1. What is a digital object?
Yuk Hui
Goldsmiths University of London

2. Plan
Part I: Objects
Part II: Relations
Remark I
Part III: Mind
Remark II

3. Part I: Objects

4. Digital Objects

5. Digital Milieu

6. Metadata
Example of Friend of a Friend (FOAF)
<foaf:Person>
<foaf:name>Peter Parker</foaf:name>
<foaf:gender>Male</foaf:gender>
<foaf:title>Mr</foaf:title>
<foaf:givenname>Peter</foaf:givenname>
<foaf:family_name>Parker</foaf:family_name>
<foaf:mbox_sha1sum>cf2f4bd069302febd8d7c26d803f63f
a7f20bd82</foaf:mbox_sha1sum> <foaf:homepage
rdf:resource="http://www.peterparker.com"/>
<foaf:weblog
rdf:resource="http://www.peterparker.com/blog/"/>
</foaf:Person>

7. Metadata
Metadata of a Flickr Photo
• comments: 1
• dates:
• dateuploaded: 8/19/07; 2:44:43 AM
• lastupdate: 8/19/07; 2:44:43 AM
• posted: 8/19/07; 2:44:43 AM
• taken: 8/18/07; 10:44:43 PM
• takengranularity: 0
• description: Sent from my iPhone
• editability:
• canaddmeta: 0
• cancomment: 0
• farm: 2
• geoperms:
• iscontact: 0
• isfamily: 0
• isfriend: 0
• ispublic: 1
• id: 1166257196
• isfavorite: 0
• license: 5
• location:
• accuracy: 15
• country: United States
• county: Santa Clara
• latitude: 37.444293
• locality: Palo Alto
• longitude: -122.160591
• region: California
• notes:
• 72157601607070993:

8. Metadata
• h: 20
• id: 72157601607070993
• title: Blue Chalk Cafe
• w: 68
• x: 280
• y: 14
• originalformat: jpg
• originalsecret:
• location: USA
• nsid: 22221172@N00
• realname: Dave Winer
• username: scriptingnews
• rotation: 0
• secret:
• server: 1007
• tags:
• barcampblock:
• author: 22221172@N00
• id: 380915-1166257196-13743477
• machine_tag: 0
• raw: barcampblock
• heatherharde:
• author: 22221172@N00
• id: 380915-1166257196-2504570
• machine_tag: 0
• raw: Heather Harde
• techcrunch:
• author: 22221172@N00
• id: 380915-1166257196-3057
• machine_tag: 0
• raw: TechCrunch
• title: Heather Harde, TechCrunch CEO
• photopage: http://www.flickr.com/photos/scriptingnews/1166257196/
• visibility:
• isfamily: 0
• isfriend: 0
• ispublic: 1

9. Object-Data
Object Data Object (internet of things)

10. Digital Objects
Information Object (embodiment)
Perception Data (control)
Immaterial relations Material Network
(Materialization)

11. Ontologies
“The curious thing about the ontological
problem is its simplicity. It can be put in three
Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: ‘What is there?’”
W.V.O. Quine, On What There
Is

12. Object and Appearance
Proposition 1: The core question of object for
metaphysicians since Aristotle is becoming the
question of appearance

13. Aristotle’s Ontology
Being
Substance
Accidents
Quantity, Quality, Relation, Action,
Passion, Time, Place, Disposition, Rainment
Grammar: Subject – Predicate

14. Hylomorphism
“in speaking here of matter I have in mind,
say, the bronze of a statue, while by shape-
form I mean the geometry of the object’s
appearance and by the composite the statue
itself as a whole entity”
Aristotle, Metaphysics

15. Hume
1) since no one will “assert, that substance is either a
colour, or sound, or a taste”
2) so the “idea of substance must therefore be derived
from an impression of reflection, into our passions
and emotions”
3) “none of which [passions and emotions] can possibly
represent a substance”
4) “we have therefore no idea of substance, distinct
from that of a collection of particular qualities, nor
have we any other meaning when we talk or reason
concerning it”
David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature

16. Kant
Noumena: unknowable (the-thing-in-itself)
Phenomena: knowable
perception
understanding
reason

17. Husserl
“how are we to understand the fact that the
‘in itself’ of the objectivity can be thought of
by us and moreover ‘apprehended’ in
cognition and thus in the end yet become
‘subjective’”
Husserl, quoted by Edo Pivčević
Husserl and Phenomenology

18. Natural Objects
The metaphysical investigation of object has
been always centered on its “Eidos”

19. Technical Objects
“is not made of matter and form only. It is made up of
technical elements arranged from a certain system of
usage and assembled into a stable structure by the
manufacturing process”
“There would be no exaggeration in saying that the quality
of a simple needle expresses the degree of perfection of a
nation’s industry”
Gilbert Simondon
On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects

20. Part II: Relations

21. Networks

22. Hylomorphism?
An architectural rule which the SGML
community embraced is the separation of
form and content. It is an essential part of
Web architecture, making possible the
independence of device mentioned above,
and greatly aiding the processing and analysis
Tim Berners-Lee
Web Architecture from 50,000 feet

23. Relations
their [Peirce and Schröder] method suffers technically
(whether philosophically or not I do not at present discuss)
from the fact that they regard a relation essentially as a
class of couples, thus requiring elaborate formulae of
summation for dealing with single relations. This view is
derived, I think, probably unconsciously, from a
philosophical error: it has always been customary to
suppose relational propositions less ultimate than class-
propositions (or subject-predicate propositions, with which
class-propositions are habitually confounded), and this has
led to a desire to treat relations as a kind of classes
Bertrand Russell
The principle of Mathematics

24. Relational Calculus
xRy
x : referents
y : relatum
R : relata
“we can now develop the whole of
mathematics without further assumptions or
indefinables”
Bertrand Russell, The principle of Mathematics

25. Relational Database
Edgar F. Codd, A Relational Model of Data for
Large Shared Data Banks, 1970
Tuple Relational Calculus
a simple example: consider a company has the following information inside its relational
database: EMPLOYEE (SSN, Name, Bdate, Address, Salary, DeptId), and the query of a TRC
will be something like this: Find all employees whose salary is greater than 30.000
{ t∣t EMPLOYEE t. Salary>30. 000}∈ ∧

26. Digital Objects
- A digital object is defined by relations (not
subject-predicate)
- A digital object’s identity is defined by its
being-in-the-milieu
- All accidents become element of relations
- Substance is not an engineering question

27. Remarks
Remark 1: what we have been talking about are
Discursive Relations, which we can actually
identify with Hume’s philosophy of relations.
Remark 2: there are other type of relations,
which I call Existential Relations, Martin
Heidegger is a philosopher of existential
relations though he refused

28. Part III: Mind

29. Mind
Tim Berners-Lee: Global Mind
Turing: can machines think?
intelligence simulation
Can we think with machines?
social computing

30. I think
Rene Descartes: cogito ergo sum
I think= substance
“I think” to Kant is “not something
represented, but the formal structure of
representing as such, and this formal structure
alone makes it possible for anything to have
been represented.”
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

31. Kant’s Categories

32. Social Categories
At the root of all our judgments there are a certain
number of essential ideas which dominate all our
intellectual life they are what philosophers since
Aristotle have called the categories of understanding:
ideas of time, space, class, number, cause, substance,
personality, etc. They correspond to the most universal
properties of things. They are like the solid frame,
which encloses all thought… They are like the
framework of the intelligence
Durkheim, The Elementary Form of Religious Life,
1915:9

33. Thinking
- Creation of digital objects through ontologies:
a global schema
- Digital objects as tertiary retention, which
conditions I think (Bernard Stiegler)
- Machine functions intrude into the flux of
consciousness

34. Remark
Remark 3. Clark and Chalmers’ Extended Mind:
cognitive process is outside the skull.
Remark 4. Digital Objects as tertiary protention