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Web 2.0 and the Ontology of the Digital

While much valuable scholarship on the digital focuses on particular artifacts or historical processes or subcultures, this essay offers a preliminary treatment of the digital in general, proposing that the digital has its own ontology, a way of being, and that this ontology is manifest in the technologies and human relations that define and surround the digital. In particular, the digital places a central emphasis on abstraction, and digital artifacts and culture demonstrate this ontology of abstraction even while remaining concrete. The kinds of social structures grouped under the label Web 2.0 exemplify the materialized abstraction of the digital, and this essay points out the formal and technical features of the digital that carry the abstract nature of the binary code into the human relations and behaviors of Web 2.0. Ontology of the Digital Much of culture now passes through the digital. Even if you aren’t looking at a screen, there’s a good chance that the text or image or object before you was digital at some point, that it was designed or accounted or customized or purchased via a digital device. Any cultural artifact today bears relations to circuits of money and other media, buffeted by the digital on all sides. Even so-called face-to-face conversation must surely now refer in its rhythms, its contexts, and its content to the digital intercourse that has elected itself the locus of culture for our time. Though this digital stew is thickest in urban areas and in post-industrial nations, the information age also exerts its influence in remote regions and developing countries, where incongruously prevalent cell phones hint at an information infrastructure that likely tracks and controls the local economy, imports and exports, documents and records, and other liminal determinants of identity. Even where digital devices are scarce, daily life now takes shape against a digital background, such that being “off the grid” is a remarkable circumstance, laced with anxiety for those whose normal activity includes a nearly constant connectedness. Not only our artifacts but our bodies, our schedules, our habits of cognition, our ways of being by ourselves and with others are now thoroughly informed by the digital. The recent rapid spread of the digital as a vehicle of culture should raise all sorts of questions. A frenzy of attention to the digital both in the academy and in culture at large addresses bits and pieces, as reviewers pass judgment on this or that technology, popular media celebrate the technofuture, and theorists chart the historical antecedents and contemporary reception of various digital activities and phenomena. While a few thinkers, including Alexander Galloway, Friedrich Kittler, and Adrian Mackenzie, read digital culture as partly an expression of the technological formalisms that undergird it, many others avoid such formal analysis of digital culture, which flirts uncomfortably with technological determinism. Pushing formalist analysis to an extreme, this paper analyzes the digital from the inside out, reading the possibilities and perils of digital technology from the digital’s constituent principles and basic capabilities. A single but significant example, the rise of Web 2.0, provides an opportunity to examine the implications of the ontology of the digital, demonstrating that the same perplexing character that shapes the basic elements of the digital also describes the actual objects and living culture that arise around digital technologies. The digital digital arts, culture, media, technology, and just about everything else that bears the label derives its vast reach and much of its unprecedented ability from its chief technique, abstraction.[1] And the definitive tool of digital abstraction is the discrete code, typically a binary code, which constitutes a bedrock of digital technologies. To abstract