Keywords

Introduction: Bridging History and Presence

The status of traces as an epistemic resource and tracing as a sociocultural practice that draws from those resources have been the subject of intense debate of late. The value that, for example, media anthropological determinations have in defining tracing (Krämer, 2007) is more decisive than ever. Especially in the context of questions of social and cultural digitalization, which emphasizes data as aggregated data (Big Data), a certain epistemology resonates under critical conditions. Traces appear and afford a special access to (ontological-material) reality: as messengers of truth. Traces, thus, experience a naturalization (Reigeluth, 2014). This naturalization takes various forms, of course, but we would be making it too easy for ourselves if we assigned this naturalization (and consequently ontological mindset) only to the explicit “naïve-realist” positions (consider, for instance, the measurement-regime euphoria in the solutionist mindset of data analysts or voter targeting) and in regard to current data-driven societies.

It is an assumption critical of intentionality, which has primarily gone deep into Western perspectives on traces, that which people do incidentally, that is, casually, what they leave behind, and so the assumption eludes the intended communication of what constitutes traces in this perspective. In his seminal work, Rokkan (1966: 4), for instance, understands traces as process-produced data:

generated through the very processes of living, working, interacting in the societies […]—from plain material evidence through all kinds of artifacts to the varieties of symbolic representations of ideas, activities, and events, whether drawings, tales, messages, or documents.

Quite a similar understanding resonates in what historian Carlo Ginzburg famously introduced as “evidential paradigm” (Ginzburg, 1979). Together with a “growth of disciplines based on reading the evidence” (Ginzburg & Davin, 1980:14), this paradigm influenced the humanities from the second half of the nineteenth century onward. At its core lies the epistemic practice of discovering the merest trace of evidence or indication to reflect on and interpret its reasons. This epistemic practice unites modern criminology as well as, for example, the history of arts and other comparable disciplines. Additionally (cf. section “Tracing and Traces in the Western Digital Realm”), the practice characterizes many of the empirical approaches associated with the emergent architectures of digital technologies.

Intriguingly, the inherent understanding of casualness and ephemerality, with which objectivity (and truth) resonates, is deeply inscribed in the history of Western social science. Indeed, it can be traced to the historiographical debate on the status of “sources” as far back as the century before last. The court of meaning probably goes back to the distinction of Gustav Droysen (1868) and Ernst Bernheim (1908) (first 1889) in their foundation of historical source work:

If we first divide all source material into the two large groups of the tradition and the remains, then we designate with it the most important difference for the methodical treatment of the sources: Everything that has remained and exists directly from the events, we call remnant (Überrest); everything that has been handed down indirectly from the events, passed through and reproduced by human conception, we call tradition. (Bernheim, 1908: 255) (our translation)

This distinction—though of course not the only—foundation is even more remarkable when one considers historical science and social science have continued to approach each other (especially so in post-war Europe), resulting in the significance of the previously mentioned notion of traces as “process-produced data” (Rokkan, 1966: 4). Additionally, this development led to the quantitative, historical social research that referred mostly to standardized and objective-oriented (mass) data such as official statistics and files monopolizing empirical ‘authenticity’. At this point one should consider that the trace in question in the above-described development of the Western, historical epistemology did not represent a fact in itself, but “evidence”:

historians observe certain traces; they pose a hypothesis about what caused them; the traces serve as evidence to confirm or falsify their hypotheses. Since historians, unlike natural scientists, cannot reproduce causes, they must use a model of knowledge acquisition in which causes are inferred from their effects. Like any inductive scientist, the historian’s inferences are dependent on prior knowledge of comparable phenomena. (Ahlskog, 2017: 112)

There are many other examples of this hypothesis-led “immediacy motive,” based on the latent assumption that expressions are not intentionally oriented to a representation or tradition and are therefore more credible. Apparently, this “motive” also affected more or less inductive approaches as evidenced in Goffman’s acclaimed account of interaction, i.e., reciprocal orientation in everyday life (Goffman, 1959: 130): “… the ‘true’ or ‘real’ attitudes, beliefs and emotions of the individual can be ascertained only indirectly, (i) through his avowals or (ii) [even more indirectly] through what appears to be involuntary expressive behavior” (brackets in orig.).

