TY - JOUR

T1 - What is a Digital Object?

AU - Hui, Yuk

PY - 2012/7

Y1 - 2012/7

N2 - We find ourselves in a media-intensive milieu comprising networks, images, sounds, and text, which we generalize as data and metadata. How can we understand this digital milieu and make sense of these data, not only focusing on their functionalities but also reflecting on our everyday life and existence? How do these material constructions demand a new philosophical understanding? Instead of following the reductionist approaches, which understand the digital milieu as abstract entities such as information and data, this article proposes to approach it from an embodied perspective: objects. The article contrasts digital objects with natural objects (e.g., apples on the table) and technical objects (e.g., hammers) in phenomenological investigations, and proposes to approach digital objects from the concept of “relations,” on the one hand the material relations that are concretized in the development of mark-up languages, such as SGML, HTML, and XML, and on the other hand, Web ontologies, the temporal relations that are produced and conditioned by the artificial memories of data.

AB - We find ourselves in a media-intensive milieu comprising networks, images, sounds, and text, which we generalize as data and metadata. How can we understand this digital milieu and make sense of these data, not only focusing on their functionalities but also reflecting on our everyday life and existence? How do these material constructions demand a new philosophical understanding? Instead of following the reductionist approaches, which understand the digital milieu as abstract entities such as information and data, this article proposes to approach it from an embodied perspective: objects. The article contrasts digital objects with natural objects (e.g., apples on the table) and technical objects (e.g., hammers) in phenomenological investigations, and proposes to approach digital objects from the concept of “relations,” on the one hand the material relations that are concretized in the development of mark-up languages, such as SGML, HTML, and XML, and on the other hand, Web ontologies, the temporal relations that are produced and conditioned by the artificial memories of data.

KW - Digital media

KW - digital objects

KW - metadata

KW - phenomenology

KW - Simondon

KW - Stiegler

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84864222260&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1111/j.1467-9973.2012.01761.x

DO - 10.1111/j.1467-9973.2012.01761.x

M3 - Journal articles

VL - 43

SP - 380

EP - 395

JO - Metaphilosophy

JF - Metaphilosophy

SN - 0026-1068

IS - 4

ER -