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Social Digitalisation
Persistent Transformations Beyond
Digital Technology
Kornelia Hahn
“The focus on social digitalisation theory offers an original contribution to

the field. I particularly liked the breadth and depth of historical examples that
the book presents in an engaging and compelling demonstration of the social
and historical processes underpinning ‘transformation’.”
—Kate Orton-Johnson, Senior Lecturer in Sociology,
University of Edinburgh, UK
Kornelia Hahn
Persistent Transformations Beyond
Digital Technology
Kornelia Hahn
Politikwissenschaft
Universität Salzburg
Salzburg, Austria
ISBN 978-3-030-79866-6 ISBN 978-3-030-79867-3 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79867-3
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To my son Tyrique
Preface
Writing this book in the year when COVID-19 first swept the globe
has inevitably come with unforeseen effects, including on my own stance
towards the phenomena explored in these pages. Like many academic
instructors and authors, I had longed to have more time to work at home
before the lockdown ruled out any other option. In spite of the privilege
of being able to continue to work in these circumstances, it seemed at
first that writing a book in the midst of a global cataclysm might be
something of a sideshow.
However, the pandemic has also compelled me to speculate, like many
others, not only on the scale and depth of changes likely to be accelerated
and generated by this pandemic but also on the role that might be played
in these changes by the very subject of this book, i.e. by transformative
processes of social digitalisation.
Back in the classroom in March 2020, just as I was announcing the
teaching schedule for the coming week, it was through my students’
connections to the outside world via their digital devices that I first learnt
there would be no more face-to-face classes for the foreseeable future.
The university had just ordered an immediate lockdown—a state whose
vii
viii Preface
significance most of us were still only beginning to grasp. Worldwide,

across every sector of society and the economy, rapidly adjusting to this
state has entailed harnessing the resources of material digital technologies
on an unprecedented scale. Such technology has proved pivotal both in
tackling the direct health impacts of the pandemic and in enabling many
people to continue performing much the same work they were doing
prior to the lockdown. In my own case, for example, the transition to
teaching online proceeded quite smoothly over a matter of weeks—so
smoothly, in fact, that it is hard to imagine there will ever be a complete
return to pre-pandemic routines.
While the application of digital technology in relation to the pandemic
raises many questions, and while we have witnessed many tragic failures
to mitigate the virus, such technology has undeniably proved immensely
helpful and even essential for people coping with lockdown conditions
and other impacts of the pandemic. For better or worse, the outcome is
that more and more areas and activities have swiftly become connected
with and/or organised by digital processing.
With digital technology set to become ever more ubiquitous over the
coming years, the hope that has helped drive me in writing this book
is that our globally shared experiences of the pandemic will lead to
more profound assessments of further digital transformation, including
assessments from the perspective of social theory as set out in this book.
The social theory approach proposed and elucidated here is primarily
concerned with long-term developments in digital processing, including
those set in motion long before the advent of material digital tech-
nologies—in some cases prior to the so-called Age of Steam. From this
perspective, the ‘Digital Transformation’ is thus understood as a trajec-
tory rather than a sudden disruptive change. This approach is above all
focused on the re-organisation through digital processing of social activ-
ities that were previously more or less contingent. Such re-organisation
involves simultaneous and intertwined processes both of discontinuance
through the digitisation of discrete units and of continuance through the
application of streamlined programming, necessarily complemented by
what I term ‘co-programming’ on the part of ourselves as interpreters.
What should be noted here already is that these intertwined processes
can only be set in motion by strategic actions and deliberate decisions,
Preface ix
with such actions and decisions often taken in a highly non-transparent

