From network to stack

New allegories for ethnographic research into the digital world

Abstract

Understanding digitality as the dense interpenetration of life with digital technologies reveals their systematic opacity. This makes the metaphors and allegories we use to make sense of the complex interrelationships between society and technology particularly salient. They shape ethnographic research and influence the places we identify as significant for observing and understanding the workings and effects of the digital. Moreover, they guide us in specifying places and questions for ethnographic research on the digital, making them conceivable and relevant. In this article, we experimentally adopt the 'stack' as an allegory rather than the more common network or cloud as central metaphors. In this way, protocols and standards, physical infrastructures and their elementary components become visible as levels of inquiry in a global geography of the digital. However, the allegory of the stack also suggests a uniform order that is in need of questioning through research. Ethnographic research into the 'stack' is therefore always also a research into 'stacking’.