Both Russia and Ukraine have been using drones on a large scale since the early stages of the war. Initially, this took the form of various types of consumer drone warfare, using commercially available ready-to-fly drones from well-known manufacturers such as DJI or Autel. However, over the last few years, there has been a significant shift towards locally manufactured first-person view (FPV) drones. This development requires – at least on the Ukrainian side – an increasing platformization of military operations.

In this article, we highlight three distinct but intertwined areas of platformization: 1) the modular FPV drone itself, understood as a military platform for sensor and weapon systems; 2) Delta, a software ecosystem for the planning and cooperative execution of drone attacks; 3) and the Brave1 Market, a logistics platform that connects military units with equipment and weapons manufacturers and is also referred to as the “Amazon for drone warfare.”

In doing so, we show that platformized drone warfare is transforming and economizing military organization and procurement processes in terms of gamification and liberal market logic. By datafying and making the operational chain from drone development to battlefield deployment (ac)countable, Delta and Brave1 are intended to ensure quality control and enable self-organization in the face of an increasingly complex network of military technology start-ups and heterogeneous hardware components. The infrastructures created in the course of platformization for drone development and the collection of operational data form the basis for future (semi-)autonomous forms of drone warfare based on machine learning and AI systems.

This paper pushes for a reframing of Anthropology as a collaborative and situated practice grounded in relationships rather than extraction. Using the metaphor of the fissure (raja) as both concept and method, it explores how research with/in communities unsettles disciplinary boundaries and challenges the coloniality of knowledge production. The text proposes a constellation of orientations – decolonial vigilance, feminist reflexivity, embodied attention, sensory attunement, and ontological openness – that operate as ethical and political commitments rather than fixed techniques. Through examples that traverse various disciplines, it shows how different media can be reimagined as tools for collective inquiry and transformation. The paper concludes by calling for creativity, solidarity and hope in order to sustain plural, accountable, and co-created forms of knowledge.

This text explores the potential of creative civic education formats in digital contexts. Foundations, institutions and vloggers have created new civic education formats in recent years in light of the shift to the right on platforms. These aim to prevent and intervene in right-wing discourse, trolling, fake news and the like. Informal formats of political education in the field of gender and queer studies are discussed on the basis of the YouTube channel ContraPoints. These are video essayistic counter-formats that aim to expose and recognize right-wing meta-politics. They produce educational formats that not only address content and information, but also aesthetics and affect. This text focuses on the format-specific nature of ContraPoints’ political education, which, following Donna Haraway, is understood here as situated knowledge.

In the Northern Moroccan city of Al Hoceima, Spanish and Moroccan history of the 20th and twenty-first century converge. The protracted anti-/colonial war fought between parties from both territories gave rise to the bloody Spanish Civil War and Francoist dictatorship and formed a basis for post-independence military oppression in the Rif uprisings 1958/59. A growing body of ethnographic work focuses on memory work on both topics in this area from Moroccan perspectives and with eyes on oppressed subjects (Aixelà-Cabré 2022, Nahhass 2022). Drawing on recent work on ‘implicated subjects’ (Rothberg 2019), I argue that it is also necessary to consider ongoing trans-Mediterranean and Spanish memory activism in order to fully understand the workings and duress of colonialism in Spain and Northern Morocco. To that end, the following paper analyzes archival practices about colonial Alhucemas and postcolonial Hoceima surrounding one private collection among this last generation of Spanish colonizers. It builds on fieldwork I conducted among former Spanish residents of Al Hoceima. As children and young adults, they grew up in relative colonial freedom under the totalitarian Franco regime. As adults, they witnessed two transitions: the transition to Moroccan independence 1956 and the transition to Spanish democracy from 1978 onwards, and many of them engage in collecting practices surrounding these transitions. This paper outlines how objects circulate in and out of one of their archives and how publics congregate around them. Through the objects, Former Residents, Spanish institutions, Spanish and Riffian actors become actors and publics who enter in relationships of co-operation without consensus about a shared narrative of perpetrators, victims and history at large. Three contested issues are made to travel through the analyzed collection: a continuously invoked notion of convivencia, (architectural) traces of a colonial past in the Hoceima cityscape and administrative and social secrets of mutual surveillance. I am interested in how these issues form part of a boundary infrastructure of memory work between Spain and Hoceima (Star and Griesemer 1989, Star and Bowker 2017, Schubert 2017). This working paper will serve as an intermediary step to explore competing and shared notions of victimhood, forms of co-operation and the creation of transborder publics around the entangled histories of life on both shores of the Mediterranean.