way. Once processes have been made digital, moreover, the dynamics of
this transformation generally do not encourage or support any further
assessment of its trajectory. Public and scholarly discourse about digital
transformation has thus far mostly limited itself to a consideration of
policies without shedding much light on the political decisions that have
led to the implementation of overall digital processing. In this book, by
contrast, I call for a critical analysis of the impacts of social digitalisation
that goes beyond an assessment of implemented material digital tech-
nologies and the policies related to their use. Failing to undertake such
an assessment of social digitalisation ‘on the run’ would itself constitute
a political decision. An important aim of the approach I propose here,
therefore, is to contribute to assessments of ongoing and future digital
transformation and thus to facilitate more informed decisions and poli-
cies better designed to address the consequences of such re-organisations
of social activities.
If this book has a message, then, it is a call for all of us to think
about digital transformation as a form of social processing beyond tech-
nology. The intention here is not to set out a case against the implemen-
tation of digital technology per se but rather to emphasise the impor-
tance of understanding the social conditions in which digital technology
is implemented and how its implementation is likely to change the trajec-
tory of social processes. A key element of this approach is thus the need
to consider the consequences of digitalisation from a variety of social
perspectives.
The more extensively digital technology is implemented, the more
urgent it becomes to base empirical studies and policies of this
phenomenon on theoretically sound foundations. This work represents
my own attempt to help strengthen the theoretical basis of research
and ultimately of political decision-making regarding forms of social
digitalisation.
A brief summary of the overall structure of the book here may help
readers to navigate its contents more easily. Thus, readers can find an
outline of social digitalisation as a long-term organisational logic of
modern society in Chapter 1, while the final chapter provides a summary
of the theory of social digitalisation. The five intervening chapters apply
x Preface
this approach to the analysis of some key modern settings in order

to garner evidence of and gain insights into the long-term dynamics
of social digitalisation. These settings include the factory (Chapter 2),
the bourgeois household (Chapter 3), the department store and other
retail settings (Chapter 4), watching television at home (Chapter 5),
and a contemporary luxury restaurant equipped with augmented reality
technology (Chapter 6).
I hope that the breadth of the approach I have taken in analysing the
re-organisation of these settings over the long term will also prove of
interest to readers who may not be especially preoccupied with digital
transformation itself. It should be noted, however, that social digitalisa-
tion theory approaches these settings not as distinct spheres but as inter-
linked in order to better capture the entangled and dynamic trajectory of
digital transformation.
Finally, the epilogue to Chapter 7 offers a short version of the theory
of social digitalisation and a small-scale practical example of its applica-
tion to the contemporary phenomenon of encapsulated ground coffee (as
depicted on the front cover of this book).
I wish to thank all those who have supported me in different ways
in the process of writing this book. Working together with Sharla Plant
and the editorial team and staff at Palgrave Macmillan was a pleasur-
able experience and I thank them all for their support and patience.
Several anonymous reviewers engaged with the contents and aims of
the book and their positive attitudes towards the project were a major
encouragement, while their criticisms inspired me to push myself further.
I am grateful to my teaching assistant, Filip Kulling, who supported
the writing process, not least by discussing the ideas and arguments in
the book and offering insights into how they might best be conveyed
to readers. My colleague Alexander Schmidl read chapters of the book
and offered highly constructive comments. As a non-native speaker of
English, I am also deeply indebted to my proofreader, Matt Jones, for his
close engagement with the drafts of this book and for his invaluable help
in increasing the readability of the text.
I dedicate this book to my son Tyrique, who has good-humouredly
endured and adapted not only to the restrictions imposed by the
Preface xi
pandemic but also the changes to our family life arising from my work
on this book over an extensive period of time.
Salzburg, Austria Kornelia Hahn

July 2021
Contents
1 Introducing Social Digitalisation 1

1.1 Digitalisation Beyond Technology: ‘Digital Fruits’
and Other Examples of Digitalisation in Food
Production, Retail and Marketing 4
1.2 Digitalised Organisation in Early Modernity 19
1.3 The Logic of Social Digitalisation: Organising
Processes of Dis/continuance 30
References 44
2 The Dis/continuous Factory System and the Rise
of the Digital Era 49
2.1 The Culture of Industrial Productivity 50
2.2 The Manufactory: Setting the Scene for Digital
Organisation 56
2.3 The Factory: Perfecting Systems of Dis/continuance 64
2.4 Mediators of Digital Processing: Commodities 70
2.5 Technologies of Industrial Productivity 78
References 82
xiii
xiv Contents
3 Digitalisation and the Production of Bourgeois Privacy 85

