Keywords

Introduction

Many years ago, in the late 2000s, I was part of a working group which aimed to reform our program at the former Royal School of Library and Information Science in Copenhagen. One course we specifically talked about was ‘Literature’, and it was suggested that the course should be called ‘Digital Literature’ to align with the then high-profile digitization discourse in society and in academia. Suddenly, an old professor in the field shouted: ‘There is no such thing as digital literature. It is bullshit. Take a look at what people are buying and reading: physical books!’ The professor was and is still right. People still buy and read physical books, and people listen to audiobooks and read e-books. But the professor forgot one thing that also characterized literature back in the late 2000s: these books were produced digitally, all the way from the author’s word processor to the production chain. Today, digital-only has still not entirely replaced physical and analogue literature (fiction and non-fiction), but the infrastructure in which literature is embedded and inscribed is completely different, configured by a digital media which shapes access and circulation. We have social media sites for promoting and discussing literature, platforms such as ResearchGate, search engines affecting access and circulation, publishers’ online catalogues, and other forms of digital media platforms without which literature, its use, and circulation in digital culture, would be unthinkable. So, while the actual literary work comes in both analogue and digital forms, it does so within a digital infrastructure that tracks, traces, counts, recommends, shares, or links. This infrastructure is characterized by a double flow of data: the tracking and tracing of users’ actions feeds data back into the infrastructure, which then algorithmically archives, processes, and further circulates data. In the following, I consider these infrastructures as forming the socio-material conditions for the circulation of, and access to, sakprosa (English: ‘subject-oriented prose’; see Berge and Ledin in this volume and the introduction).

The chapter sets out to present a theoretical and conceptual discussion of the conditions and functions of sakprosa in digital media culture by looking at the effect(s) imposed by digital means and modes of circulation and access. Digital media culture has a different set of affordances, implying that the circulation of sakprosa goes through a range of different agents (humans or algorithmic) producing many forms of (meta)data and paratexts affecting access and reception. I argue that we must work towards specifying the possibilities of circulation and their effects. The consequence of this argument is that we need to understand digital media culture as a socio-material condition for sakprosa. In order to clarify what this means, I adapt the concept of a discourse network from the German media theorist Friedrich Kittler (1990). I thus argue for the necessity of a firm understanding of this condition in order to make sense of what exactly the role of digital media is regarding sakprosa and its configurations in current digital culture. My hope is that this argument sparks an understanding in sakprosa research of digital media as not in opposition to sakprosa, but rather as a material condition in digital culture, just as print was some time ago.

The chapter furnishes the modern research conversation about sakprosa in digital culture with a vocabulary and modes of understanding that enables us to see how digital materiality not only surrounds sakprosa but also has performative effects shaping how we perceive, access, and make use of it. The novelty of the approach taken here with regard to sakprosa is to introduce a set of concepts and analytical gaze from materialist media theory and use that as a point of departure for examining and understanding how digital media culture works as a socio-material condition for the circulation and access to sakprosa, how to read and write it and what we, on the whole, make of it.

I approach my discussion in the following way. Having made some initial methodological remarks, I introduce Kittler’s notion of discourse network and how I adapt it here. Next, supplementing the notion of discourse network with some observations on digital archives and algorithms serves to establish some conceptual building-blocks for the next two examples. Analyzing how a particular scholarly publishing house encourages authors to think about their contributed articles and their circulation, and how a Danish public authority website communicates and grants access to state-based information, serves to show how a digital discourse network sets up conditions and possibilities for the circulation of, and access to, sakprosa.

