A Method for Describing The Evolution of New Media Ecological Systems

• In Event: Toward Multiplicity and Complexity: Examining World Wide Webs

Abstract

We are utterly entangled with our digital things. Human co-dependence on digital things allows us to invent and maintain identity, to live everyday life conveniently, to socialize, to think, and to create in a space that seems endlessly supplied with accessible, connected information. This co-dependence on digital things has been felt by anyone who has made it to a forgotten meeting thanks to an automated calendar alarm, sent a text to check the arrival of the next public transit bus, or felt the panic of having lost their phone. Digital things change our habits, and in turn we build new digital things in the style of those new habits in an iterative, collaborative push and pull. We redefine values, like friendship, labor, and love to match the allowances and constraints imposed by our digital things, just as we build new tools to reflect our values. This article begins from an attempt to find methodological approaches that can accurately represent the complex flow of everyday digital life. The piece walks the reader through new media ecological entanglements using a systems approach. It explores a range of digital materialities that are woven into everyday life lived digitally, and calls on archaeological methods to highlight and qualify valuable work being done to historicize the web, and document it's evolutionary development. Web archives around the world hold material traces of the evolution of the digital media ecology. They are rich archaeological records of everyday digital life during the first 25 years of the web. Scholars are drawing in archival research methods, historical approaches, big data approaches, and in some cases archaeological methods to describe not just the constituent elements of this complex and nuanced system, but something of the larger ecology.

Author

• Meghan Dougherty, Loyola U Chicago