Digital Assemblages Research Articles

Social media and the vitiating public sphere: Role of digital assemblages in the production of hate speech in India

In the digital era, communities with common interests interacting on social media often lead to varying mobilizations. Augmented with an imagined sense of community (nation), these interactions fuel ultra-nationalist sentiments. This leads to the production of communal violence that targets minorities. The increase in anti-Muslim reportage done by mainstream media in recent years has also legitimized the systemic othering of Muslims. Calls for violence and genocide against Muslims have now become the new normal in India. In this light, social media’s rise signifies a tectonic shift resulting in the creation of a majoritarian digital Hindu identity that facilitates the state’s goal of institutionalized hate. In this article, we try to evaluate how the democratization of social media platforms functions as a tool for political mobilization and how, when exploited by digital hate-driven communities, this results in violence against minorities. Through a comprehensive analysis of such digital assemblies in the Indian context, we seek to acknowledge this culture of hate that is taking digital India by storm.

Digital assemblages with AI for creative interpretation of short stories

Abstract I demonstrate an approach fostering inventive interpretation of short stories in Literary Studies and higher education generally. It involves constructing an ‘assemblage’—at its simplest, an evolving network of unusual connections for creative outcome. The assemblage of this article combines freshly located research literature, directly and indirectly related to a story’s themes, and/or the personality type of protagonists. Importantly, this assemblage also utilizes text analysis software revealing the relatively invisible (e.g. (in)frequent words, parts of speech, and topics) and Large Language Model (LLM) Generative AI to enrich the interpretation. The use of all these elements helps productively exceed initial intuitions about the story, facilitating creativity. I model the approach using Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, The Black Cat, whose protagonist is a homicidal psychopath. Specifically, the assemblage here includes relevant software-based research (a corpus analysis of homicidal psychopathic language), non-software-based research (psychoanalytical literary criticism of The Black Cat using the empirically validated concept of transference), text analysis software (WMatrix and Datayze), and the LLM Generative AI, ‘ChatGPT’ (using the freely available LLM GPT-3.5). One use of this approach is as a pedagogy in Literary Studies employing text analysis software (e.g. on a digital stylistics course). Yet given creative adaptability is a key 21st-century skill, with digital literacy—including the use of Generative AI—an important contemporary competence, and with the short story genre universally known, I highlight too the utility of this approach as a university-wide pedagogy for enhancing creative thinking.

An exploration of human and platform intra-actions in a digital teaching and learning environment

ABSTRACT This study uses a sociomaterial critical posthuman paradigm to examine possibilities, constraints, and tensions that come into view in the ‘intra-action’ between teachers and a digital environment. It considers how teacher subjectivities may be reimagined in new digitised visuospatial environments. This qualitative study utilises reflective interviews with things to illuminate general issues of subjectivities in human/digital contexts in a newly adopted Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) at a university in the Middle East. The interviews reveal several diffractions from the new entanglement created by introducing the new VLE. This highlights what it means to be a higher education educator in the digital age. This study contributes to critical research on digital assemblages to counteract the wholly positivist and non-problematized discourse of instrumentalization of technology use in education that often accompanies them. It also creates more openings for discussing posthuman subjectivities in sociomaterial contexts.

Indigenous articulations of social media and digital assemblages of care

Studies show that, in times of need, Indigenous people across the continent now referred to as ‘Australia’ tend to rely more on the ‘informal’ connections of support, care and trust made with family, friends and community—connections which are increasingly mediated through digital technologies. Australian researchers have recently begun attending to the possibilities social media offers in sustaining networks of support ‘outside’ settler geographies of institutionalised health. This burgeoning digital health research, however, has tended to frame Indigenous people only as recipients of care; and it has mostly focused on the narrow remit of connecting Indigenous social media users with formal sources of health information and support. In this paper, we instead explore the already-existing ‘informal’ care practices of and between Indigenous social media users. We draw on recent developments in cultural and health geography, which have sought to understand care, health and wellbeing through Deleuze and Guattari's (1988) notion of ‘assemblage’, to chart the geographies of care that digital media makes possible. We show that Indigenous social media users are engaged in the production of distinct territorial arrangements of care. In identifying people in their networks who appear in need of help, they actively and creatively work to establish a suitable working arrangement to meet that need, which participants variously described through expressions of intimacy, networks, formality and atmosphere. These Indigenous articulations of digital media, we argue, are reterritorialising new spaces of care, safety and strength, against and outside the settler geographies that lead to widespread health disparities, and they challenge dominant narratives about Indigenous digital life.

Digital assemblages, information infrastructures, and mobile knowledge work

We theorize mobile knowledge workers’ uses of digital and material resources in support of their working practices. We do so to advance current conceptualizations of both “information infrastructures” and “digital assemblages” as elements of contemporary knowledge work. We focus on mobile knowledge workers as they are (increasingly) self-employed (e.g., as freelancers, entrepreneurs, temporary workers, and contractors), competing for work, and collaborating with others: one likely future of work that we can study empirically. To pursue their work, mobile knowledge workers draw together collections of commodity digital technologies or digital assemblages (e.g., laptops, phones, public WiFi, cloud storage, and apps), relying on a reservoir of knowledge about new and emergent means to navigate this professional terrain. We find that digital assemblages are created and repurposed by workers in their infrastructuring practices and in response to mobility demands and technological environments. In their constitution, they are generative to both collaborative and organizational goals. Building from this, we theorize that digital assemblages, as individuated forms of information infrastructure, sustain stability and internal cohesion even as they allow for openness and generativity.