Methodological Remarks

Before venturing into the discussion about digital media as a socio-material condition for the circulation of, and access to, sakprosa, some initial remarks are needed about the relationship between sakprosa, digital media, and digitization. As sakprosa is many things (e.g., scholarly treatises, textbooks, administrative records, account books), so are digital media (e.g., games, word-processing, databases), and there has always been a close relationship between any given discourse and the media available for articulating and circulating it. Speeches, for instance, are a historical product of primary orality (Ong 1982) while the list is a product of writing (Goody 1977). While some may regard this as a mere historical circumstance, I deal with it here as an analytical point of departure. As such close relationship is another way of saying that the media technologies available shape what we consider and study as sakprosa; that it is not pure free-floating spirit. There is something that makes our historically formed conceptions of sakprosa (and other kinds of cultural artifacts) possible and that is the medium into which it is inscribed. I am also not going to talk about the digitization of sakprosa and what is lost and gained; that is, the process of converting analogue material into digital form. Rather, I am going to speak of both analogue and digital sakprosa and digital forms, and how they feed into and are accessed in a digital media culture. I am going to examine digital media culture as a precondition for both analogue and born-digital forms of sakprosa. Using ‘precondition’ is not the same as being deterministic. It is a way of claiming that digital media set up an infrastructure providing different sets of affordances for our everyday involvement with and in communication, written or oral. Of course, the mundane use of communication is shaped by the people using its means and modes, ranging from the accidental to the strictly routinized use. For citizens, audiences, publics, or users in most Western cultures, however, digital media and their communicative affordances play, if not a key role, then at least some kind of recognizable role in our daily interactions with sakprosa. It is not a question of whether digital media are good or bad for our involvement with sakprosa. That may well be the case. Rather, it is a question of what kind of material configurations (i.e., digital media) shape our perceptions, use, and production of sakprosa.

We can easily interrogate sakprosa without necessarily resorting to any reflection of digital media and vice versa. However, as many of today’s cultural forms and social interactions are being shaped by digital media, this would be close to a fallacious mission. Theoretically, empirically, and methodologically, we cannot approach sakprosa any longer as if it is only a product of print. Whether we like or not, digital media are the communicative currency without which we are unable to tap into any understanding of sakprosa and its involvement in digital media culture. We are way past the point of discussing how analogue and printed texts are converted to digital form. In current culture, many forms of communication are born digital (e.g., social media); that is, they have no print or analogue equivalent, but of course remediate previous forms of text. As Jack Goody (1977) reminds us regarding the written list: some forms of communication are medium-specific. Born digital, then, means that these forms of text carry with them features fairly unique to the digital medium, and these features shape our conceptions of and practices with digital media and the discourses they affect.

Clearly, sakprosa becomes a different thing with digital media, but of course it also inherits remediated things from its analogue and print condition (Bolter and Grusin 1999). This chapter ventures into the kind of thing that sakprosa is materially and supposedly becoming (as opposed to an ontological category), when looked at from the point of view of the means and modes of digital access and circulation.

Digital Media as the Contemporary Discourse Network for Sakprosa

Friedrich Kittler’s book Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Kittler 1990) can serve as a useful conceptual tool with which to, initially, frame sakprosa and how it is constituted by digital media. But what does Kittler mean with his notion of a discourse network? In general, Kittler’s notion of discourse network is to be understood as the assemblage of technologies, power, and institutions that make meaning, or more precisely the production of meaning, and something like literature and cultural artifacts in general, possible. It ‘can designate the network technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data’ (Kittler 1990: 369). Of interest here is Kittler’s use of information theory concepts such as selection, storage, processing, and data, and the relationship to institutions. This indicates his undertaking: to produce an understanding of what makes literature possible in particular epochs with particular technologies and particular forms of institutionalizations (e.g., the university) affecting how we perceive literature, but with a vocabulary not usually applied to describe such a situation. For Kittler ‘Media, from books to cinema to computers, were not reducible to either content or to sociological conditions, but had to include considerations that took into account how media technologies afford specific forms of perception and modes of memory as well as social relations’ (Parikka 2012: 68). Here we see how the notion of a discourse network is similar to Foucault’s (1972: 127) idea of a historical a priori, which is not a surprise given that Kittler’s book is partly a Foucaultian take on media technologies in its ambition ‘to map out the epistemic conditions of media’ (Parikka 2012: 68). But it is also a broader take on media than usual in media and communication studies, as Kittler applies it ‘to all domains of cultural exchange’ and as that which is ‘determined by the technological possibilities of the epoch in question’ (Wellbery 1990: xiii).

