With digital-ontologies “instead of a hierarchically organized world, it unfolds a world of lateral connections, of crossings and networkings, as well as rhizomatic proliferations and transformations. Changeability dominates in place of stability, surface instead of depth, possibility instead of actuality” (Welsch 1997: 176).

As “our tools work along with us in our thoughts”, the new media of digital inscription have a stake in the current state of thinking within archaeology. These digital media provide a space for easy cut and paste operations of ideas and data. Thoughts, once inscribed, are readymade in various files (a remediated technology) and instantaneously available to be redeposited in new narratives. The ease and plasticity of these operations leaves little space for the comprehensive reiteration of ideas through the activity of writing.

Consider this new ontology of digital inscription in relation to the linear process using a typewriter. Ideas must be transcribed from one page to another through the activity of typing. This rearticulation constitutes a process where the author must work through those ideas word for word, in detail, and thus provides a context for further intellectual engagement. With the immediacy and malability of digital media the chain of transformation in the process of inscription lacks the depth in its linkages that is possible through the activity of using a typewriter.

Return to Key Themes

Go Home