摘要：While much valuable scholarship on the digital focuses on particular artifacts or historical processes or subcultures, this essay offers a preliminary treatment of the digital in general, proposing that the digital has its own ontology, a way of being, and that this ontology is manifest in the technologies and human relations that define and surround the digital. In particular, the digital places a central emphasis on abstraction, and digital artifacts and culture demonstrate this ontology of abstraction even while remaining concrete. The kinds of social structures grouped under the label Web 2.0 exemplify the materialized abstraction of the digital, and this essay points out the formal and technical features of the digital that carry the abstract nature of the binary code into the human relations and behaviors of Web 2.0.
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