In dealing with (fiction) literature as a media system, Kittler (1990) analyzes how literature functions as, and is made up of, channels of communication emphasizing how the very medium, consisting of sense and nonsense, noise, and information, with its own characteristics, or affordances, shapes the kinds of messages going through it and our perceptions of these messages. In this take on literature, Kittler offers a rethinking of it through classic media terms such as ‘recording’, ‘archiving’, ‘messages’, ‘communication’, ‘noise’, and ‘transmission’, at the expense of the hermeneutical paradigm of meaning, understanding, and interpretation: ‘if literature is medially constituted—that is, if it is a means of processing, storage, and transmission of data—then its character will change historically according to the material and technical resources at its disposal. And it will likewise change historically according to the alternative medial possibilities with which it competes’ (Wellbery 1990: xiii). In doing this, Kittler indicates how literature becomes something other than hitherto conceived of in literary criticism; namely, literature as a product of a specific technology called writing. With the rise of what Kittler calls ‘technical media’ (gramophone or film), or in Benjamin’s (1977/1935) terms, a media of mechanical reproductions, writing becomes one medium among other media capable of recording, storing, and producing discourses such as the gramophone and film (and nowadays digital media). As such, literature, and sakprosa too, can be discussed and compared with other forms media communicating and recording their specific parts of human experience (i.e., sound, motion, or writing). This is also similar to what Ledin et al. (2019) have called multimodal non-fiction.

Kittler (1990) identifies two prevalent discourse networks: the discourse network of 1800 (Romanticism) and the discourse network of 1900 (Modernism). The former is characterized by the dominance of the writing technology and its monopoly as the key storage medium: ‘The discourse network of 1800 functioned without phonographs, gramophones, or cinematographs. Only books could provide serial storage of serial data’ (Kittler 1990: 116). The medium of writing universalized people’s experiences and perceptions of the world in that writing conditioned what could be stored and communicated: ‘writing functioned as a universal medium—in times when there was no concept of medium’ (Kittler 1999: 5–6). This means that, in the discourse network of 1800, the storage of sounds, for instance, is dependent on musical scores—a product of writing. This implies that perceptions of sound are determined by a medium other than sound. This insight of Kittler’s is essential if we are to understand what kinds of discourses (in a broad sense) are possible given the presence of particular media technologies.

The discourse network of 1900 is characterized by the advent of the gramophone and film as two major technologies challenging and ending the monopoly of writing as the main storage medium: ‘The ability to record sense data technologically shifted the entire discourse network ca 1900. For the first time in history, writing ceased to be synonymous with the serial storage of data’ (Kittler 1990: 229). With the gramophone and film, acoustical and optical data could be stored without the use of writing, thus enlarging the foundation on which we perceive, store, and communicate knowledge about the world. Simply put, with gramophone and film, we are able to sense other things (sound and vision) than what the written word is capable of.

Phenomenologically, writing, gramophones, and film, respectively, represent different modes of articulating and organizing experience and perceiving our worlds. Today, written, acoustical, and optical data still work as distinct media with their distinct discourses and affordances, but they are also integrated in digital media, which configures their production, circulation, and access. In fact, books have been digital in their production for a long time, although it is only within the last decade or so that books have been digital in their consumption mode, thanks to, for example, e-readers, tablets, mobile phones, and other digital formats. Film and music streaming services also provide access to acoustic and optical media, but their very access and circulation are conditioned by digital media.

A discourse network, as argued by Kittler, thus serves as the medial condition for the production, circulation, and reception of cultural data, and therefore sakprosa. Nowadays, with digital media as the discourse network, the infrastructure, or even as ontology (Kittler 2009; Peters 2015) of our communications, it is almost unthinkable not to consider its communicative and epistemic force, due to its calculative capabilities and hardware and software power. This makes it possible to speak of digital media discourse networks or infrastructures. Digital infrastructures may serve as what Kittler calls ‘the unarticulated as background of all media’ (Kittler 1990: 302). With the notion of the ‘unarticulated’, we will once again have to understand Kittler’s information theory inspiration. Given that information is a selection among probabilities, there will always be something behind it (the unarticulated), which is not part of the message as such, but part of making the message possible. In the digital media discourse network, this takes the form of data and algorithms. Background digital media play a central archival role due to their connection with databases and algorithms that are designed to track, trace, sort, calculate, and arrange our communicative activities based on some sort of data collection.

The take-home message for sakprosa is clear. Looked upon from the notion of a digital discourse network, sakprosa is inscribed in an environment of software, algorithms, and archival undertakings. Whether in print or in digital form, access to and the circulation of sakprosa happens against a background of digital media processing and storing various sorts of data because of the dialectical relation between users’ actions and algorithmic actions producing new forms of data, and thus access points.