Although the distinction between digital and analog was first made in the context of automatic computers, the concepts were quickly broadened to apply to media and communication systems of all kinds. This working paper continues work on both fronts by looking at the historical broadening of the concept of digitality to include non-numerical systems of representation such as those used to encode text and pictures. This conception underlies the ability of computers to deal with things other than numbers, but it has its roots in communications theory, most famously in the work of Claude Shannon. In parallel with our historical description of the emergence of nonnumerical conceptions of digitality we broaden our analytical treatment of digitality to encompass more historical technologies and reading practices: not only adding machines and punched cards, but also musical boxes, weaving systems, movable type, and even alphabets and hand gestures.

This paper discusses the use of (online) theatre as an ethnographic research tool in an existing collaborative study on (digital) media use and social transformation in a Moroccan village situated in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. Due to the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic to the ongoing fieldwork there, the project team sought a way to re-establish a regular feedback loop with the village community in a non-phys–ical way. As a solution, the project team, together with the local partners, decided to bring in a theatre maker to conduct online theatre workshops, with the aim to bring the project back to life in a meaningful way and to generate data for the overall goal of the project: to explore and develop socio-technical collabora–tion infrastructures in Morocco. This working paper describes the process, motivations, design, and outcomes of the project, as well as the controversies, opportunities, and struggles that arose during the theatre work. It also reflects on the added value and objections of such a collaboration between an academic and an artistic discipline and describes the process of ‘negotiating con–nection’ between researchers and research partners amidst the pandemic. I argue that, despite the necessary challenges, using theatre as a methodological tool for ethnographic research, can, through cooperation, allow researchers to better understand cultural practices, social relations, and power dynamics within a marginalized community.

This working paper presents the preliminary results of a masterclass in media ethnography that took place in April 2022 at the University of Siegen and was organised by SFB 1187 “Media of Cooperation”. The central question was which research practices emerge when ethnographers understand the digital materiality of their research objects, instruments and environments as active participants within the research process. An approach to such a conscious correspondence (Weidle 2020) with digital materiality was initiated via the authoring software “Korsakow”. What is special about Korsakow is the computer-generated multilinear linking of individual media assets it affords. By working with Korsakow, the participants of the masterclass explored and critically discussed possible new approaches to their research data, two of which are presented in this paper. For Astrid Vogelpohl, Korsakow represents a variant of combinatory visual research in which algorithms support the analysis process as non-human research partners. The extent to which the research paths differ from analytical work with primarily human partners is the focus of her elaboration. Tobias Leßner, on the other hand, first describes his personal approach to Korsakow and the accompanying irritations, questions and considerations against the background of his ethnographic work and then focuses on the pragmatic but also methodological implications of the shift of the ethnographer’s authorship towards the algorithm and the power of interpretation towards the recipient. Ultimately, the approaches presented are starting points for further search movements for the digital and its (co-)operation in (media-)ethnographic research that reconfigures itself as diffractive in the context of the ontological turn (Mellander/Wiszmeg 2016). As part of the production of knowledge, this involves considering how the correspondence with digital materiality can be used to communicate research findings.

Climate change and environmental issues call for an ecological transformation of production and consumption. In Germany, the transport sector is considered the “troubled child” of the transformation, because emissions in the mobility sector have not fallen in recent decades, in contrast to other sectors. But there are signs of change – the car industry has been criticised since the “diesel scandal” and, alongside electric mobility, e-fuels and cycling, the rail industry is seen as a beacon of hope. The industry emphasises its importance for climate and ecology and can thus establish a stable new reference in the public.

