Questioning the enduring but fragile materiality of digital traces: the case of social media analytics
(2018) 34e EGOS Colloquium — Location: Tallinn, Estonie (4.July.2018)
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- The enduring but fragile materiality of digital traces For several decades, the literature in computer science (Bannon & Kuutti 1996) deals with the capture, centralization and exploitation of our digitally-mediated interactions. In a positivist and almost utopian vision, we see computer science as a solution to the incompleteness and approximation of human memory. The indexing tools, artificial intelligence will facilitate the recovery of information and will create an organizational memory whose properties, such as completeness, will be much higher than those of men (Huber, 1990). Even if one understands the value of creating a shared memory of all our communications (conversations, texts, etc.), this vision is simply not realistic since the cooperative activity in the organization is dispersed (Vásquez & Cooren, 2013). Therefore a system like this would necessarily be partial and incomplete. Thirty years later, one might think that the debate is over. It is far from being the case. Indeed, this illusion of “completeness” is growing in the discourses of IT solution providers whose arguments are based on (1) the increased use of digital tools in an organizational context, the increased capabilities of (2) capture, storage and (3) processing of our digital traces: 1. The increasing use of digital devices in business interactions – emails, enterprise social media such as Yammer, Facebook Business, Elium, or collaborative tools like GoogleDrive, SharePoint, Slack – creates a mass of traces of our interactions including their contents and metadata (the logs: who, what, how, when). Although these digital traces constitute one mode of existence, among others, of our digitally mediated interactions in organizations, these can nowadays be the subject of very advanced analyzes. 2. These analyses rely on constantly evolving capture and storage capabilities. With the acceleration of digital innovations, we are delegating to machines – tertiary retention tools according to Stiegler ("Rétention | Ars Industrialis", s. d.) – the storage and retention of all our digital interactions and productions. We store, we sort but we do not throw anything (Van House & Churchill, 2008). 3. The exploitation of data, given the quantity collected, is no longer a human task (Bowker, 2014). Once collected and stored, the traces of our interactions are subjects to calculations made available in different formats such as reports or dashboards composed of numbers, visuals or graphs. This translation into signs makes it possible to read calculations that, if not readable, would have no impact on communication as Jeanneret explains (Bazet, Hémont, & Mayère, 2017). In this article, in opposition to this illusion of completeness, we aim to enter the factory of a digital traces analytical tool. From the creation of digital traces to the visual graph representing a social network based on these traces, the objective is to highlight the enduring but fragile and variable materiality of digital traces of our interactions. From a theoretical point of view, we think of this factory as a process of translation (Akrich, Callon, & Latour, 2006),. The linguistic metaphor of translation “emphasizes the manner in which entities’ interests, goals, or desires are represented, simplified, and transformed in the production and mobilization of artifacts” (Shiga, 2007, p.40). Endurance, in Stengers’ words, is understood as, “for better or worse, an achievement of a feature that goes on mattering” (Stengers, 2005, p.48). This contribution addresses the call of SWG05 through its questioning about the ways in which the factory of a digital traces analytical tool “matter and are key in making [those events of communications] ‘go on mattering’.” In the remaining, we first explain the theoretical framework mobilized to address materiality. Then we give an overview of our analysis at three stages of the translation process.
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Lambotte, F. (2018). Questioning the enduring but fragile materiality of digital traces: the case of social media analytics. 34e EGOS Colloquium, Tallinn, Estonie.