3.1 The Concept of Bourgeois Privacy 86
3.2 The Distinctive Bourgeois Lifestyle 90
3.3 The Organisation of Bourgeois Life as a Series
of Dis/continuances 95
3.4 Manufacturing in the Bourgeois Household 100
3.5 Technologies of Household Reproduction 108
References 119
4 The Formalisation of the Modern Market 123
4.1 The ‘Open’ Market and Its ‘Closed’ Organisation 124
4.2 The Department Store: The Formalisation
of Interaction Designs Inside the Retailing Machine 134
4.3 Technologies of Physical and Logistical Assemblage
in the Department Store 145
4.4 Physical and Logistical Assemblage as Self-Service
and Prosumption 150
4.5 The Imaginative Assemblage Undertaken
by Purchasing Audiences 159
References 163
5 The Evolution of Advanced Digital Literacy 167
5.1 The Networked Household: ‘homes with a View’ 168
5.2 The Industrial Production of Digitalised Television
Programmes 178
5.3 The Fluid Technologies of Programming Reality 184
5.4 Imaginative Assemblage of TV Audiences:
‘Continuity Editing’ as an Advanced Form
of Digital Literacy 192
References 197
6 Augmented and Reduced Realities 203
6.1 Theories About Technologically Mediated Realities 204
6.2 Modern Perception Styles 211
6.3 Experiences of Augmented and Reduced Realities 221
6.4 Diverse Readings of Augmented and Reduced
Realities 229
Contents xv
6.5 Co-programming Technologically Programmed

Sign-Worlds 236
References 249
7 The Dynamics of Social Digitalisation 253
7.1 Social Digitalisation and Material Digital
Technology 254
7.2 Social Digitalisation’s Chains of Interdependence 260
7.3 Semiotic Resources Supplying Digital Processing 264
7.4 The Significance of Digital Literacies 270
7.5 Researching Social Digitalisation 275
References 279
8 Epilogue: Social Digitalisation Theory Encapsulated
in a Cup of Coffee 281
References 292
Index 293
1
Introducing Social Digitalisation
Preliminary definition: ‘social digitalisation’ refers to the dynamics entailed

in the organisation of social life through the persistent implementation of
digital logic over time. Digital logic is defined as a combination of digitisa-
tion, i.e. the rendering of things and processes into abstract discrete units that
engenders discontinuances in social procedures and activities, and program-
ming, i.e. the formal composition of these units in such a way as to produce
continuance. As a vital component of this process, such re-organisation
requires the simultaneous co-evolution of our capacities to interpret and make
sense of such digitalised processing—capacities I refer to most generally as
‘digital literacy’. In contrast to prevailing conceptualisations of the ‘digital
transformation’, this approach does not consider digitalisation as the outcome
of any material digital technology introduced in recent decades but rather as
a long-term trajectory in modern society and culture.
SOS, the alphabetic equivalent of the Morse code distress signal,
seems a good example of what this book is about, namely the evolu-
tion of modern digital transformation prior to the advent of material
digital technology. There are many examples of such transformations
in everyday life, including the well-known Maggi bouillon cube or the
shelves of orderly stacked boxes of encapsulated ground coffee depicted
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1
Switzerland AG 2021
K. Hahn, Social Digitalisation,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79867-3_1
2 K. Hahn
on the cover of this book. Digital organisation and transformation have