Yet the situation is ambivalent. To better understand this dynamic, the first part of this article works through the transport transition discourse with a focus on rail transport. Extensive data from the social media platform Twitter serve as a basis. This part gives an overview of the actors involved and their positions and shows competing understandings of the transport transition as well as the multiplicity of problem ideas. From a qualitative perspective, the second part discusses two innovative projects in rail transport: the “Green Function of Movement Control”, which brings a kind of green wave to rail, and the “Digital Automatic Coupling”, which is intended to replace a coupling technology in freight transport that is more than 150 years old. However, it becomes apparent that the ecological transformation at the workplace rail is fleeting. The railways themselves are not driving any transformation, because they are instead preoccupied with issues of obsolescence – i.e. issues of ageing – i.e. with repair, maintenance, servicing as well as old technology and entrenched, slowly grown administration. This is not a problem per se, but an adequate description of the work and competences that are necessary to keep a rail network alive – and that need to be appreciated. If there is to be a change in transport by and with the railways, it will only work with less and slower traffic, also on the railways.

Stationary voice-controlled systems are installed in an increasing number of households. The devices are operated primarily via voice-user interfaces, which evaluate the spoken commands cloud-based, and are aligned to the principles of interpersonal interaction. This raises questions about the integration of the devices into everyday practices carried out in the household: How is use of smart speakers negotiated situationally, embedded in interpersonal interactions, and (how) are aspects of data privacy, data processing and potential exploitation reflected by the users? The project “Un/desired Observation in Interaction: Intelligent Personal Assistants” in the CRC “Media of Cooperation” approaches these questions empirically. However, such an investigation of smart speakers faces the methodologi-cal challenge that this requires voice data documenting not only the use of the smart speaker itself, but also the contexts of the use that go beyond mere “voice commands”. Therefore, a “Conditional Voice Recorder” (CVR), a technology developed in Nottingham by Porcheron and colleagues (2018), was brought to bear to create audio recordings of usage contexts. These include not only the voice command itself, but also a few minutes before and after the smart speaker is addressed. However, the original device required further technical development to be compatible not only with Amazon’s smart speaker model, but also products from other providers (Google and Apple). The paper reflects on this advancement and the implementation of the CVR i.e. our own research practices as data practices. On the one hand, it makes visible which (otherwise opaque) data were collected and processed during the advancement, how the usage of the CVR itself is inscribed in the data recorded with it, and which data practices were carried out in the evaluation. On the other hand, it documents the advancement and application of the CVR to enable other studies with it (or similar technologies).

There is a long tradition of conceptualising the ‘extensions of man’ or the ‘extensions of the body’ as devices enabling the emergence of technical instruments and/or of media, a tradition renewed by recent discussions in German media studies (Siegert, Harrasser, Kassung). But most of the earlier protagonists of this tradition focussed exclusively on the extensions of human extremities and the brain (McLuhan, Leroi-Gourhan, Kapp). Only a minor tradition mentioned ‘containers’ as technical and figurative externalisations of the rump and of whole bodies (Mumford). Especially the British archeologist Clive Gamble has recently pointed to a long ‘drift’ from instruments to containers, and to the ambiguities of technical and figurative containers. Gamble’s renewal of Mumford’s intuition gives media theory a unique chance to develop a new prehistory of today’s media and computer interfaces: acknowleding the long-term impact of gender divisions of labour; completing the incomplete matrix of Leroi-Gourhan’s technical extensions by pondering the distributed cognition of traps and work-places; elucidating the spatial intelligence of useful, ritual and aesthetic skills; explicating the cooperative spatial action enabled by media such as maps and cosmograms, Amerindian bundles, Sub-Saharan masks and Siberian drums and many others yet to be explored in the long drift from instruments to containers to media.

