Digital materiality? How artifacts without matter, matter

By Paul M. Leonardi. First Monday, 2010

335 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It sounds rather odd to say that digital artifacts -- like software -- have material properties because people generally think of materials or materiality as physical substances such as wood, steel, and stone. Yet scholars increasingly talk about the "materiality" of digital artifacts. What do they mean? In this paper, I explore two definitions of the adjective "material" -- practical instantiation and significance -- in addition to its normal connotation as matter. I argue that treating materiality as the practical instantiation of theoretical ideas (like policies that allow women to vote help make material the idea that sexes are equal) or as what is significant in the explanation of a given context (like material evidence in a courtroom trial) provides a more useful framework for understanding how digital artifacts affect the process of organizing. I contend that moving away from linking materiality to notions of physical substance or matter may help scholars of technology integrate their work more centrally with studies of discourse, routine, institutions and other phenomena that lie at the core of organization theory, specifically, and social theory more broadly.

Subfields: Computer Science Applications, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/950acf97d5aecc5c950bcb26cbd76f97cfe5ee45

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Computer Science Applications

1. Jakko Kemper
2. Péter Nagy
3. Gina Neff
4. Joanne Locke
5. Nicholas Rowbottom
6. Daan Kolkman

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Gina Neff
2. Jakko Kemper
3. Péter Nagy
4. Joanne Locke
5. Nicholas Rowbottom
6. Daan Kolkman

Citations in the corpus

• The emergence of (2016, background): “There is a developing body of research around the concept of affordances derived from the ecological psychology literature (Gibson 1977, Hutchby 2001, Leonardi and Barley 2008, Markus and Silver 2008, Leonardi 2010, 2011).”
• Transparent to whom? No algorithmic accountability without a critical audience (2018, background): “Con fl icting perspectives on this issue exist (Betancourt, 2017; Faulkner & Runde, 2013; Knoespe & Zhu, 2008; Leonardi, 2010; Suchman, 2007), but the intimate connection between immaterial digital objects and their material bearers cannot be overlooked when considering a model ’ s functionality…”
• Imagined Affordance: Reconstructing a Keyword for Communication Theory (2015, background): “Leonardi (2010) argues that materiality can be understood as (1) matter, (2) practical instantiation, and/or (3) significance.”