Digital Formations: IT and New Architectures in the Global Realm

Extract

Digital Formations: IT and New Architectures in the Global Realm. Edited by Robert Latham and Saskia Sassen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 367p. $65.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

This is an interesting collection of essays about what the editors call “digital formations.” A social formation is something in society that is emerging without a single founding event, in its early stages of development, and tending toward a variable structure and nature (p. 9). Despite this, “you should be able to identify a coherent configuration of organization, space, and interaction” (p. 10). Several of the social formations studied by the authors in this volume are only partly digital: that is, they combine digital and nondigital elements. They are all, however, subject to “digitization,” which involves the “rendering of facets of social and political life in a digital form” (p. 16). One important reason for studying digital formations is that some are potentially “destabilizing of existing hierarchies of scale and nested hierarchies” (p. 19), while others reinforce them. An example of the former is the open-source software movement (as chronicled here by Steve Weber); an example of the latter is what Dieter Ernst in his chapter calls the “global flagship networks” created by large multinational corporations.