, media archaeology instead argues for understanding media evolution as a process whereby past technologies that had been presumed obsolete or ‘dead’ are reintegrated into new media practices and tools. The focus here on logics of circularity, multiplicity and the connections between media theory and new materialism (Coole and Frost, 2010; Parikka, 2012b) presents a productive counterpoint to utopian celebrations of technological progress and upgrade culture.

In summary then, whilst the contradictions inherent in contemporary discourses surrounding the postdigital render the term itself of little critical value, particular tropes and figures it alludes to articulate numerous issues are pivotal to comprehending the contemporary digital landscape. This includes the relations between technology and space, and, in particular, the ways that automated systems of organized inorganic matter are transforming urban spaces. Closely related to such changes are the range of political and ethical problematics that arise around issues surrounding the contestation of control over largely automated systems of surveillance and control within globalized network cultures. Central to such issues are questions pertaining to the materiality of software and how we situate the specific affordances of software within wider technocultural assemblages of production, consumption and access. Additionally, the postdigital raises questions surrounding a desire to move beyond discourses limited to newness within technological fields, where the rapid pace of upgrade culture itself poses challenges to the formation of reflexive analytic frameworks capable of adapting to the rate of dynamism present in contemporary technological changes. The importance of engaging with debates pertaining to the postdigital, then, largely emanates from the ways that the incoherence and lack of conceptual clarity present in the multiple discourses surrounding the term, which are frequently predicated upon a highly problematic dualistic onto-epistemology and foregrounds the necessity of refocusing attention upon questions surrounding contemporary modes of epiphylogenesis via the proliferation of digital technics.