Abstract
According to social systems theory, systems cannot share meaning directly. Interactions produce material and symbolic information that systems must decode independently. This chapter explores what happens when the digital and political systems interact with each other, first asking where these interactions must take place and then describing the logical outcomes of such events. It argues that interaction between the digital and political systems always happens in hypertext, which itself is a complex system with logical operations. The chapter describes those operations and explains how they can work to compound the influence of certain digital logics with profound consequences for political language. In particular, this chapter describes how hypertextual deferral can work to destabilise the political world.
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Notes
- 1.
This presupposes the significance of these interactions in shaping social knowledge and hence rendering the material world meaningful (Lewis, 2005).
- 2.
This is not such a different place from the one that the interactionists GH Mead and Percy Bridgman describe. Our access to the interaction field is always limited by our perspective: where we stand, which way we look and the limitations of our sight. Those limitations are the same regardless of the material form or symbolic complexity of the interaction itself. Observation always requires representation and interpretation, whether we are interpreting molecular collisions or political argument, but in the latter cases we are arguably dealing with higher degrees of complexity.
- 3.
There is not space here to recount the many different ways in which logics act on code which in turn acts on text. In recent years there has been a huge amount of work done in Science and Technology Studies and Critical Software Studies on this subject—it has been a long while since anyone seriously advanced an argument that code was neutral or abstract in its operation, somehow separate from the humans who wrote it. Theorists have unpacked the multiple systemic influences on code—the gendered, economic and political biases that have an enormous insidious influence on the shape of our social media feeds.
- 4.
I take this term from Arjun Appadurai. ‘What is most important about these mediascapes is that they provide (especially in their television, film and cassette forms) large and complex repertoires of images, narratives and “ethnoscapes” to viewers throughout the world, in which the world of commodities and the world of “news” and politics are profoundly mixed. What this means is that many audiences throughout the world experience the media themselves as a complicated and interconnected repertoire of print, celluloid, electronic screens and billboards. The lines between the “realistic” and the fictional landscapes they see are blurred, so that the further away these audiences are from the direct experiences of metropolitan life, the more likely they are to construct “imagined worlds” which are chimerical, aesthetic, even fantastic objects, particularly if assessed by the criteria of some other perspective, some other “imagined world”’ (Appadurai, 1991, p. 299).
- 5.
Wikipedia’s frequent ‘edit wars’ are interesting case studies in this regard. The term refers to periods of conflict on the editorial pages of site entries, in which different users (or groups of users) contest definitions and aim to assert their own opinions. These struggles are largely hidden from the readers of the website but are infamous for their intense and often aggressive nature (Yasseri, Sumi, Rung, Kornai, & Kertesz, 2012).
- 6.
Like many of the energetic ideas on the digital-political space, the appealing logic of the filter bubble may be more complicated and less compelling than initially thought (Bruns, 2019).
- 7.
It’s important to note that this is not their sole interactive domain. Political systems produce privacy legislation that restricts what data can be captured and stored, for instance; politicians regulate markets in which digital corporations operate, and those same digital corporations lobby politicians directly to make decisions that they favour. Nevertheless, in my analysis at least and in the specific context of communicative politics, the dominant productive logics of both systems operate primarily on hypertext: one system interprets it as data, the other as discourse.
- 8.
There are many ways that we attempt this, many tools and techniques that can help us download or scrape event-trace data, testing strategies, surveys and interviews—the field of digital research methods is growing. The methodological challenge is deploying these different tools in a way that recognises and responds to perspectival uncertainty.
- 9.
In online communication, ‘the interacting parties meet in time rather than in a place; for that reason, response presence becomes important, and temporal rules of coordination begin to matter’ (Knorr Cetina, 2009, p. 79). In order to fulfil the role designated to them, hashtags need to facilitate this meeting.
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Pond, P. (2020). Hypertext Reality. In: Complexity, Digital Media and Post Truth Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44537-9_8
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