The Background of Digital Media: The Archive, the Database, and Algorithms

While Kittler (1990) does not discuss the role of the archive (or database) and algorithms in a discourse network at any length, but implies them, I am going to briefly explain the role of the archive and algorithms that make up particular features in understanding digital media culture. This understanding will be used in the two examples, together with Kittler’s notion of a discourse network.

Obviously, the idea of an archive is not a product of digital media. Since the invention of writing, human cultures have been able to store items externally from mind and body. It is not unfamiliar for sakprosa to be connected with the notion of an archive; for example, several scholarly journals use ‘archive’ in their titles, such as ‘Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie’. Here an archive is alluded to in the sense of a repository, or a static collection of papers. It is ‘writing that stores writing’, as Kittler (1999: 7) puts it. What positions the archive in such a central place in digital media culture, however, is the computer as a medium; as a medium of storage, communication, and transmission in one place, in one medium. The particularities of digital media lie in their fundamental configuration as archival media, a view taken seriously in media archeology by scholars such as Wolfgang Ernst and Jussi Parikkka (Parikka 2012), and which is similar to logistical media as dealt with by John Durham Peters (Peters 2015).

Archiving and archives in digital culture and with digital media, in contrast to traditional archives (e.g., state or bureaucratic ones) which are rather static, can be understood with reference to Eivind Røssaak’s (2010) notion of the ‘archive in motion’. Archives in this sense are ‘associated with the advent of computer technologies and ultimately, the Internet, where constant transfer and updating functions as well as “live” communication and interaction redefine the temporality of the archival document itself’ (2010: 12). The notion of temporality is crucial, as archiving takes place in real-time and archives real-time action, implying an ever-changing archive and a differentiation from traditional archives. What defines the archive in digital culture is therefore ‘the dynamics, permanent updating, and conflation of software with search’ (Parikka 2012: 123). Archive in a digital sense, then, is not determined by the medium of writing but by the digital medium. This means ‘a turn from object-centred archiving to objects in the software sense, their searchability and transformation into forms that make them viewable and experiential through encoding, streaming and other software techniques’ (Parikka 2012: 124). Digital media as multimedia archives store words, sounds, or images by treating them on the same (binary) level and not with reference to their modality, which is a phenomenological feature. Multimedia is an ‘interfacial betrayal’ as there are ‘no multimedia in virtual space but just one medium, which calculates images, words, and sounds indifferently because it is able to emulate all other media. The term multimedia is a delusion … Multimedia, then, is for human eyes only’ (Ernst 2013: 118–119, 121). This anti-phenomenological stance taken by Ernst is useful, as it makes us aware of how the computer as a medium handles cultural data (such as sakprosa) on its own media-technical premises, thus shaping how it is represented, stored, and circulated.

Lev Manovich (2001) is another scholar considering the relative uniqueness of digital media with reference to some sort of collection: the database. By means of the database, Manovich (2001: 218) claims that the computer age introduces a correlate to narrative: ‘Many new media objects do not tell stories; they do not have a beginning or end, in fact, they do not have any development, thematically, formally, or otherwise that would organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, with every item possessing the same significance as any other’. Looking at, for instance, search engines, we can see how such a media object does not tell a story, while users on Instagram, another new media object, claim to be posting stories. But the point for Manovich is that these media objects ‘appear as collections of items on which the user can perform various operations—view, navigate, search. The user’s experience of such computerized collections is, therefore, quite distinct from reading a narrative or watching a film or navigating an architectural site’ (Manovich 2001: 219). This distinct experience on the part of users, according to Manovich, is what makes the database a cultural form. While Manovich here differs somewhat from Ernst, he nevertheless conceives of the computer as a medium emulating all other media (Manovich 2001: 25). As the background of media, the database acts as the unarticulated, only demonstrating its existence through the various operations we perform in order to interact with digital media.

Applying the idea of archives and databases to sakprosa in digital culture enables us to understand how many forms of sakprosa come to us in archival, database, or list forms (cf. Goody 1977; Ledin 2015; Young 2017) enabling communicative interactions such as searching, navigating, and looking things up as supplements to reading. As mentioned, the notion of the list is of course not new with regard to sakprosa, but because digital media in many ways are media that arrange, list, and/order items, they hold a certain communicative ‘logic’ that is consequential regarding how sakprosa circulates and is accessed in digital media. With this, we might go as far as to say that this is what makes sakprosa become its own archive or turn into an archive; an archive that is both dynamic and processual in contrast to classic physical archives (Parikka 2012).