Both the naturalization of data—following prior knowledge, i.e., assumptions on the social—and the missing contextuality it implies have been repeatedly criticized in recent years. As we previously stated, the current debate has been and is being further intensified by the digitalization discourse (cf. also Grenz, 2020). Crawford et al. (2014) refer to Reigeluth and argue that digital traces are “being icily naturalized, with its institutional and methodological preconditions being marginalized from discussion.” Consequently, the idiom “digital traces in context” (Hepp et al., 2018) reacts to the fact that traces have different statuses in different social contexts, i.e., that what happens to materials (tracing) also differs in sociocultural fields. However, the argument that Reigeluth (2014) initiated earlier goes even further. Namely, in the West, there are different epistemologies with which scientists but also everyday actors access traces. Reigeluth refers to French philosophy (relational ontology) and elaborates on the self-relational quality of traces.

Regarding this debate on the epistemological dimension of traces and tracing, our paper advances this idea further. Following our own preliminary work and—this is the essential—in confrontation with an explicitly non-Western epistemology (“First Australians,” cf. section “Bridging Vignettes”), what we propose here is another perspective: interpretive tracing (cf. section “(Com)Posing Interpretive Tracing”), i.e., systematically reflecting about the practices and underlying epistemologies of traces as objects of interpretation. Interpretation in this instance means much more than the Western rational ideal of fathoming and/or artfully laying out materials. It is a perspective that is sensitive to the tacit assumptions of objectivity and linear inferencing that underlie many Western approaches. Further, it is an open perspective that is, as we will show, sensitive to various embedded notions of time and temporality (not just time as a linear approach to the world) in particular. Furthermore, this perspective we advocate can eventually show that trace and tracing entail different social, cultural, and societal notions of social binding. In order to do so, we use an Indigenous, non-Western perspective as productive guideline and basis of orientation. Moreover, it is important to note at the outset that the cultural vignettes that follow are each intended to provide insights into particular epistemologies of tracing. Thus, we do not intend to let the Western and the Indigenous perspectives be seen as opposing each other. On the contrary, we have to understand our contemporary, globally (or translocal) entangled world as “global micro-structures” (Knorr & Bruegger, 2002).

In the following section, we will present vignettes illustrating different understandings of traces and tracing. For simplicity, we will use the juxtaposition of individual and economic principles of a Western-digital realm vice versa of some insights from research on Indigenous Australian cultures (First Australians). We will then briefly introduce our proposed perspective of interpretive tracing and present inherent concepts and practices of materiality and, in particular, temporality oriented to them. Thereupon, we argue that and to what extent different understandings of traces and tracing also convey different conceptions of human social binding (individual, collective, i.e., monochronic, polychronic conceptions of culture). We will highlight how such a perspective on interpretive tracing makes it possible to identify such “splinters” or signatures of such conceptions in the global context. We will reveal how the various tracing practices and understandings evoke certain forms of individualized exploitation and alienation while simultaneously bearing a certain socio-moral protective function. This insight is pointed out in the concluding section.

Bridging Vignettes

Tracing and Traces in the Western Digital Realm

Digital traces play a central role in contemporary digitalization in several respects; we begin by emphasizing two such aspects here. Firstly, the architecture of digital media technology is typically designed to generate attention and be self-evident in order to maximize the time users engage. Secondly, this is linked to economic strategies (Plantin u. a., 2018: 297) that radicalize the principle of user configuration. This is because the general types of users that underpin the architecture of the programs are never fixed, but permanently adapted. However, recent studies show that usage data, such as individual dwell times on pages or frequencies of clicks, are not only stored and sold for revenue purposes. Web-based software applications are now successively being designed to be less irritating based on this data in order to make applications seamless, i.e., seamlessly adaptable to users’ everyday situations and practices. Data also serve to gradually expand digital offerings with new incentive elements. It is important to note that the “platform capitalism” (Srnicek, 2016) prominently described is primarily about data—namely Big Data—that is collected en masse, stored, and (automatically) analyzed and distributed in near real time.

Online platforms, with all their promises of communication and especially with their ability for people to become visible to and for each other (cf. on the underlying “regime of visibility” Bucher, 2012: 113), are therefore built in a special way. They represent hypercomplex arrangements that can capture a comprehensive picture (i.e., “user behavior”) of users incidentally, so to speak—making them complex trace generators. At their center is the rational concept of the individual user, whose behavior can be tracked (hypermedially) across multiple spaces with precision. Because this hypermedial “traceability” is of such exorbitant value, the technologies that enable the tracking of the individual user are so extremely coveted but also extremely criticized—at least after they became known (this applies, e.g., to the UDID, i.e., an unchangeable identifier of each individual iPhone, which, however, was already been sharply criticized since 2010 and replaced by another variant (Grenz & Kirschner, 2018: 619)—at present, as is well known, Apple is again in the headlines about this).