Chasing Future Feelings: A Practice-led Experiment with Emergent Digital Materialities of Heritage

High-fidelity imaging methods such as laser scanning and digital photogrammetry have captured public and professional audiences in a flurry of optimistic discourse about their capacities as forms of preservation and of archaeological recording and interpretation. With technical finesse and mastery, endangered heritage can, it is argued, be captured, re-materialized, and recovered from the forces that threaten it. As the plot concerning our ‘digital futures’ thickens, we discuss here an experimental project that offers an oblique approach to the practice of 3D visualization, one that subverts the dominance of neutral, technical field engagements. We examine digital materiality by exploring digital heritage objects as both method and site of ethnographic encounter. Orbiting the ruins of Asinou, an abandoned village in the Troodos Mountains of Cyprus, with our ‘low-tech’ equipment, we sought to observe the conditions of the ‘in-between’ of two makeshift forms, each as ‘real’ as the other. We focus our thinking on the tensions of translation that play on the surface of our technically crude digital assemblages, as spaces of generative potential for speculations about encounters with emerging digital materialities, their affective capacities and status as future heritage objects.

Detection of Sociolinguistic Features in Digital Social Networks for the Detection of Communities

The emergence of digital social networks has transformed society, social groups, and institutions in terms of the communication and expression of their opinions. Determining how language variations allow the detection of communities, together with the relevance of specific vocabulary (proposed by the National Council of Accreditation of Colombia (Consejo Nacional de Acreditacion - CNA) to determine the quality evaluation parameters for universities in Colombia) in digital assemblages could lead to a better understanding of their dynamics and social foundations, thus resulting in better communication policies and intervention where necessary. The approach presented in this paper intends to determine what are the semantic spaces (sociolinguistic features) shared by social groups in digital social networks. It includes five layers based on Design Science Research, which are integrated with Natural Language Processing techniques (NLP), Computational Linguistics (CL), and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The approach is validated through a case study wherein the semantic values of a series of “Twitter” institutional accounts belonging to Colombian Universities are analyzed in terms of the 12 quality factors established by CNA. In addition, the topics and the sociolect used by different actors in the university communities are also analyzed. The current approach allows determining the sociolinguistic features of social groups in digital social networks. Its application allows detecting the words or concepts to which each actor of a social group (university) gives more importance in terms of vocabulary.

The territoriality of teams: Assembling power through the playing of Pokémon Go

This paper explores how the playing of Pokémon Go can cause power to be assembled, and team-based expressions of territoriality to manifest. By playing the game, players become embedded within digital assemblages of power, which they reproduce through their interactions with other players, game features, and public spaces. When digital assets—such as gyms—are indexed to public spaces, players work together in teams to compete for digital ownership, and control, of these assets. In turn, this leads to the forging of a team-based sense of territoriality that is pervasive, and maximized by consolidating the power of the assemblage. Qualitative data are presented to empirically explore how playing Pokémon Go in Singapore can encourage players to forge a team-based sense of territoriality, which in turn results in the (dis)assembling of power. To conclude, I call for closer consideration of the implications of digital assemblages of power for everyday life.

Agency and governance: Pokémon-Go and contested fun in public space

Geographic research about digital technologies sometimes frames software as a locus of social, economic, and political agency that successfully mediates a range of corporate, governmental, and institutional practices. But some digital technologies lack support from authoritative actors. How and why might some effects of software be modulated, challenged, or subverted, even if programmers’ and other stakeholders’ intentions are not malicious? This essay argues that a nuanced geographic understanding of software should encompass varieties of actors, regimes, interactions, and experiences that can limit and complicate use of everyday technologies in space and time, fortifying some digital assemblages but not others. Using content from Reddit.com, I conducted an observational discourse analysis of the popular Augmented Reality (AR) game Pokémon-Go. Reddit users reflected on occasional moments when the game conflicted with governmental, institutional, cultural, and/or locational realities and decisions that revealed the contested and fragile nature of some software-mediated practices. Three thematic areas generated considerable audience reception and engagement, which I have termed “location,” “governance,” and “encounter.” They structure the analysis that follows, along with connections to AR research in engineering sub-disciplines. It may be useful for geographers to pay greater empirical attention to everyday moments when socio-spatial practices, regulatory logics (both formal and informal), and sub-cultural tensions limit what some digital technologies and their users can do in public space.

Data Thing-Power: How Do Personal Digital Data Come to Matter?

