A theory of digital objects

Abstract

Digital objects are marked by a limited set of variable yet generic attributes such as editability, interactivity, openness and distributedness. As digital objects diffuse throughout the institutional fabric, these attributes and the information-based operations and procedures out of which they are sustained install themselves at the heart of social practice. The entities and processes that constitute the stuff of social practice are thereby rendered increasingly unstable and transfigurable, producing a context of experience in which the certainties of recurring and recognizable objects are on the wane. These claims are supported with reference to 1) the elusive identity of digital documents and the problems of authentication/preservation of records such an identity posits and 2) the operations of search engines and the effects digital search has on the content of the documents it retrieves.

Perspectives on Code Forking and Sustainability in Open Source Software

“…The main differences are related to their characteristics as editable, interactive, reprogrammable, distributed, and open [9]. These characteristics dictate that software as an artefact is prone to being changed, repaired and updated rather than remain fixed from early stages of the design process (see also [10]).…”

Digital data, dynamic capability and financial performance: an empirical investigation in the era of Big Data

“…DD have unique properties that we do not find in physical infrastructures (Kallinikos et al, 2010). Moreover, DD are so easily shared, replicated, and combinable that they present tremendous reuse opportunities (Lynch, 2008).…”

“…These unique characteristics have contributed to the exponential growth of DD (Kallinikos et al, 2010), and such growth requires the use of new organisational approaches and specific research streams. "Businesses appear to be on the cusp of a data-driven revolution in management.…”

“…Firms capture enormous amounts of fine-grained data on social media activity, RFID tags, web browsing patterns, consumer sentiment, and mobile phone usage, and the analysis of these data promises to produce insights that will revolutionise managerial decision-making" (Tambe, 2014(Tambe, , p. 1452. These finegrained data play an additional economic function: generating wishful content and unwitting meta-data surrounding main content (Orlikowski, 2015;Kallinikos et al, 2010).…”

Digital Art as ‘Monetised Graphics’: Enforcing Intellectual Property on the Blockchain

“…At the level of programming they are text files; further down the operating system they are binary codes; finally, at the level of circuit boards they are nothing but signals generated by the values of voltage and the operation of logic gates' (Hui 2012, p. 387). Secondly, these 'constitutional texture [s] of digital technologies' have the effect that digital artefacts are generally 'editable, interactive, open and reprogrammable, and distributed', characteristics that heavily influence social practices regarding our interactions with the digital (Kallinikos et al 2010). What these definitions share is the premise that the digital is almost always easy to reproduce and share, suggesting, again, that immaterial, digital-born artworks cannot easily attain the status of the unique, desirable collector's items that continue to inform the standards by which the commercial art world measures value in both its aesthetic and commercial connotations.…”