Above all, this image of the user is characterized by the fact that they can be precisely analyzed (and understood) through what they casually leave behind (i.e., their digital traces) and—at least according to the assumption inscribed in the digital architecture—their behavior can be predicted and even controlled. “Profiling” is at the center of the core activities of the economic designers of these digital technologies (and thus all advanced forms of computational analysis even beyond the field of economics, it seems). In short, aggregated trace data are supposed to provide access to the “true innermost” realms of people (Anderson, 2008; Latour, 2007). That this naturalization of traces already described in the introduction is by no means utopian is shown by various social conflicts. One example is the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, in which a Facebook data interface was so strained by third parties that it was able to collect and pass on personal data records of millions of users (friends) by means of a Facebook app, without their knowledge.

Tracing and Traces of Indigenous Cultures, First Australians, Songlines, and Yarning

A recent collaborative study (Robinson, 2020) looking at how the emergent processes of mediatization are adopted and adapted to preserve, maintain, and promote traditional Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social and cultural values illustrated another perspective in the epistemology of deciphering traces. To understand the complexity required when interpreting traces that are both ancient and non-linear in nature requires an entirely different mindset form everything so far posited by contemporary Western social sciences. This difference is exemplified distinctly when we observe how the many diverse Indigenous Australian nations engage in a communicative process known simply as Songlines.

Visitors to an unfamiliar place might consult Tripadvisor on their smartphone for information concerning good places to eat and comfortable and affordable places to spend the night. But what if they have no access to the internet? Without a computerized trail digitally documented by past tourists to refer to, our visitor is left vulnerable and open to chance. The ancient Indigenous Songlines affords the Aboriginal traveler a means to access that information without the aid of any contemporary media. This puts a whole new meaning to—singing for your supper. Because no written records were kept by First Australians, much of their communicative knowledge cultures are only traceable aurally and orally. However, some traces have survived the colonization process—Rock Art, for example. The sacred moments, the aesthetic symbolism of materiality, and the spiritual meanings expressed in First Australian Songlines are another incredible resource for researchers studying ancient traces.

Rhoda Roberts AOFootnote 1, a Bundjalung woman, nurse, journalist, broadcaster, actor, producer, writer, art advisor, and artistic director, describes the complex architecture and properties of Songlines thus. Songlines resemble a vast fishing net extending over Australia. The interconnecting lines of the net represent the vast network of trade routes, while the diamond shapes formed within the net represent the clan groups and their ancestral territories. Songlines include crucial cultural, social, and political information together with details of resources available that a traveler needs to survive. Songlines imply a very special materiality, namely, the voice, or rather the voice that only performs according to the situation, leaving behind collective memories or auditive footprints. Consequently, they invoke a spatial and local signature that re-enacts traces originating some 60,000 years in the past. These ancient Songlines are today being recreated in a digital format. The causality and implications offer opportunities for social sciences research which are essential to the trace debate.

(Com)Posing Interpretive Tracing

The idea of interpretative tracing originally arose in the methodological debate within mediatization research and again in the context of the debate on the contexts of traces (Grenz & Kirschner, 2018; Hepp u. a., 2018). Originally, it was about tracing the negotiations of heterogeneous actors in digital spaces and thus conflicts and tensions on the basis of different kinds of data (in a linear, i.e., also Western, frame of reference), but also to determine what actually are the processes that come into view in “trace data” or “process-produced data.” In exchange with other studies and authors and especially between the authors of this chapter, it became apparent to address the underlying presuppositions about the “nature” of the trace, about times, places, and materialities within all these approaches. It also fell and still falls at a time when interdisciplinary and international mediatization research is critically coming to terms with its Western perspective and inherent biases (Kannengießer & McCurdy, 2021).