Paying close attention to the intricacies of the episode below, this paper sets out to reflect in situ a shift to digitizing “lost and found” services. Foreshadowing a more extensive study on a contemporary redistribution of assistance at Deutsche Bahn, it refers to a pragmatist tradition concerned with preserving the condition of voice. Following this vein, it faces a purist critical attitude – epitomized in the practice of economics (Orléan 2014), which defends market forces (“exit”) as a way to outperform voice in any situation of decline, decay or dissatisfaction (Hirschman 1970). Anti-elitist suspicions, brought to perfection by another branch of social sciences, have become a powerful ally of this position. Rather than criticizing elitism and privilege, however, the present contribution draws on ethnographic research which displays the ambiguity of privileged users’ encounters with assis- tants. Exploring ambiguous patterns in the practice of assistance, it seeks for a politics of pity which has been largely absent from current appraisals of digital sociality.

Registration, identification, and classification are practices that are now virtually inseparable in digital cultures. Drawing on the media history of the passport and credit card, the following text explores how ever new infrastructural cascades of identification arise and what public controversy is inherent in the corresponding data processing. Identification is a cooperative media and data practice that always involves more than one person. From the outset, it involves human bodies and their semiotic resources, linking them to bureaucratic recording systems. Even the latest digital procedures prefer to access faces and fingerprints: biometrics attempts to eliminate the distance between accounts, bodies, and persons that is constitutive for identification.

This article reviews the “practice turn” (PT) in sociology, social theory, and media studies. In addition, it develops a sociological perspective on turns in general. As other turns, PT presents itself as heterogeneous and interdisciplinary phenomenon lacking clear conceptual and institutional boundaries. In order to grasp this fuzziness inherent to PT, I regard PT as a “sign-post” (Wittgenstein 1984) giving rather vague directions and thus “assembling” (Latour 2005) a heterogeneous research community. Thus, my main question is as follows: How does PT guide research and how do researchers follow PT? Drawing on interviews with researchers involved in PT, I distinguish two major ideal-typical ways of following PT. Revolutionary approaches aim for overcoming existing ways of doing research by turning to practice. In contrast, reformative approaches aim for a renewal of disciplines. Whereas revolutionary approaches mainly arise in interdisciplinary fields and various “studies”, reformative approaches flourish on the margins of sociology. In exploring this pattern, the article develops a sociological way of reflecting PT and turns in general. Thereby the article establishes an institutional perspective drawing on the work of Boltanski and Chiapello (2007).

What happened at the Wittgenstein Archive in Tübingen? For more than 30 years, this question has been the subject of speculation and legend among Wittgenstein scholars. The archive was the first major project to produce a machine-readable transcription of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s posthumous philosophical writings (approx. 20,000 pages) in preparation for a scholarly complete edition. This project began with high hopes and promised to be a shining moment for both philosophical editing and the early digital humanities. But the project group soon fell apart. To this day, the exact circumstances of the collapse remain unknown. This article therefore presents the history of the archive based on extensive archival research and interviews. At its core, this story reveals an expanding loss of trust within a research group and beyond. As Harold Garfinkel’s breaching experiments would suggest, the loss of trust in this case also led to the collapse of cooperation.

The text presented here was written by Harold Garfinkel for the Fourth World Congress of Sociology in Stresa (Italy) in 1959, where Garfinkel participated in the Section on the Sociology of Knowledge organized by Kurt Wolff. The “General Theme” of the Fourth World Congress of Sociology was “Society and Sociological Knowledge / La Société et la Connaissance Sociologique”. Garfinkel’s original Stresa paper had to be “heavily abridged” for publication (Garfinkel 1961).
The present text may be categorized as a “missing link” both in the history of Ethnomethodology and in a crucial period of the history of the Post-War Social Sciences.

