Digital Rubbish

Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics is a study of the material life of information and its devices and of electronic waste in its physical and electronic incarnations. It is also a cultural and material mapping of the spaces where electronics in the form of both hardware and information accumulate, break down, or are stowed away. Electronic waste occurs not just in the form of discarded computers but also as a scatter of information devices, software, and systems that are rendered obsolete and fail. Where other studies have addressed ""digital"" technology through a focus on its immateriality or virtual qualities, Jennifer Gabrys traces the material, spatial, cultural, and political infrastructures that enable the emergence and dissolution of these technologies. By drawing on the material analysis developed by Walter Benjamin, this natural history method allows for an inquiry into electronics that focuses neither on technological progression nor on great inventors but rather considers the ways in which electronic technologies fail and decay. Ranging across studies of media and technology, as well as environments, geography, and design, Gabrys pulls together the far-reaching material and cultural processes that enable the making and breaking of these technologies.