What use is the concept of the digital? Embracing the retro

Abstract

Responding to this journal's inaugural editorial statement, this forum piece reflects on the ongoing usefulness of the concept of the digital itself. The digital as a term could be regarded to encapsulate too much of social life to be effective as an analytical point of reference. Beginning with the unstated evocations of the term, the article turns back to earlier work on digital sociology in an attempt to put this concept into context and to think about its value. It argues for embracing the digital's retro properties by reflecting on how it might be used to understand the relations between past, present and future. The article concludes by thinking about how potential issues with the term digital can be turned to the advantage of the researcher and also how a renewed agenda for research on digital society might yet be devised, especially in the pages of this new journal.

Imagine for a moment that this brand new journal Dialogues on Digital Society had instead been called Dialogues on Society. I suspect the content of the two journals would be quite different. The likely differences perhaps tell us something about the concept of the digital itself. We may not always know exactly what the term ‘digital’ stands for, beyond the specifically technical that is, but we have a collective sense of what it does. When ‘digital’ is deployed as a prefix there appears to be a tacit understanding of what it is getting at. That shared feeling for the term has remained despite the escalation and intensification of its forms and the extensive transformations that digitalisation has brought about.

The ongoing utility and endurance of the term is particularly interesting when we consider three unshakable issues. First, the digital has come to capture so many different things. Second, so much of the social world is in some way implicated by aspects of digitalisation. And, third, the digital is associated with seemingly rapid shifts and changes. As such, I’d like to take the inauguration of this journal and the vision provided by its opening editorial statement to directly pose a question. Put starkly: what use is the concept of the digital?

I’m not asking this question in order to find a definition. Such a project is not needed, we know what the technical definitions of digital and digitalisation are. Definitions are not really what is at stake, rather I think it's a question of limits, purpose and focus. It's about rediscovering or reasserting the value of the digital as an analytical terrain. This, in turn, requires reimagining the agenda that the digital might be used to set and treating that agenda as itself requiring ongoing work and maintenance. Digitalisation is never fixed. This inbuilt flux means that its boundaries need to be actively and continually demarcated.

Because of everything that the term has come to encompass, the concept of the digital has inevitably become a catchall. Advancements have left the original digital technologies far behind, risking making the term seem redundant today. A relic of times past, an old vision of a future long gone. The digital has ‘a ubiquitous, ghostly presence’ (Mitchell, 2005: 15). Yet, with good reason, we still use it as a hook in book titles, degree courses, modules, journal articles, projects, research centres, policies, regulations and beyond into everyday discourse. This is by no means a criticism. Instead, it is to say that the digital is still doing something that is deemed useful as a marker or label. It has utility, even if this is unstated. The binaries evoked by ‘zeros + ones’, as the title of Sadie Plant's (1998) famous book once put it, may seem to have been around for too long to offer a flexible or purposeful analytical frame. Yet that past tells us that the digital moment is situated in a genealogy (see for example Koopman, 2019 or Huhtamo & Parikka, 2011). The term itself and the technical and social infrastructures in which it is situated are themselves a part of that genealogy. The digital might evoke a technological future, yet its historical lines are vast.

Twenty years ago, in an interview with Nicholas Gane on the future of social theory, Saskia Sassen reflected on how, at the time:

‘the tendency is to conceive of the digital as simply and exclusively digital and the non-digital…These either/or categorizations filter out alternative conceptualizations, thereby precluding a more complex reading of the intersection and/or interaction of digitization with social, material and place bound conditions.’ (Sassen in Gane, 2004: 140)

The problem that Sassen was concerned with, along with the need for alternative conceptualizations outlined in the interview, has only been exacerbated by the embedding of the digital further into the social. The idea that things are either digital or non-digital breaks down quickly with the regionally specific technological infrastructures that are now established and subject to expansion. What use is the concept of the digital when that distinction breaks down? There is not then a digital society and a non-digital society. Instead, there are versions of the digital society, as Sassen puts it here, occuring in ‘place bound conditions’. As this would suggest, the digital alone should not be the focus. It is a broad canvas that does not provide manageable limits. Instead it needs limits placing inside that wider frame. It requires specific focal points to be identified within the digital so as to give direction and to impose meaning from the inside-out. These focal points would need to inject a sense of the particular where the broader term lacks it. Indeed, the project of a digital sociology has acknowledged this necessity for balancing the specific and the contextual from the outset, with Orton-Johnson and Prior's (2013: 2) introduction to their collection of pieces on the subject contending that the point is ‘to reflect on the increasing normality and inclusion of the digital in everyday life, resisting binary tendencies and highlighting the mess and the continuities in new digital social landscapes’.

Similarly, when seeking to set the scene for such study Noortje Marres begins by identifying a problem with the concept of the digital, suggesting that:

‘we need to consider a fundamental ambiguity surrounding ‘the digital’ in the phrase ‘digital sociology’. The ‘digital’ in digital sociology may denote at least three different things: it may refer to (1) the topics of social inquiry; (2) the instruments and methods of social research; (3) platforms for engaging with the audiences and publics of sociology.’ (Marres, 2017: 24).

In this sense, the digital represents a rethinking of the social alongside a rethinking of how it can be researched and also how ideas about it can be disseminated. Such an observation is also incorporated into Barnard's (2017: 199) distinction between ‘digital scholarship’ and ‘scholarship of the digital’ and in Lupton's (2015: 190) conclusion that the digital raises questions about both ‘focus and methods’. It is for this reason and due to the problems of the term digital that Marres (2017: 25) was explicitly not ‘forcing a quick settlement of the definition of digital sociology’.

One conclusion we might draw here is that the value of the concept of the digital is in what we choose to place within it. The digital is a constellation rather than a single point of reference. The concept still has value but the agenda needs to be actively tackled and reimagined. There can’t be a single framework for this. The launch of this journal provides a moment and new space in which the digital society agenda can be restated and reworked. Despite its obvious problems, the concept of the digital can be put to use as a field or a space in which different constellations can actively hold. The question is how to get at the changes brought by digitalisation, and then within this how to understand the variegation in its depths and scales, across temporal lines, to capture atrophy and waste, to consider the long-held emotional and embodied attachments formed over time, and to incorporate nostalgia as well as the draw of the new. There are, alongside this, the methodological problems posed by the recursions of the digital (see Hayles, 2012; Hui, 2019), in which data circulations, algorithmic decisions and analytical process feedback into the social world in repeated loops over time – looping over and over (see Beer, 2022). And of course there are also the geopolitical forces (see for example Crampton, 2015; Shen & He, 2022; Tang, 2022), the regionally specific variations in infrastructure (Srinivasan, 2022), the embedded discriminations (Chun, 2021), the emergent ethical questions (Amoore, 2020) and the relations between the digital and the environmental too (see for instance Crawford, 2021).

The digital may seem old-hat, a redundant artefact, a fossil from a different time, yet abandoning the term on that basis could be a mistake. It still has purpose, if it is dealt with actively and is reimagined in response to its shifting forces. Accepting and embracing the retro properties of the term digital might be a productive step in itself. Marres (2017: 21) has claimed that ‘the digital does not solve sociology's problems, to the contrary, it unsettles’. Embracing the digital's retro properties can unsettle and in so doing open-up new perspectives on the relations between the past, present and future. It also guides us away from getting caught-up in searching only for the new and provokes a reimagining of what the purpose of the concept of the digital might yet be.