From Place and Materiality to Temporality

So far, the presented fields above highlight how traces cannot simply be read but require interpretation in certain contexts. Furthermore, the insights demonstrated also show how traces (and, by extension, their interpretation) are always significantly contingent on their materiality. As is well known in the respective debate, traces were and are brought into a close relationship of reference with the materials (substances) that have shaped and/or imprinted them (Krämer, 2007). Consequently, the entire composition of the material world (as “material carriers”), which is not only oriented toward—say—writing, falls into the area of possible analysis (again Rokkan, 1966: 4), in and on which actions that have taken place can leave “imprints.”

We have shown that certain forms of materiality are transient (the voice; but one could also say, by extension, smells, for instance), as in the case of auditive Songlines in section (“Tracing and Traces of Indigeneous Cultures, First Australian”). Here, materiality affords the chance for understanding only and solely through a specific, situated locality—and through a knowledge collective that interprets at the right time and place in and through a specific practice (singing)—and in turn establishes a social relationship over time through it. This is contrasted with the Western-rational figure of “capturing,” which, incidentally, is also prototypically expressed in modern photography. Traces in the digital, as they are also intentionally created by users, for example, in order to become visible to each other (Bucher, 2017), tend to minimize appresentationsFootnote 2, i.e., the meaningful and sensual completion of given indications (but there are exceptions, as phenomenological analyses of Snapchat (Schlechter & Grenz, 2021) or filter photography (Eisewicht & Grenz, 2017) show).

In addition, it is the significant different temporal orientations or temporal horizons we want to draw on here as they shape the interpretation of (whatever) things as traces, i.e., that are also folded into the very technologies and techniques of capturing traces. In section “Tracing and Traces in the Western Digital Realm”, a linear understanding of time is expressed in the everyday practical epistemes that underlie contemporary “trace generators” (e.g., platforms). Behavior is conceived here by providers or data analysts as something that users have done and as a result, subsequently, has consequences. And, there is an assumption that future actions can be influenced by current interventions (e.g., adapting certain “features”). Even if in the form of incongruent interests, traders, designers, and users are in a linear temporal relationship.

Compared to this hypothesis-guided or, as it were, psychologizing approaches given as examples, the time horizons of the Indigenous perspective presented follow other principles or if you will a different logic: Indigenous Australian relationship with and to time is anything but linear. The concept of place is combined with both the temporal and the material, meaning “places” within the realms of knowledge locale can be either ideological, theoretical, or memory centric. For example, when engaging with time, strong foundational philosophies exist within Indigenous frames of reference which privilege notions of cyclic continuity. This concept continually confounds Western scholars, often resulting in gross inaccuracies when engaging with Indigenous temporal spaces. Stanner’s (2009) expose of the anthropological misinterpretation exemplified by the Westernization of the Indigenous notion of The Dreaming, being reduced to simply a time constructed with a past, present, and future, is a prime example of this significant misunderstanding (Fig. 4.1).

Fig. 4.1
2 figures. Figure 1 represents the indigenous Australian concept of time. It has 2 directional arrows in a circular format with text cyclical. Figure 2 represents the linear idea of time. It has an arrow with direction from past to future.

Indigenous Australian concept of time

Full size image

The family motto of the Maharajah of Benares, Satyan nasti paro dharmah, which itself is a modified passage from the Mahabharata (Sântiparvan, Chap. 160, stanza 24) proclaims “There is no religion higher than truth.” Just as religion is secondary in terms of importance in this statement, so too is the gaining of knowledge for Indigenous Australians when discussing the methods of knowledge attainment. Truth is always at the forefront. Here truth, in an Aboriginal sense, is anchored in the fundamental notion of inclusiveness. As such, it is a preeminent precept of what it is to being an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. A notable aspect of practicing this Ways of Being is highlighted by Martin (2008: 77) when she explains how relatedness permits and encourages active participation, thus avoiding “stagnation,” “digression,” and “dislocation.” Consequently, when relatedness is properly “respected in this transformation ‘otherness’ becomes ‘anotherness’.” That is, anotherness encompasses the principles of acceptance, empathy, and generosity, while the Western dichotomous idea of Said’s (1979) otherness and its malevolent racist undertones demand the transformation to end in replacement. The emphasis attached to the method employed in acquiring knowledge highlights one of the many “fail-safe” precautions embedded in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ancient protocols to ensure individual/group agency and autonomy are never compromised, but this means truth becomes relative.

