Paper short abstract:

The relationship between media and social continuity and change needs to be re-conceptualized in front of the challenges of digital technologies and people’s media practices. Practice theory reconfigures materiality and virtual, media and social space by looking at what happens when people make things. Drawing on our ethnographic research, we will explore how software developers are making materiality and how Free Culture activists creative practices make media space.

Paper long abstract:

The relationship between media and social continuity and change needs to be re-conceptualized in front of new objects of study that deal with digital technology and people's daily life digital media practices. It has been argued that digital technologies are bringing astonishing social changes regarding all aspects of our social life and cultural forms, especially in the way we conceptualize and experience space, time and materiality.

On one hand, in the Internet social studies, the materiality is often situated in the physical world -the wires and the hardware-, while the virtual worlds are seen as places of human culture realized by computer programs through the Internet (Boellstorff, 2008). On the other hand, media Studies theoretical developments such as MediaSpace deal with the dialectical intermingle between the kinds of space created by media and the effects that existing spatial arrangements have on media forms as they materialize in everyday life (Couldry and McCarthy, 2004). Regarding those, we will argue that a theoretical approach of practices allows us to re-compound the distinction between materiality and virtual, media and social space by looking at what happens when people make things. Studies of material culture focus almost exclusively on made objects rather than on the processes of making (Ingold, 2011), rather, in our ethnographic research, we are following how software developers are making materiality and how Free Culture activists creative practices make media space.