„The project pursues a historical praxeology of digitally networked media that foregrounds specific technoeconomic trajectories since 1989. We situate co-operative data practices, business models and infrastructures of capturing, monitoring and environing within advertising and sensor networks.“

Executive summary

In its third term, the media-historical subproject reconstructs the development of new web and internet technologies since 1989. On the one hand, its case studies are devoted to the computerization of physical environments through specialized wireless technologies, in particular Bluetooth. On the other, they trace the universalization of individualized web-based advertising in the transition from “Web” to “Web 2.0.” Both subject areas – advertising and sensor networks – are conceived in terms of the practices, business models, and infrastructures of capturing, monitoring, and environing that are generated within them. To this end, the project follows up on the work of computer scientist Philip E. Agre in media theory and data criticism, while at the same time shedding new light on his hitherto undervalued work. By turning to Agre’s work, the project’s final term pursues a political economy of digitally networked media that explains the reciprocal fabrication of data-intensive media between practices of capturing, monitoring, and environing. The historiographical work of this project focuses on the universalizations by which the perpetual capturing of personal data has become the normalized basis of Internet-based economies.

In methodological terms, the project is situated between historical praxeology, science and technology studies (STS), and the history of computing and networking. It develops new digital historiographic methods that deal with materials of a “born-digital cultural heritage” that shed a critical light on case studies on both advertising networks and sensor networks. In its third term, the project aims to synthesize the historical intersection of economy and digitally networked media. At the same time, it historically contextualizes the way digital cultures deal with everyday forms of surveillance that, in an interplay between monitoring and capturing, make a lasting mark on socio-technical media environments in the 21^st century.