With the proliferation of smart devices such as smartphones, smart watches, and smart speakers as well as the ongoing push toward smart cities, humans, technologies, and environments have become entangled in increasingly complex yet seemingly frictionless infrastructures of datafication and computation. A seemingly frictionless user experience, however, conceals the contradictions, power asymmetries, and polarisations that shape our digital cultures. This issue of Digital Culture & Society takes the notion of frictions as a starting point for a situated analysis of our digital present. Frictions are sites where criticism is sparked, value conflicts are negotiated, and design alternatives are explored. By bringing together research from media studies, science and technology studies (STS), and sociology, this issue begins to synthesise and systematise the structural inconsistencies that frictions expose.
Digital technologies are widely considered as drivers of innovation and solution for small and grand challenges alike. In this context 'the digital' appears to be problematic only because there is still too little of it: too little digital services in public administration, too little digital learning and teaching etc.Consequently, policy makers, technologists, and businesspeople alike frequently call for more digitization. The capacity to accumulate, analyze and utilize data is seen as a key factor for leveraging the potentials of digital innovation. Once data was claimed to be without material limits, a 'capitalist-colonialist fantasy' became the metaphor naturalizing the next digital revolution.
