Closer to the Metal
Closer to the Metal
This chapter concerns what happens after the material turn in digital media studies. It is not enough to account for the hardware, the users and publics, or the conceptual structures at work; digital media scholarship must document all three at once, understanding their interrelationships and dynamics. Two case studies substantiate this: the role of system administrators (sysadmins) in the online activist group Anonymous, and the project of defining the elements that constitute spam online. Explaining these three frames of reference provides a model for looking at digital media, and exposes their limits for future inquiry.
Keywords: infrastructure, Anonymous, hardware, sysadmins, spam, materiality
MIT Press Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