(World)Society and Social Binding

Traces do not only provide an access or orientation, which is accessed by actors in everyday life. They also frequently provide answers to the sociological question to the hidden ideas of what constitutes society and sociality they refer to.Footnote 3 However, this ultimately compels us to ask about inherent forms and conceptions of social binding that are so to say folded into the described conceptions of trace and tracing.

ResearchersFootnote 4 posit that more time engaging with social media means less face-to-face social interaction and that this reduction or absence of in-person social support may be highlighting a correlation between problematic social media use and negative mental health (Shensa et al., 2017). Moreover, in-person social support is considered a protecting factor against negative mental health outcomes, associated with depression and anxiety (Harandi et al., 2017). There is, however, still conjecture among researchers. One cross-sectional study concluded that both offline and online social support were associated with fewer instances of depression-related thoughts and feelings (Cole et al., 2017), whereas other cross-sectional studies established a correlation between in-person social support and reduced depressive symptoms, and emotional-based social support through Facebook was linked to more depressive symptoms (McCloskey et al., 2015; Shensa et al., 2020). Similarly, a longitudinal study argued that only real-life social support produced a tangible sense of wellbeing, while online social support received on social media had no discerning influence on a person’s wellbeing (Trepte et al., 2014).

Recent data produced by Primack et al. (2017) declared American teenagers using networked media technologies (NMTs) intensively were three times more prone to feeling socially alienated. Of note, none of these studies examined problematic social media use, only self-reported time spent on social media. The age of deep mediatization is not simply characterized by an abundance of access to NMTs and the distinct processes of production and consumption that surround them; instead, Western perception of the here and now is now defined, first and foremost, by an abundance of digital information (Rey, 2012).

NMTs and in particular the metaverse allow us to construct fictional avatars of ourselves through the use of filters and photo editing software. When used haphazardly, they can proport to extend one’s social figurations (see Elias,Footnote 5 1998), but as many have claimed in the preceding studies mentioned, NMTs have a tendency to decrease the frequency, the veracity or conviction, and the overall quality of interactions with real-life people (RLP), which incidentally are three characteristics that are fundamentally sacrosanct to the Indigenous practice of the “ways of being” (see Martin, 2008). NMTs’ relative anonymity allows some individuals to falsely create figurations that develop into social groups, the size of which the human brain has neither the time nor the capacity to interact meaningfully with as in a real-life situation. Marx (1920) himself understood that “social relations are closely bound up with productive forces … The handmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.” What social figurations do NMTs give us and are they consistent in characteristics to enable us to accurately track and trace their effects?

According to Krämer (2015: 174), when communicating information, “messengers and traces constitute different dimensions of the transmission” process. The messenger (media) establishes the spatial process, while the trace embodies the temporal process. Further, Krämer states:

The acts of identification associated with the reading of traces can provide a sense of guidance and transform uncertainty into certainty; the reading of traces is thus a cultural technique of knowledge production. (2015: 178)

It is the cultural technique described here in the production of knowledge that takes on the preeminent role in Indigenous cultures. The technique is not about capturing this time, this place, and this thing; it is more about flow. For the Indigenous Australian, everything is in flux. The language reflects that. Their languages are made up of 70% more verbs than those used in the West. For example, being a bay gives agency and liberty to the water (in Aboriginal culture, all things have agency). It is not that by which the bay is seen but that by which the bay can be seen—so not what we can see and think but that by which we can see and think. The next step in the bay’s iteration might be being a cloud or being a river. It is not about particular thoughts, visuals, and sounds; it is understanding the phenomenon by which they are possible. So, encoding in Indigenous languages constitutes a whole new paradigm.

Indigenous knowledge then is not so much about information as it is method. It is not about state; it is more interested in process. Knowledge is not concerned about do this, but rather how to do this. Collectivist groups where children grow up among adults and extended family where time is not a factor encourage high context reasoning (see Hall, 1977) and the foundations of socially distributed cognition (Dcog)Footnote 6 (see Hutchins, 1995). However, children of a single- or two-parent family who are reared in a more direct individualistic discipline regime do not experience this and tend to be more characteristic of the “indoor cat.” The point we wish to convey here is that individualistic cultures tend to communicate in a more direct fashion, while collectivistic cultures have a tendency to communicate more indirectly. Returning again to the perception of time, high context thinking typically employs a polychronic perception of time, while low context cultures understand time as monochronic. Monochronic cultures perceive time as tangible and linear—time is saved or spent; time is reified as money. Because time is seen as money, the West makes and adheres to strict deadlines and focuses on observing, producing, and following sequential patterns in a quest to make their time as financially efficient as possible. Polychronic cultures on the other hand see time as fluid. Consequently, traces take on a socio-moral significance insofar as non-Western notions of tracing necessarily require collectivity or community—a modus that is not possible or at least typically not afforded in many current practices of digital tracing.