Another key feature of digital media and digital archives is algorithms. For some time now, the importance of algorithms has been recognized in many fields outside computer science. While much research on the role of algorithms in digital culture has focused on what they do to audiences or users, and their black-box nature (Pasquale 2015), other kinds of research focus on what we as publics, audiences, consumers, readers, or users, do with algorithmic systems by means of living with, interpreting, or decoding algorithms (Andersen 2020; Bucher 2017; Gillespie 2014; Lomborg and Kapsch 2020). Almost by ‘nature’, digital media are algorithmic systems (Seaver 2014) or automated media (Andrejevic 2020) due to their calculative powers. Algorithms in digital media networks control, curate, monitor, sort, recommend, and/or predict based on the data circulating as a result of the actions of users and the databases imbedded in various platforms. Algorithms, therefore, communicate, and thus shape communication. This means that sakprosa produced and accessed within a digital media network must, to some extent, be sensitive to algorithms and their performative effects. As I show below, academic publishing houses encourage their authors to think carefully about titles so that they can be found by, for instance, search engines and their algorithms.

Sakprosa as Digitally Configured: The Case of Borger.dk

‘The state, that’s sakprosa’, writes Tønnesson (2008: 61; my translation). It is hard to conceive of the modern form of the state and its exercise of power and governance, its articulation of rights and obligation, without texts: laws, government orders, financial statements, evaluations, contracts, memos, pamphlets, reports, and their corresponding forms of archiving. State and society at large are to a very large extent organized by means of sakprosa (Goody 1986). This is a sphere where power is textual and textually motivated, mediated, and enforced, entailing that communication between public authorities and citizens is to a large extent textual and articulated discursively through a range of genres. With the use of digital media in the sphere of the state, this form of communication is somehow changed or re-configured. In Denmark, this change was emphasized with the introduction of the common public portal Borger.dk (www.borger.dk) in 2007, where state-based information and services are communicated.

Established in 2007, the Borger.dk portal (see Fig. 1) is today the main communication channel between Danish public authorities and citizens. Before the introduction of this portal, communications from public authorities came in both oral and print media, and in such diverse genres as meetings, in person inquiries, consultations, letters, brochures, or pamphlets. As part of a general national digitization strategy, the purpose from the outset was to develop one comprehensive access point for state-based information and services. The portal was developed through three versions. First, the whole idea of a common citizen portal was the product of a survey among citizens which was completed in 2005. The results showed a huge number of public homepages and the need for a general guide to state-based information. The second version of the portal was launched in 2008, with ‘My Overview’ being added and thus personalizing access, which has been a significant part of the portal since then. Through ‘My Overview’, by means of a NemID, citizens can now gain access to personal information from the Danish Civil Registration System (CRS; in Danish CPR), income information from the tax authorities and individual contacts with the health-care system. In the third version, there is now an emphasis on a good user experience by means of user-friendly communication, clarity, and action-oriented texts with the hope of guiding citizens to self-service. Most popular categories and sites on the portal have now been assigned their own category, such as ‘Retirement pension’ and currently, ‘Corona passport’.

Fig. 1
A screenshot of the website, Borger dot d k. It has 3 photos, each paired with a few lines of text in a foreign language. Photo 1 presents a person wearing headphones around his neck, 2. A coffee cup, a stethoscope, and a laptop on a table, and 3. A child smiling while being held by a woman.

Borger.dk. Screenshot

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With these changes in communication and assemblages of text, Borger.dk is now an established site for state-based information in Denmark, shaping citizens’ interactions with a variety of sakprosa genres discursively articulated in action-oriented texts configured by the digital medium through which Borger.dk is launched. Borger.dk is now basically a hypertextual archive, with links, keywords, and categories. Many texts, a great deal of data, and a range of public homepages have been converted and transposed to one access portal consisting of action-oriented texts, and one main list of hypertextual categories with the hope of providing an overview, user-friendly communication, and self-service. Old genres and old media disappear and are transposed to the interface of Borger.dk. As Kittler (1990: 275) points out, ‘Transpositions liquidate the medium from which they proceed’. The old media (and old genres) are liquidated in the sense that the features determining their access and circulation are determined by the new medium affording new communicative actions too (Andersen 2017, 2021a). This is evidenced by the hypertextual categories at play and demonstrates how sakprosa is inscribed into a background with different set of affordances. The consequence of this kind of inscription is that, beyond the disappearance of old media, what we see as users are categories, hypertexts, and keywords as a means to access and ultimately make sense of state-based information. This inscription practice further testifies to the conflation of storage and transmission that is so common with digital archives (Parikka 2012).