As more and more sensors are currently being installed in media, everyday objects, and infrastructure, transforming them into mobile “smart devices,” new socio-technical conditions for data collection and processing are emerging that cannot be addressed with established concepts for the information and knowledge society. They are characterized by unlimited data collection, as we enter into a constant connection with the environment with the help of sensors. The concept of sensor media therefore allows us to focus on what is constant in media environments and what holds our “digital society” together. The basic idea of this working paper is that sensor media initiate an epistemic shift from the information society to the sensor society and can only be understood in the mutual calculation and re-sensitization of data, environments, and bodies. Sensor media are also predestined for a practice-theoretical examination, as the media recording and representation of the body-environment relationship through new sensor technologies achieves a level of diversity that better reflects the complexity of praxeological description. Conversely, the cultural and social impacts of sensor media can only be adequately described on the basis of methodological innovations.

This paper will focus on the thematics of mystery, conspiracy and inquiry, a subject area explored in one of my more recent books, where I sought to un- derstand the prominent place these thematics have occupied in the representation of reality since around the turn of the 20th century. It has also long been my aim to analyse the role that these thematics may have played in the formation of political metaphys- ics. Although not necessarily one of the canonical forms of political philosophy, political metaphysics left its mark on the last century and, in all probability, continues to haunt the present one. It can be seen as a kind of mythology that is equipped with a for- midable practical e ectiveness, which gives it the power to shape the contours of reality. The thematics of mystery, conspiracy and inquiry have constantly ipped back and forth between the representation of reality in literature, particularly in so-called ‘popular’ literature, and the most disturbing and sometimes most dramatic aspects of reality itself.

Enter a modern workplace, look around and look carefully, and you will notice a profusion of inscriptions of the most modest and unassuming kind. We are not here primarily referring to the mountains of text produced and perused as part of everyday work (such as letters, emails, reports, contracts), which naturally typically are the center of practitioners’ attention, but to an assortment of inconspicuous and mundane artifacts, such as fault report forms, folders, binder labels, part routing schemes, kanban cards, identification codes, that have been specially designed to facilitate the coordination and integration of cooperative activities. We call this vast and heterogeneous family of specialized artifacts ‘coordinative artifacts’. Though unremarkable, such artifacts play an essential role in enabling workers in modern work settings to get the work done in a reasonably orderly fashion. They provide a manifold latticework of signs by means of which distributed cooperative work activities are coordinated and integrated. Based on a series of ethnographic and similar studies of cooperative work in different domains of work (manufacturing, software engineering, architectural design, oncology treatment, ICD pacemaker treatment), the paper will attempt to show that we can begin to identify and describe the logics of the practices of designing and using such coordinative artifacts.

Thomas Haigh is working with Paul Ceruzzi of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., on an expanded and completely reorganized version of Ceruzzi’s classic monograph A History of Modern Computing. Haigh discusses the challenges involved in producing a one volume history of a uniquely flexible technology. Since the first edition of the book was published twenty years ago our sense of what the computer is for has shifted utterly, to encompass media consumption, personal communication, and shopping as well as the traditional activities of business administration and scientific number crunching. To reflect this, Ceruzzi and Haigh are adopting a new structure, in which each chapter of the book tells the story of how “the computer” becomes something different through its interaction with a particular set of users and applications. Haigh connects this structure to the work of historian Michael S. Mahoney, and his discussion of the “Histories of Computing(s).” He ponders the particular difficulty of avoiding a simplistic narrative of historical progress, often called a “whig history,” in summarizing the evolution of a technology whose spectacular technical improvement has come to define our idea of modernity. Haigh also discusses Ceruzzi’s text in relation to other comprehensive histories of computing, the production process of the new edition, and some of the editorial choices involved in a project of this kind.

The essay tries to make sense of the iconography and monumentalism of Göbekli Tepe by way of a comparison with recent ›hunting ideologies‹ in forager situations of abundance or ›super-abundance‹. The article refers to two North American situations of super-abundance (North-West Coast societies based on seasonal aquafaunal abundance; and the seasonal congregations of large-scale Bison hunting groups on the Plains) to demonstrate how foragers coping with a situation of seasonal super-abundance are still able to ritually perform the reversibility of prey and predator inherent in hunting ideologies. The radical iconography of predators at Göbekli Tepe may likewise point to the ritual function of turning ›hunter into prey‹, and the monumentalism of Göbekli Tepe may be interpreted as a ritual setting celebrating the unity of a hunting congregation quite foreign to – and even deliberately pitted against – later regional developments.