Reflections and Outlook: Tracing the Social

The juxtaposition of Western and non-Western conceptions of trace and trace interpretation along continental boundaries, as we have undertaken here, is of course a heuristic one. The last 50 years of sociological and, of course, cultural anthropological and social anthropological research have shown that cultures mix globally successively or, in any case, are not fixed along regional containers (Knorr & Bruegger, 2002). We claim that the interpretative tracing approach proposed here can and should make globality an object of reflection. It reacts to the simplifying conception of society (in singular). The term “society,” or “societal,” has successively fallen into disrepute in recent years because, strictly speaking, it implies uniformity and homogeneity, whereas today’s societies are highly differentiated not only rationally (division of labor) but also culturally and socio-morally.

The term “world society” had been offered to respond to this. However, it is important that it is no longer conceived in a totalizing (and homogenizing, e.g., in the sense of an Americanization or McDonaldization) way as a result of the globalization controversies of the 1990s, but emphasizes locally situated, cultural order formations in a global context (Nederveen, 1996; for a “classical” overview, Talbott, 1996). What remains, however, is the notion of a non-determined entanglement of globalization and localization (Robertson, 1992: 100). Robertson (ibid.) describes this relationship as a “mixing of the universal with particular and particular with universal.”

Against this global social background, the perspective on interpretative tracing that we have made strong offers us a cosmopolitical instrument of analysis. The point we want to make here in particular is the possibility to trace (sic!) different world-spanning signatures of togetherness—deep-seated conceptions of social binding—that are expressed in global micro-structures. Within different communities, or groups of actors, techniques, and technologies, they act as apparatuses of the social, deeply inscribed in the (historical and very contemporary) practices of tracing.

For the digitization debate of recent years and certain controversies show us that and the notions of the social that underpin them (as they eventually flow into cultural practices and ultimately into the shape and design of today’s platform architectures) have again become the subject of a global discussion more than ever. This becomes evident, for example, when we connect the debate on “alienation” with and through digital media described above with critical discourses of today, e.g., with “digital colonialism.” The debate there is aimed at Big Data and “data harvesting,” which is being pursued especially in the Global South by the major technology corporations of our time. The somewhat broader argument (similar to the critical globalization debate, though significantly more drastic) goes something like this: Data technologies and processing procedures do not only capture the traces (digital trace data) of an enormous mass of people. But this expansive technological regime also transports certain norms and—we would add—subliminal forms of social binding, namely, massive, isolated individuals:

At the end of the day, you want to find that balance where the perspective of the local expert is respected and it’s at the centre of data practices or AI technologies, and you want to see it benefit local communities. (Gorey, 2020)

It becomes even more clear that the persistence of local, cultural ways of dealing with traces and the reading of traces ultimately also function as (often) latent forms of protection and preservation—as we can learn from the Indigenous perspective we have drawn to in this chapter. Thus, the Indigenous concept of strict adherence to social protocols (ways of knowing, being doing) acts as a form of in-built cultural safety valve that inoculates them from cultural erosion. We can follow this route of thought regarding temporality, media, and inherent forms of cultural “safeguarding” even further. Several recent studies within social sciences (e.g., Gibbs u. a., 2015; Grenz & Eisewicht, 2017) contend that platforms like Instagram, App Stores, or Twitter nowadays do not present themselves as “harmonious” orders of people togetherness, but rather as complex and often unmanageable arrangements of diverse groups with equally diverse, often incongruent interests. Consequently, the arbitrary way “friends” are grouped together by Facebook is a situation that is totally foreign to the Indigenous protocols of learning and engaging with “new” acquaintances. This process in Indigenous terms is a fairly long and drawn out process. In this sense, this text is at best a door opener to a significantly broader, cosmopolitan dimension of tracing. It allows us to be systematically sensitive to the often hidden epistemes of today’s digital infrastructures and thus to make visible a maybe even “deeper” social layer of “deep mediatization” (Hepp, 2020).