Humans have become increasingly datafied with the use of digital technologies that generate information about them. The onto-epistemological dimensions of personal digital data assemblages and their relationship to bodies and selves have yet to be thoroughly theorised. In this essay, I adopt various sociomaterialist perspectives, particularly those espoused in feminist materialism, vital materialism and the anthropology of material culture, to examine the ways in which these assemblages operate as part of knowing, perceiving and sensing human bodies. My aim is to reflect on the enactments of the human-nonhuman assemblages that are personal digital data. In so doing, I position these assemblages as things which are made and used by humans, involving processes of creativity, articulation and improvisation, and draw attention to the vitality of data things (their thing-power). I argue that these theoretical perspectives work to highlight the material dimensions of human-data assemblages as they are made, grown, enacted, articulated and incorporated; and emphasise the intertwined nature of known, knower and knowing. This approach is both reflexive (identifying shared tacit norms, assumptions and discourses underpinning practices) and diffractive (showing the emergent entanglements of practices and agents, what is different or resistant, what are new or alternative possibilities). It is able to demonstrate how digital data assemblages assume importance and significance in people’s lives.

Digital calendars for flexible organizational routines

PurposeOnline calendar services (OCS) are primarily used for temporal orientation and reminding. Nonetheless, calendar work may also entail generic activities such as scheduling, tracking, archive and recall and retrieval which are not adequately supported by available systems. The purpose of the paper is to explore how online calendaring may be re-configured and re-aligned to alleviate these shortcomings, thus servicing accountability in team work and flexibility in organizational routines.Design/methodology/approachFollowing a design science research methodology, the authors review “justifiable failures” or deliberate non-use of OCS and establish the rationale for, design and evaluate a digital service that configures calendaring as an ecology of separate digital materials supporting file-, photo- and video-sharing services, online argumentation, project/task management and social bookmarking. The new service is a digital composite of materials that incrementally co-adapt and co-evolve to serve primary and secondary work-oriented activities. The authors assess the value of the digital composite in two empirical settings and discuss intrinsic features that create new possibilities for action.FindingsThe authors present the rationale, design, implementation and evaluation of a new digital composite calendaring service which is deployed in two empirical settings, namely group vacation planning and collective information management. Each case features different re-configurations of calendaring to serve human intentions. In vacation planning, the digital composite of the calendar operates as a mashup allowing peers to negotiate, schedule and track vacation options and archive, recall or retrieve digital memories of vacations. In the case of collective information management, the digital composite is further augmented so as to re-align performative and ostensive aspects of routines in a regional organic farming partnership.Practical implicationsDigital composites rely on the interdependent operation of different bounded systems and services to establish configured ecologies of (previously) separate digital artifacts. The practical implications of digital composites are that they can appropriate performative capacities which are already established and embedded across different settings. As a result, they enact complex digital assemblages which can re-align not only daily activities but also organizational routines. On the other hand, digital composites remain in flux, since their state, at any moment in time, is partly determined (even temporarily) by the state of their constituent parts.Originality/valueCalendaring as presented in this paper defines a genre of digital artifacts that promote flexible and accountable collaborative work while exploiting material agency and resources distributed across digital settings. As such, it establishes a kind of meta-material that invokes collective social agency, thus re-aligning performative and ostensive aspects of organizational routines.

Asthma on the move: how mobile apps remediate risk for disease management

Mobile health apps have emerged as a technological fix promising to improve asthma management. In the United States, treatment non-adherence has become the most pressing asthma risk; as such, emphasis has increasingly focused on getting asthmatics to take medications as prescribed. In this article I examine how mobile Asthma (mAsthma) apps operate as part of digital risk society, where mobile apps create new modes of risk identification and management; promise to control messy and undisciplined subjects and care practices; use algorithms to generate new risk calculations; and make risk livelier through digital assemblages. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, content analysis of mAsthma app design, as well as interviews with app developers, in this article I argue that these digital care technologies strip disease and risk of biographical, ecological and affective detail in ways that largely reinforce biomedical paradigms. Yet some apps offer new insight into the place-based dynamics of environmental health, a view made possible with digitised personal tracking, visual analytics and crowdsourced data. mAsthma apps are caught in the tension between the biopolitics of existing chronic care infrastructure, which reinforce a strict neoliberalised patient responsibility, and the promise of collective, place-based approaches to global environmental health problems.

Digital assemblages: evidence and theorising from the computerisation of the US residential real estate industry

We develop the concept of digital assemblages in order to advance current theorising on the ways in which information and communication technologies (ICTs) are helping to reshape work. The empirical setting is the US residential real estate industry—a ‘living laboratory’ for studying information‐intensive work and the adoption and uses of ICT. We find that real estate agents' uses of ICT are pervasive and suggest that agents now embed themselves more deeply into the transacting of real estate by actively supporting buyers and sellers, rather than acting primarily as information intermediaries. Building from this, we theorise that this ICT use can more coherently be understood as a ‘digital assemblage’ rather than a formal information system. Digital assemblages are characterised as distinct patterns of ICT collections that, in use, are functionally equivalent and structurally similar, relying on standardised and commodified ICT and are neither formally designed nor collectively governed.