been underway for a long time, arguably long before the SOS distress
signal was first used for ship rescue in 1905.1 As a consequence of this
long evolution, today’s material digital technology has necessarily had to
be fitted into a pre-existing ‘digital culture’. Throughout the following
chapters I present evidence for this argument to show how the holistic
approach I propose can lead to a better understanding and evaluation of
contemporary social digitalisation.
The example of the SOS signal affords a first illustration of the overall
argument set out in this book, including in its application of digital
logic, people’s interpretation of this innovation, and in the fact that
Morse code itself was the culmination of numerous attempts made before
the nineteenth century to develop a code system by which to convey
messages through telegraphy—a word whose literal meaning is ‘writing
at a distance’. Prior to the use of electronically transmitted sounds, for
example, various code systems had been developed using flags and lights.
When Samuel Morse came up with the first version of a single-wire
code system in 1837, however, this system proved so highly efficient
and economical that it ultimately became the basis of the International
Morse Code. This system was itself based on the earlier code system of
the alphabet, which the Morse code converts and further encodes. Morse
is a binary code consisting of two symbols, i.e. the ‘dots’ and ‘dashes’ in
the visual version that symbolise the duration of the signal units in the
audio version. For obvious reasons, the code of a distress signal should
be as brief and clear as possible, prompting the choice of two of Morse’s
simpler codes, i.e. those for the letters ‘S’ (dot code: · · ·) and ‘O’ (dash
code: ———), combining these to form SOS (· · · ——— · · ·). The
codes of the letters S and O are not only simple codes compared to
the other letters but also the most distinct from each other (Headrick,
2000, p. 204). The coding of this distress signal was thus designed on the
basis of and in relation to the formal traits of the code units, which are
arbitrary and without reference to any literal meaning. Since it was first
introduced, however, the sequence of the SOS code has been interpreted
1 For a comprehensive history of the telegraph and the Morse code with reference to the
Internet, see Tom Standage’s (1998) book, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the
Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.
far less technically. In order to better memorise the sequence, people have
ascribed to the code the more comprehensible and also somehow cultur-
ally indicative phrase ‘Save Our Souls’. After all, unless one knows the
real origins of the signal it seems intuitively plausible that the letters SOS
might be an acronym of ‘save our souls’ as a means of indicating distress.
This example can help advance our analysis of digitalisation in several
important ways. For one, the binary system of the Morse code reminds us
that the digital code system so crucial to computers is a technology that
was already well-established before the invention of the computer—in
the alphabet and in sheet music, for example, and indeed in any numer-
ical grading system. A yet more important insight to be gained from
this example is that the Morse code system was used most effectively
and efficiently only after it had been implemented within an existing
social context. Transmitted by a wireless telegraph apparatus, messages
converted into Morse code initially made most sense in contexts where
it was not possible to communicate by any other means and where it
was desirable to communicate instantly, especially in a distressing situ-
ation—as in the case of its initial use by crews aboard the new steam
vessels of the time. Once the hardware and software of the telegraph
had been ‘inserted’ into this particular setting, however, the SOS code
became associated with this context to such an extent that the reference
between this code and the specific communication of an emergency situ-
ation has now become part of global culture. In other words, even though
SOS is a technical code that was first conceived within a technical and
not a social context, there is an inextricable link between the technical
code and the socio-cultural context of its use. So much so is this the
case, indeed, that from today’s vantage point it is rather astonishing to
learn that the globally recognised emergency call ‘Save Our Souls!’ is not
actually literally encoded in the SOS signal. And while the SOS code
is obviously limited as an example of social digitalisation, it does hint
at the complexity of the historical trajectory of digital organisation and
what would later become known as ‘digital culture’.
4 K. Hahn
1.1 Digitalisation Beyond Technology:

‘Digital Fruits’ and Other Examples
of Digitalisation in Food Production,
Retail and Marketing
The trajectory of digitalisation can further be illustrated by ‘digital fruits’
as an example from contemporary everyday life. ‘Digital Fruits in the
Supermarket’ was the headline of an article in an Austrian newspaper
in 2018 (Wienerroither, 2018). This article was informed by an inter-
view with a representative of a local company providing technology
for the so-called digital fruits—a product that was actually no more
than a packet of dried fruits wrapped in a newly designed material that
enabled consumers to obtain additional information about the product
via Augmented Reality (AR) technology. By scanning the product’s pack-
aging in the supermarket with a smartphone, potential customers are
linked via an app to videos, promotional lotteries, recipes and nutri-
tional facts about the product, as well as the possibility of learning
more about the ecological and social conditions of the product’s culti-
vation, harvesting and distribution. The article further informed readers
that the AR technology allows for ‘interaction’ with potential customers,
connecting the company’s software with users who in turn provide the
company with data, albeit mostly inadvertently. As indicated in the
headline, ‘digital fruits’ are presented in this article as part of contem-
porary digital culture and/or material digital technology, even though
the product itself can easily be imagined in a traditional and even pre-
modern marketplace not embedded in any digitalised setting at all. This
observation suggests it is worth reflecting on what exactly it is about these
dried fruits that makes them ‘digital’.
Starting from the immediate context, the first thing to note is that
the product is offered within a contemporary supermarket setting. This
is important because tracing back the organisation of this setting in line
with the social digitalisation approach I propose can help us to under-
stand how today’s ‘digital fruits’ have emerged within and are dependent
upon an already long-established and far-reaching trajectory of digital
organisation. Thus, since we may fairly assume that dried fruits could
still be sold and consumed even in today’s ‘digital culture’ without the
need for any digital organisation, it is clear that ‘digital fruits’ must also
now serve as sign vehicles in addition to their use and exchange value.
For example, while the promotion of the product obviously appeals to
motives for buying fruits beyond mere consumption, it is also clearly
beneficial for sellers to obtain information about customers beyond the
customers’ interest in buying dried fruits. For customers, the AR tech-
nology embedded in the product packaging might make the selection
process in the supermarket more meaningful than merely grabbing a
random product from the shelves without AR technology. Furthermore,
some customers may prefer to obtain any information they seek about
the product by interacting with the AR packaging rather than with a
copresent human seller. What is important to note here, however, is that
the meaning ascribed to this purchasing process does not depend on the
AR technology itself; rather this meaning is influenced by the signifying
practices of the interpreters, i.e. in this case the purchase-related signi-
fying practices of potential customers for digital fruits. These practices in
turn are embedded in and draw upon semiotic resources that have been
shaped by our accumulated experiences of the extensive organisation of
digitalised settings over time, including the now seemingly ‘ordinary’
contemporary self-service supermarket. A key argument advanced in this
book is thus exemplified here in that potential customer must first have
developed some degree of digital literacy before they can make sense of
products promoted in supermarkets as ‘digital fruits’. In other words, it
is this evolved digital literacy that enables customers to ‘read’ the signif-
icance of a technologically augmented food product offered within an
already highly digitalised setting. This is not to say that the ‘significance’
of this product is necessarily unambiguous; indeed, the ambiguity of a
product and thus its openness to multiple interpretations can often be
an intentional strategy to widen its potential appeal.
There have in fact been many precursors of ‘digital’ food throughout
modernity. In the food retail industry in particular, as a sector that has
for some time accounted for a substantial proportion of global GDP,
there has been quite a long history of digital processing. For example,
a study by Kinsey and Ashman (2000, p. 83) of the use of information
technology in the food retail industry provides evidence of how attempts
6 K. Hahn
to increase productivity in the grocery business have always relied on the

