Digitally Networked Media between Specialization and Universalization (DIGMEDIA)

The project is part of the Collaborative Research Center 1187 “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen. DIGMEDIA acts as subproject A01, led by Sebastian Gießmann in Germany and Valérie Schafer in Luxembourg. We pursue together a historical praxeology of digitally networked media that foregrounds specific techno-economic trajectories since 1989. We situate co-operative data practices, business models and infrastructures of capturing, monitoring, and environing within advertising and sensor networks. To this end, the subproject reconstructs how digital cultures have dealt with their inherent control surpluses and the expansion of background cooperation between control, sensor and environmental practices. In doing so, it aims to explain how the capture of personal data has become the standard business model of the surveilled public internet. In a first part, the project historically contextualizes the boom of wireless technologies, which have become the infrastructural basis of a sensory Internet of Things. The logistical informatization of environments and mobile media through barcodes, RFID tags, Bluetooth networks, and near-field communication has so far only been rudimentarily documented in media studies. To fill this gap, the project reconstructs the media history of wireless technologies with a focus on the Bluetooth standard, which, after a period of laboratory development starting in 1989, would come to be used worldwide after 1998. The agencies for marketing-oriented usage research that cropped up on the web from the 1990s onwards followed methods of both mass and financial media for the statistical penetration of media usage. These strategies are reconstructed to trace the institutional and personal continuities between previous media research, economics, and the investment of actors in the emergent WWW. What is striking here is the sheer amount of start-up companies in the wake of the dotcom boom of the late 1990s that would use advertising networks to bring together audience measurement and marketing, capturing and monitoring. This furnishes the basis for the subproject’s explanation of the subsequent convergence of audience metrics, marketing, online advertising, and user-driven social media platforms in Web 2.0. In terms of media theory, the subproject builds on work that foregrounds practices of registration and identification. The relationship between environing, capturing, and monitoring is essentially characterized by their socio-technical and practical mutual fabrication. The third work package therefore profiles the necessary media-theoretical and methodological foundations on the basis of the work of Philip E. Agre. By questioning and rediscussing this seminal work, the project inquiries into the logics of capturing and monitoring, as well as the accompanying grammars of institutional and technical action underlying these media environments.