ABSTRACT
Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer’s above argument for the increased need to attend to the materiality of communication usefully highlights the basic approach of this book. Like Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer, we have centred our project upon tracing the origins of agendas of control and demonstrating how techniques and procedures come together in digital matters. Indeed, their statement could almost be taken as a manifesto for various theorists who seek to compensate for the relative overconcentration in recent times upon the signified to the exclusion of the signifier. As already touched upon, we cannot create an opposition between a neutral and incorporeal conception of information and communication and the material channels that transmit this information. Instead, communication and information must be understood as an im/material performance in which none of the factors involved can be privileged over the other; medium and message must be approached as a single im/material complex. We consistently emphasize throughout this book that digital modes of communication are not neutral and, although premised upon the rapid flow of information in the seemingly immaterial and neutral form of binary 1s and 0s, this mode of propulsion has historical antecedents in both earlier forms of media and the substance of city environments. We examine in detail the notion of enframement and how, whilst the virtual realities of digital matters may appear as radical new realms of their own, they nonetheless have their precedence in a history of technological
enframing, and more specifically in the evolution of media technologies as a part of this history.