adoption of new technologies. As the most recent example of such adop-
tion at the time they conducted the study in 2000, Kinsley and Ashman
cited the use of digital technology for testing the quality of fruits,
including the visual screening of their surfaces and the digital measure-
ment of their firmness and levels of ripeness. Interestingly, although this
method of quality testing is performed automatically with the aim of
ensuring faster processing, it nevertheless involves testing every single
fruit, thus constituting a form of digital processing based on the smallest
unit—in this sense comparable to a ‘bit’ or binary digit.
Further examples of digitalisation in the food industry include the
introduction of the Food Categorization Code to identify products in
the global food processing industry more clearly and precisely than is
possible through our linguistic coding of food. The category code for
‘dried fruits, nuts and seeds’, for example, is 04.1.2.2.2 Another code
system that has been around in the food industry since 1990 is the price
look-up code (PLU), introduced as a way to identify bulk produce in
order to streamline checkout and inventory control processes in super-
markets, i.e. to make these processes easier, faster and more accurate.3
The PLU code is administered by the International Federation for Produce
Standards and assigns either four or five random digits that are printed
onto stickers for labelling conventionally and organically grown products
respectively. These methods of organisation have changed the retailing
process in a specific way, with bulk produce now digitised in discrete units
in order to enable each item to be handled individually. Such itemisa-
tion is clearly beneficial for commercial purposes; in addition, however,
this numerical identification system transcodes our more ambiguous
linguistic codes.4 Customers in supermarkets can certainly still talk to
2 According to information at: https://foodlicensing.fssai.gov.in/PDF/Food_Categorization_C

ode.pdf. Accessed 25 February 2021.
3 According to information at: https://www.ifpsglobal.com/PLU-Codes. Accessed 25 February
2021.
4 By chance I had a telling personal experience of this ambiguity in January 2019 when I
happily grabbed a savoy cabbage from a very limited stock in a corner of the lowest shelf of
the vegetable section in my local supermarket. It was only when I reached the checkout that I
realised my savoy cabbage was neither wrapped nor labelled and had no PLU code, much to
the irritation of the very busy person in charge that Saturday morning. “What is this?” the shop
clerks and sales assistants or to each other when shopping, of course,

but communications based on the linguistic code of talking literally
do not ‘count’ in this digitalised communicative system of economic
transactions.
Starting from the mid-1970s in the United States, supermarket
checkout-scanners transformed the management of stock-keeping
because the same data collected by scanners could also be used for
easily re-ordering any products missing on the shelves. The comput-
erised internal organisation of stock was later further enhanced by the
added option of connecting the purchase of one item to all other
items presented at the checkout by individual customers. The collec-
tion of such data helped to inform more effective marketing and other
strategies to increase sales (Kinsey & Ashman, 2000, p. 86). With the
advent of electronic data interchange (EDI) systems in 1999 and the
direct transmittal of scanner sales data to manufacturers and suppliers,
moreover, shelves could now be automatically replenished, thereby
“developing a continuous and coordinated flow of product” (Kinsey
& Ashman, 2000, p. 88). The generation and use of scanner data
made it possible not only to determine which products to order and
when but also to calculate the optimum product assortment. This in
turn has facilitated the development of ‘category management’, leading
somewhat paradoxically to a reduction in the variety of products and
services available to customers at the same time as enabling a “continuous
replenishment of products” (Kinsey & Ashman, 2000, pp. 88–89). Such
category management digitises (bulk) food by assigning abstract numer-
ical codes according to the discrete units of a specific category system,
thereby supporting sales strategies that are shaped primarily by the aim
of ensuring a continuity of sales rather than, say, the aim of providing
customers with a wider range of higher quality products.
assistant asked. “It’s a savoy cabbage,” I answered. “But is it a lettuce or a cabbage?” she asked,
glaring. “It’s a savoy cabbage”, I repeated. (I should add the German word for ‘savoy cabbage’
is phonetically completely distinct from the words for either ‘lettuce’ or ‘cabbage’ and so I was
referring to a third type of product.) Apparently concluding that any further conversation with
me would be futile, the shop assistant then referred to a list before entering some numbers into
the cash register and proceeding with the sale. On leaving the shop, I learnt from my receipt
that she had decided to record my purchase as ‘cabbage’.
8 K. Hahn
As we have already seen in the case of ‘digital fruits’, food wrapping