Examining the Borger.dk portal shows how this form of communication today is shaped and enacted by the digital medium. There is a shift in genre and communicative demands. At the expense of the visibility of particular forms of texts such as pamphlets, leaflets, or forms, there is a shift towards hypertext, navigation, and searching a collection of items (a database) as primary communicative actions enforced by the very materiality of digital media (Finnemann 1999). As Manovich (2001: 128) points out regarding our actions with digital media: ‘almost every practical act involves choosing from some menu, catalogue, or database’. We can see this with Borger.dk, where a user is, at the initial point of access, invited to choose from the menus or categories. Recalling Manovich (2001: 219), what we see is a collection of items on which we are invited to perform operations such as viewing, navigating, and searching in order to communicate with Borger.dk. We are not presented with a beginning or end, as Borger.dk, with its categories, hyperlinks, and menus, does not tell a story on the interface level. Borger.dk thus brings with it a new textual-communicative condition for our perceptions of state-based information. Compared with, for instance, print-based archives, interaction at Borger.dk, with its hyperlinks, navigation, and search features at the forefront, is changed from the act of reading to an act of re-activating the archive (Ernst 2013: 121). The user is re-activating, not reading, Borger.dk by means of every click or navigation action on the site. This practice of re-activating also creates a new editorial boundary: self-service, the declared goal of Borger.dk, but it is self-service as a communicative action and as means to interact with the texts. One implication of this is that the demarcation or visibility of genres (e.g., pamphlets) disappears, as they are ‘converted’ into hypertextual categories to be navigated and searched in order to make sense of them.

Nowhere is the citizen invoked as a citizen (‘borger’ literally translates into ‘citizen’) but rather as the user of a service made available by the state. The sender is the state but in the form of the state as a service institution, not as a public institution informing people of their rights and duties and offering expertise. This is further indicated by the persistent personal form of approach: You, I, your, and/or yours. The individual person thus takes center stage, responsibilities and choices are personalized, and there is no appeal to the public institution as a public good.

A final note on Borger.dk involves its plain language (klart sprog/klarspråk). If we are to assess the language employed on Borger.dk, we need to consider the medium in which plain language is supposed to be put into action. As Borger.dk is not a plain traditional text with a clear beginning and an end, it does not make sense to assess it against the written medium. We must look at the digital medium and what makes up plain language here. Obviously, if we were to assess language on Borger.dk as determined by the written medium, we would say that it is not plain at all, with its categories, links, and keywords, but from a digital medium point of view, categories, links, and keywords make sense, as that is how digital media configure communication, precisely because of its database nature. In order to assess plain language on Borger.dk we would have to, among other things, interrogate the naming of the categories, what is included in them (and not), and how this forms expectations on the part of users.

This small example of one public-authority website has served to show how the discourse network of digital media shapes both access to state-based information and shapes what kind of thing it is. Communication from the state happens through hypertextual categories with their underlying databases. The disappearance of the old print media and genres such as forms makes the interaction with, and ultimately our understanding of, state-based information a matter of navigation and a re-activation of the archive, all conditioned by the very digital medium. Radically, this condition may also imply that not only do the genres and media disappear, so too does the state: it has no public buildings, visible office workers, or forms of communication that would testify to it. The state and its public discourse are turned into hypertext, keywords, and a real-time archive; a discourse configured by digital media.