Social media and information and communication technologies (ICTs) have played a pivotal role in various conflicts around the world, including the Arab Spring in Tunisia, the war in Syria, Palestinian activism, and the recent protests in Iran. This book examines the use and impact of ICT and social media in these conflicts, focusing on countries in the MENA region. The research takes an on-the-ground approach, working closely with local people to understand their everyday use and appropriation of social media and ICT. The author presents four studies covering different aspects of social media use in conflict: the evolution of the media landscape in post-uprising Tunisia; Palestinian activists using social media to oppose the construction of the wall; the role of social media among Syrian Free Army fighters, activists and refugees; and young Iranians’ strategies for circumventing internet restrictions. These studies reveal the ways in which social media and conflict intersect. The research assesses the impact of social media in these settings, considering the historical, socio-economic and socio-technical dynamics of the regions. Finally, the dissertation critically reflects on the methods used in this fieldwork, emphasizing the role of the researcher and personal biases.

This volume conceives cooperation in broad terms as any form of mutual making, in which goals, means, and procedures are seen as ongoing accomplishments. From the exchanges of goods or information, to the interactions between bodies or organizations, and the coordination between colleagues, competitors, friends or foes. Mutually making the conditions of mutual making entails translating heterogeneous interests, negotiating conflicting values and articulating distributed activities. On the one hand, the contributions cover different notions and concepts of cooperation in diverse fields of study: from the mundane cooperation of everyday life to collective endeavors within specific domains. On the other hand, the contributions share a focus on the practices of making cooperation possible through cooperatively creating the conditions for cooperation itself. Seeing cooperative media both as a condition and consequence of cooperation, the volume sheds light on a general feature of media, technologies and instruments that both enable and constrain the collaboration between heterogeneous social worlds, with and without consensus.

The digital nature of society is characterized by structural change in all areas of society. How are digital media part of contemporary childhoods? The study of media and media practices in children’s everyday lives presents new challenges for childhood and family research, which are being addressed with an innovative methodological repertoire. This volume contributes to clarifying the media forms of childhood and family life and establishes digital childhoods as an independent field of research.

The volume scrutinizes publics and infrastructures not separately but in their constitutive interrelations and resonances. The contributions, originating in a range of disciplinary perspectives, share a praxeological approach, discussing historical and current processes of mediated cooperation in infrastructuring and making public(s) by tracing different forms of the production, design, and historic trajectories of various publics and infrastructures.

As the “father” of ethnomethodology, Harold Garfinkel’s overarching concern was “the study of the everyday practices used by ordinary members of society in order to deal with their day-to-day lives.” His approach and conception of ethnomethodology stem fundamentally from a critique of Auguste Comte’s individualism, which was first put forward by Émile Durkheim and further developed by Talcott Parsons, who ultimately supervised Garfinkel’s dissertation at Harvard University. Over the following seven decades, ethnomethodology became an influential and controversial movement, not only within sociology but in a variety of scientific disciplines.

This thesis shows how the creation of a virtual archive based on the collection of documents from Harold Garfinkel’s personal office contributes to the development of a “sociological theory of information” in his sense.

When someone communicates through a speech computer, complex social practices arise that significantly shape the everyday lives of users. The example of media-structured communication via speech computers by people without spoken language shows how technology and media determine and shape everyday life and life with a physical disability. Based on sociological theories of practice, two topics are discussed: First, the fundamental importance of embodied knowledge for participation in media-technology-structured practices. Second, the use of communication technology shows how assistance, cooperation, and agency are distributed and negotiated in the execution of everyday practices. The central questions are: How can the relationship between the body, devices/things, and media within social practices be described and understood? Which theories, and in what combination, are suitable for adequately grasping the problem and understanding the social construction of disability under the conditions of modern media technology?

