What is a Digital Object?

Research output: Journal contributionsJournal articlesResearchpeer-review

Authors

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.
Original languageEnglish
JournalMetaphilosophy
Volume43
Issue number4
Pages (from-to)380-395
Number of pages16
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 07.2012

    Research areas

  • Digital media
  • digital objects, metadata, phenomenology, Simondon, Stiegler

Recently viewed

Publications

  1. Canopy leaf traits, basal area, and age predict functional patterns of regenerating communities in secondary subtropical forests
  2. Simulation and optimization of material and energy flow systems
  3. The role of learning strategies for performance in mathematics courses for engineers
  4. Towards a heuristic for assessing adaptation knowledge: impacts, implications, decisions and actions
  5. An inquiry into the digitisation of border and migration management
  6. Relationship between pH-values and nutrient availability in forest soils - the consequences for the use of ecograms in forest ecology
  7. Problem Definition and Agenda-Setting in Critical Perspective
  8. Biodegradability and genotoxicity of surface functionalized colloidal silica (SiO2) particles in the aquatic environment
  9. "to expose, to show, to demonstrate, to inform, to offer. Artistic Practices around 1990"
  10. An antisaturating adaptive preaction and a slide surface to achieve soft landing control for electromagnetic actuators
  11. Actor analysis as a tool for exploring the decision-making processes in environmental governance
  12. Analyzing Talk and Text II: Thematic Analysis
  13. Towards combined methods for recording ground beetles
  14. Indicator model of students' writing skills (IMOSS)
  15. Mapping Colonial Contexts
  16. A Multilevel CFA–MTMM Approach for Multisource Feedback Instruments
  17. Res Lunae: Characterizing Diverse Lunar Resource Systems Using the Social-Ecological System Framework
  18. The representative turn in EU studies
  19. Making REDD+ pay
  20. Work availability types and well-being in Germany–a latent class analysis among a nationally representative sample
  21. Lehrer-Kooperation im JeKi-Kontext