Interlude: Four Practices of Making Information Matter

Summary

Making information matter is a ‘spiral dance’ (Haraway, 1991: 181). It is an ongoing process involving many lives that make, break, and remake what matters in this world. As researchers, we are part of this dance. The central concern is thus no longer that information, tools, infrastructures and our own selves matter, but how. This is why the next chapters provide analyses of four different practices that are maybe not all equally prevalent in societies today, but equally relevant. All of them are enacted in the larger arena of surveillance, capture, and control, which is where information matters centrally.

The first one, association, is a defining information practice in today's societies. Often, but not always, association is practiced in digital, information-heavy environments where algorithms and other forms of analyses are used to identify connections, relationships, and patterns. In most cases, association is used for capture and control and it has potentially become the most prevalent form of governance in densely digitized environments. That is why it is all the more important to render associative practices more accessible by tracing each step, each turn at which information comes to matter. There is awareness about associative practices and how much they influence us. Their formative powers are recognized and discomfort about being subjected to them, or participating in their making is increasingly expressed. Critical voices from mainstream public discourses include those of Eli Pariser (The Filter Bubble, 2011), Yuval Harari (Homo Deus, 2017), Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2019), and Farhad Manjoo (journalist, The New York Times), to name a few. What mainstream discourses do not (yet) do sufficiently is to acknowledge alternative ways of making information matter – whether these are spectacular or everyday activities. This is why I want to give extra space to another three practices of making information matter that create ‘cracks of possibility’ (Zach Blas, interview) within predominant regimes of capture, control, and association. None of these practices represent an exodus from informationalized societies. They still imagine, generate, process, and re-use information, but they make it matter differently. All of them make that difference from within information-rich, digitized environments. They draw their energy from the possibility of alternatives to associative regimes.

One such practice is conversion, the idea of changing the materiality of information deliberately, of finding new functions and roles for information and infrastructures.