ABSTRACT

Contemporary social theory has increasingly represented societies in the developed world as characterised by networks, across which information circulates and spreads. The emergence of new ways of developing social networks via online technologies such as social media platforms has inspired many sociologists and other social theorists to devote their attention to how these technologies are shaping and reshaping social lives. The focus on the ceaseless movement of digital data, while accurately articulating the networked nature of contemporary societies and the speed and ease with which information travels across the networks, also tends to obscure certain dimensions of digitisation. The materiality of digital objects is also apparent in debates over how and where digital data should be stored, as they require ever-larger physical structures for archiving purposes. The specific features of how digital data are produced and the ways in which these data are now archived are vital to how they are understood as new forms of social data.