Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology (review)

The rich selection of essays gathered in this volume provides a survey of cutting-edge research in the field of new media studies as well as a sampling of the type of research performed at the New Media and Digital Culture program at the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. The blending of these two perspectives is undoubtedly one of the most attractive aspects of this book, which demonstrates a strong sense of pedagogy and clarity in each of its contributions, while craving for presenting new insights in a scientific domain that is strongly opened to contextual and cultural analysis, yet for the same reason also difficult to handle or at least to circumscribe.

The editors of this collection are not claiming to present a full-fledged state of the art where the discipline stands now nor what it is actually standing for. Although well aware of what is being performed in the major research centers, such as MIT's Media Lab (where one of the founding fathers and still-collaborator with the Utrecht program, William Urrichio, is now teaching) or Montreal's NT2 and parallel centers, the Utrecht Department has tried first of all to achieve its own viewpoint on the practices and the discourses that are associated with the notion of "new media." The most striking, and dramatically important, achievement in this regard is the definition of digital culture as an illustration of material culture. Turning away from often very radical ideas on digitization as disembodiment, the Utrecht group rightly stresses the importance of the material aspects of digital culture, not only at the level of software as shaped by as well as shaping a large set of material operations, but also at the level of the incorporation of this software in highly material hardware. The concept that the group has coined for this complex and multilayered form of materiality, namely "in-materiality," expresses in an exemplary way the will to find new paths within the broader approach of digital materialism.

Generally speaking, this ambition is successfully demonstrated in this book, yet in a way that remains rather "soft." Not in the sense that the concept of in-materiality proves only able to cover a tiny part of what is meant by digital culture; on the contrary: the topics and issues that are covered in Digital Material are important and wide-ranging and strike a good balance between philosophical reflections—yet philosophy here does not mean disembodied conceptualism—and close readings of sometimes very small phenomena. The book proposes excellent essays of, for instance, the status of the digital archive, the definition of new forms of indexicality, or the notion of audience participation, but it has no less attractive chapters on more microscopic themes such as specific discussion forums, innovations in e-learning environments or music web sites. If the overall impression of the book is however more "soft" than the editors would like to have it, this impression has more to do with the fact that the authors rely on a wide variety of secondary literature and theoretical framings to study each in a particular subfield the core issue of in-materiality. Some contributors are heavily influenced by psychoanalysis and authors like Žižek (who is of course not a psychoanalytical thinker in the traditional sense of the word). Others have a strong preference for remediation theories à la Bolter and Grusin or are involved in an in-depth rereading of Johan Huizinga. Still others privilege Goffman or Certeau, and so on. This is of course not a critique, for this diversity, which simply reflects the diversity of the new media fields in general, is the best warrant against uniformity of thinking. Yet the mere concept of in-materiality may seem a little too weak or shallow to...