Why do you need an inflatable boat to record birds? Why does a loudspeaker have to sound like a nightingale? How can you see and hear bat sounds at the same time? In the field, things are researched where they are, how they are, and when they occur. Since they are not as easy to control as in the laboratory, other strategies must be found for data collection. This leads to a special interplay between human senses and technical media. Judith Willkomm describes this interconnection in her technography on bioacoustic field studies.

Michael Staack’s multi-year ethnography is the first and only comprehensive social-scientific analysis of the combat sport ‘Mixed Martial Arts’. Based on systematic training observations, the author meticulously analyses how Mixed Martial Arts practitioners conjointly create and immerse themselves into their own world of ultimate bodily combat. With his examination of concentrative technique demonstrations, cooperative technique train-ings, and chaotic sparring practices, Staack not only provides a sociological illumination of Mixed Martial Arts culture’s defining theme – the quest of ‘Fighting As Real As It Gets’. Rather further-more, he provides a compelling cultural-sociological case study on practical social constructions of ‘authenticity’.

Human sociality is shaped and realized most notably in embodied practices of interpersonal interaction. At the same time, the social nature of human beings is open for cultural influences. This book inspects the foundations of human sociality theoretically drawing on recent debates in sociology, anthropology, and linguistics, and empirically by the example of interactions on the central square of a Wolof village in Northwestern Senegal.

Voice Assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa populate private homes as well as smartphones, TVs and cars. While suggesting easy living with smart devices, these assistants are criticized as the next step of corporate and state surveillance of the private home, or as harbingers of new and simplified linguistic practices. The contributors to this volume focus on the transformation and persistence of everyday linguistic, media and data practices under platformized conditions and new interfaces. This collection thus brings together perspectives from media sociology, media studies, media linguistics and domestication research.

Recording music is rarely understood as a autonomous form of music making. In this theoretical and empirical study of the recording process, David Waldecker combines Theodor W. Adorno’s critical music sociology, themes from praxeology, and ethnographic research of hardcore and jazz recording sessions. This book demonstrates how the technical and spatial particularities of the recording studio shape production processes as a particular way of making music. Also, current music sociology and the relation of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics to ethnography as a research methodology are discussed.

What constitutes a data practice and how do contemporary digital media technologies reconfigure our understanding of practices in general? Autonomously acting media, distributed digital infrastructures, and sensor-based media environments challenge the conditions of accounting for data practices both theoretically and empirically. Which forms of cooperation are constituted in and by data practices? And how are human and nonhuman agencies distributed and interrelated in data-saturated environments? The volume collects theoretical, empirical, and historiographical contributions from a range of international scholars to shed light on the current shift from media to data practices.

This issue of Media in Action highlights two topics, each of them examined from a range of diverse perspectives. The first is a thematic focus is on “Socio-Informatics”. Socio-Informatics is an IT design discipline, which combines qualitative, praxeological research with design methods. In this section, four articles elaborate different viewpoints on methodological issues against the backgrounds of their specific research and design contexts. The second section brings together five essays as a book review symposium to Charles Goodwin’s latest book publication “Co-operative Action”, paying tribute to the lifetime achievements of the recently deceased author.

The dynamics of contemporary media have created a fast-paced field, in which academic studies are often challenged, both methodologically and theoretically, to keep pace with current developments in media, technology and society. In our view, the question of cooperation is a crucial issue surrounding these dynamics. Digital networked media in particular can be viewed as cooperative platforms, enabling people to work together, share experiences and information about their lives, and interact with each other. This is, however, not a new phenomenon: the media have always been vital for connecting individuals, groups or whole societies. Likewise, cooperation is a fundamental feature of all human endeavours. The journal Media in Action aims to explore how to connect the two observations that (1) contemporary digital media are prima facie media of cooperation and (2) media and cooperation have been tightly enmeshed long before the digital age. This question lies at the core of this interdisciplinary journal on cooperative media and it unites the scholars in the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) 1187 Media of Cooperation at the University of Siegen.