Digital artifacts as quasi‐objects: Qualification, mediation, and materiality

Abstract

Digital artifacts have novel properties that largely derive from the processes that mediate their creation, and that can be best understood by a close examination of such processes. This paper introduces the concept of "quasiobject" to characterize these objects and elucidate the activities that comprise their mediations. A case study of "bugs" is analyzed to illustrate exemplary activities of justification, qualification, and binding in the process of bug fixing in Free/Open Source Software development. The findings of the case study lead to broader reflections on the character of digital artifacts in general. The relationship of "quasi-object" to other similar concepts are explored.

Everything Counts in Large Amounts: A Critical Realist Case Study on Data-Based Production

“…Table 4 summarizes the three properties of digital data in the case. The properties are hardly idiosyncratic to the case, but we acknowledge that other cases may also exhibit other properties (Ekbia, 2009;Faulkner and Runde, 2010;Yoo et al, 2010;Kallinikos et al, 2013). Although comprehensiveness and unboundedness are attributable only to the data pool as a whole, granularity could be understood as a property of the individual data token object.…”

“…The data tokens can be understood as non-material technological objects (Faulkner and Runde, 2009Runde et al, 2009) or digital objects (Ekbia, 2009;Kallinikos et al, 2013). The concept of object is central to critical realist theorizing and connects the study with recent discussions on materiality (Orlikowski, 2007;Mutch, 2010;Leonardi et al, 2012).…”

A randomized trial found online questionnaires supplemented by postal reminders generated a cost-effective and generalizable sample but don’t forget the reminders

“…In general, scientific e-mail surveys, even those which are anonymous, receive more favourable responses than commercial surveys [27]. As digital objects, e-mails lack physicality but they may have practical consequences, significance or relevance and, in that sense, can be considered 'material' [28,29]. Appearance and layout also matters: advertising on Google and Facebook have reportedly outperformed that of online news media, suggesting that the presentation of an online approach can affect its reception [30,31].…”

The Transfigurability of Digital Objects

“…Estas operaciones consisten básicamente en procesar datos que sirven para generar representaciones momentáneas similares a objetos ante el usuario. Por tanto, los objetos digitales no son entidades fijas sino más bien operaciones tecnológicas que emulan representaciones de objetos (Manovich, 2001;Ekbia, 2009;Faulkner et al, 2010). La mutación constante de bits y bytes es, por un lado, la fuerza impulsora así como la fuente de la mayoría de los servicios destacables que ha creado internet.…”

“…Sin embargo, las aplicaciones de software, bases de datos, archivos informáticos, imágenes digitales y demás sólo son objetos en un sentido eufemístico. Mediante operaciones informáticas, se representan como objetos sólo ante la mirada del usuario (Ekbia, 2009;Kallinikos, 2009b;Faulkner et al, 2010;Kallinikos et al, 2010). En otras palabras, los objetos digitales cobran vida mediante la organización de datos en red gracias a los procesos y cálculos de las TIC, que les otorgan unas características distintivas.…”