Digital friction surfaces and new alterity formations

Abstract

Integration of datascapes into everyday routines erodes the once-stable threshold between actual and virtual environments. People’s actions and inter-actions online consequently gain off-line phenomenality, history, and after-life. Declarations on Facebook, for example, including those posted and forgotten years beforehand, can provoke public shaming or even law-enforcement intervention. Digital financial transactions everywhere are now traceable as pieces of codified information that can be extracted and exploited.