Materializing digital futures: touch, movement, sound and vision

Visual media with growing affordances using augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are found in most aspects of everyday life in workplaces and on household devices—computer and digital television screens, appliances such as refrigerators and home assistants, applications for social media and gaming. These affordances are facilitated by touch-surfaces such as iPads and iPhones, which are increasingly ubiquitous in an evolving global technological climate. Personal and industrial data collection, data sharing and increased self-tracking practices using social media applications on mobile screen devices that are linked to wearable devices or recorded data from ingestible sensors are key parts of this (Klauser and Albrechtslund, 2014). Today, small mobile screens, enabled by computer networks and various networked digital technologies, make it possible for individuals, corporations and governments to accumulate, curate and distribute personal data on an unprecedented scale (see Pantzar and Ruckenstein 2015; Reigeluth, 2014; Sonricker Hansen et al. 2012). The advent of ‘big data’ (and small data) technologies and the reach of social media have inexorably altered the boundaries between private and public life, and profoundly altered our sense of self (Williamson, 2015; Whooley, Ploderer and Gray, 2014). This book will consider how the former techniques of connection to community in cultural and leisure activities are reconfigured (Acquisti and Gross, 2006) through this changing landscape of digital media visibility, data agglomerations and personal engagement with an empirical digital self. In this evolving context, we find new virtual worlds forming.

Each technologically enabled opportunity brings an increasingly sophisticated visual language with the act of pursuing the intrasensorial ways of perceiving the world around us—through touch, movement, sound and vision—that is the heart of screen media use and audience engagement with unfolding, refolding, ever-changing digital artifacts. In this context, haptic sense (touch) and sound are accorded equal importance together with the visual. Emphasis is placed on all the senses that play important roles for the ways they work together and afford thinking beyond a single image, a single sound, a single touch, a single movement to imagine or do something else that positions us in the middle of a screen media revolution. It is also true that our:
Digital artifacts are embedded in wider and constantly shifting ecosystems such that they become increasingly editable, interactive , reprogrammable , and distributable. This state of flux and constant transfiguration renders the value and utility of these artifacts contingent on shifting webs of functional relations with other artifacts across specific contexts and organizations (Kallinikos et al. 2013, 357)

Found in the work of Kallinikos (et al. 2013) is the convincing position that socio-cultural technological developments have evolved through iterative processes affording numerous opportunities for construal and interpretation—a ‘media manifold’ expanding media environment (Couldry 2011, 220). The premise connects to this book’s overarching contention for a new perception of intra-communication in the everyday whereby digital media use emerges and meaning materializes from within various and complex socio-cultural relationships not outside of it (see Barad, 2003). We seek in this anthology to explore the forms, infrastructures and various relationships through situated critical analyses of the production, circulation and use of digital devices, screen and sound media and systems, and suggest a teleological orientation in our contemporary socio-cultural lives.

This book uses the term ‘materialize’ in regard to unfolding, connecting and immersive digital media. The word has the same provenance as ‘mediatization’ and situated in the context of ongoing vibrant mediation (Hepp 2013). For its part, an understanding of ‘visual n