Sakprosa as Digitally Configured: The Case of SAGE Publishing

The availability of various digital platforms such as search engines, social media, and sites of publishing houses means that sakprosa is increasingly exposed to algorithmic calculations and processing. An examination of SAGE Publishing as a case in point gives us a sense of how these kinds of archival and algorithmic infrastructures shape access and the circulation of sakprosa. We can see how sakprosa changes in this medial alignment with digital media. SAGE Publishing encourages their authors to think carefully about their choice of language, titles, and keywords for their articles, because those articles are supposed to be recognized and circulated by search engines and social media. Under the headline ‘Help Readers Find Your Article’, SAGE Publishers provide an example of this feature. In order to optimize the chances of being discovered by search engines and academic audiences, SAGE encourages authors to ‘repeat key phrases in the abstract while writing naturally’ and to get the title right by making sure it is ‘descriptive, unambiguous, accurate and reads well’, and to make a creative title a subtitle of the more descriptive title. SAGE also suggests adding at least three or four keywords, and further encourages authors to link to their article and encourage others do to so as well, in order to align with search engines like Google (https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/help-readers-find-your-article). These four aspects, (repeating key phrases, descriptive titles, creative subtitles, and keywords) demonstrate how the circulation of, and access to, academic articles is conditioned and regulated by the medium of the search engine relying on, among other things, ‘hyperlinks, well marked-up source code, the volume of incoming links from related websites, revisits, click-throughs’ (https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/help-readers-find-your-article). Here it makes up the digital discourse network of academic prose. It configures and inscribes itself into the scholarly article itself in order for it to be able to circulate and be accessible.

Examining a particular SAGE journal, in this case the European Journal of Communication, shows ‘the unarticulated as background of all modern media’ (Kittler 1990: 302) and its communicative force and effect. Metric labels such as ‘Most read’, ‘Most cited’, and ‘Trending on Altmetric’ (see Fig. 2) work in the background by algorithmically picking up data traces from users/readers and codifying this data into communicative labels (Andersen and Lomborg 2020). They are not part of the specific scholarly article per se, but they form part of its network or ecology (Casper 2016) and are a result of the algorithmic and archival actions of digital media. Thanks to these actions, they form part of the way that a scholarly article materializes and circulates on a digital platform:

Fig. 2
A screenshot of the page of the European Journal of Communication under the SAGE journals website. It has 5 tabs at the top including journal home, info, and submit paper, with 4 tabs below, including most read, most cited, and trending on Altmetric, with the respective entries.

SAGE Journal. Screenshot

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This last example with SAGE Publishing shows, on one level, how a digital infrastructure, with its algorithmic forms of curating and its archival foundation, enters into the rhetorical work of scholarly authors. On another level, the example also shows how the unarticulated is inscribed into journals affecting circulation and access. Together, the examples show how a digital discourse network consisting of technologies and institutions allows a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data (Kittler 1990: 369). It shows, in short, how sakprosa is medially constituted by a digital discourse network that is considered a means of processing, storing, and transmitting data.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have tried to argue for and demonstrate a medial conception of sakprosa; a conception adapted from Kittler’s (1990) notion of a discourse network. Employing this notion was meant as a conceptual tool helping to argue how digital media constitute the circulation of and access to sakprosa, here exemplified through the digital communication of state-based information and SAGE Publishing. In arguing this, I have shown how the digital discourse network inscribes itself into and constitute the circulation of and access to sakprosa. The chapter has contributed to the research field of sakprosa with a vocabulary, discourse, and understanding that situates sakprosa in a digital media conversation strongly emphasizing the materiality of media as a means of storing, processing, and transmitting information. This is no shame. It is consequential to the fact that digital media are no longer something in which cultural artifacts are converted. Digital media are the modern communicative infrastructure in which all other cultural artifacts either are embedded or inscribed into. Among other things, this entails that we as users are still situated in actions of understanding and interpreting such infrastructure in our daily efforts in order to make sense of it (Andersen 2020). Not recognizing this in research on sakprosa risks leaving it as a dusty form of literature with no bearing on society and culture. But we know better. Much more, and in a very different way, than fiction literature, sakprosa is fundamental to the workings of modern society (Andersen 2021b). The very same form of society is now saturated with many forms of digital media as a background shaping our everyday social interactions. The research implications of the argument presented are, first, that sakprosa is, or is becoming, a different thing when operating in a discourse network consisting of software, data, archives, and algorithms. Sakprosa in a digital discourse network becomes a thing to be tagged, archived, or searched for, in addition to writing and reading (Andersen 2021a), and as such presents a new form of textuality. This needs to be recognized when studying sakprosa in these spheres. Another implication is the need for sakprosa research to engage more with digital media conversations so as to inform these conversations. Discussing and understanding sakprosa in light of digital media is, therefore, crucial.