and the substantial role played by packaging in retail is a topic that well
merits exploration in relation to social digitalisation, not least because
some form of wrapping is essential and now even legally compulsory
for most foods offered as products on the market. The evolution and
role of food wrapping can best be demonstrated in the case of food that
is more highly processed—or ‘transcoded’—than dried fruits. Industri-
ally produced meat and bread products, for instance, first developed and
distributed at the beginning of the twentieth century, provide especially
good examples of the historical development of packaging and digital
processing. The history of these products has been described in two excel-
lent studies by Roger Horowitz (2006) on the US meat industry and
Aaron Bobrow-Strain (2012) on the social history of store-bought bread,
as explored below in relation to social digitalisation.
As Horowitz notes, the modern marketing of meat products in super-
markets contrasts with the marketing of many other products, including
dried fruits for example, since meat is now mostly offered ‘fresh’ rather
than preserved or dried as was often the case in the past. Horowitz (2006,
p. 130) describes the meat industry’s “struggle to tame nature” by “over-
coming the process of decay”, explaining how the mass marketing of
fresh meat entailed tackling not only the problem of meat’s perishable
nature but also “the dilemma of organizing mass production around an
item that came in irregular sizes” (Horowitz, 2006, p. xii). The solu-
tion eventually adopted to overcome these obstacles and thus enable
the profitable sale of fresh meat in supermarkets was to slow down the
process of physical decay and to standardise the shape of meat (Horowitz,
2006, p. 2). This was accomplished by applying a new technology that
preserved the perishable product as ‘fresh’, namely the technology of
cellophane packaging that was introduced into meat retailing in the
United States in the 1920s.
Cellophane packaging material serves at least two purposes. First, it
attenuates the natural process of decay by interposing a film between the
meat and the external environment, thereby creating “artificial condi-
tions” or an “artificial environment” that “allowed for manipulation of
[meat’s] appearance” (Horowitz, 2006, p. 137). Second, cellophane was
the first transparent packaging material available for consumer prod-

ucts and significantly altered the way customers encountered meat.
Different cuts of meat could now be customised for different market
segments while less popular products such as internal organs could be
presented more appealingly, especially as cellophane wrapping influ-
ences both the colour and smell of meat (Horowitz, 2006, p. 137).
The slogans used for marketing cellophane as food wrapping—including
“‘Shows What It Protects! Protects What It Shows!’” (Horowitz, 2006,
p. 139)—emphasised the enhanced visibility of products for customers
prior to purchase. Together with claims as to the increased safety and
hygiene of the new wrapping technology, this factor of enhanced visi-
bility became an important sales aspect. The transparency of cellophane
serves as a screen through which an inspecting customer can gather
certain hints, at least subjectively, about the quality of the product.
Horowitz (2006, p. 139) quotes advertisements promising that “cases
filled with cellophane-wrapped meat would ‘Make shopping quicker,
easier’” and “permit selection of ‘the weight or size you want,’ and
‘provide menu ideas’”. Moreover, the new packaging “carried a distinc-
tive logo […] and minimal text to maximize the meat visible through
the cellophane” (Horowitz, 2006, p. 139). Here, Horowitz is refer-
ring to the star logo of Armour and Company, one of the leading
meatpacking firms in the United States. As emphasised in the adver-
tising, customers in the new self-service supermarkets, first introduced
in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1916,5 were no longer reliant upon a pre-
selection made for them by sellers/clerks. This latter traditional process
was now critically exposed by comparison with self-service, moreover,
especially compared to pre-selected products wrapped in non-transparent
material and offered on the recommendation of a seller/clerk rather than
by a formal and ‘official’-looking quality label.
The presence of a brand logo conveys information to customers who
might otherwise feel uninformed about the cultivation and processing
of a product. Such branding transcodes information about the produc-
tion process only in an abstract and symbolic way, however, while the
5The introduction of the self-service supermarket will be addressed more comprehensively in

Chapter 4.
10 K. Hahn
actual meat production process itself has obviously become less and less
visible to customers ever since. With the introduction of visual and later
written communications about products on meat packaging, customers
could also choose to skip any conversations over the butcher’s counter.
On the one hand, therefore, the ‘reality’ of the traditional retail setting
was reduced by presenting cuts of meat through preservative and labelled
cellophane wrapping, thereby decreasing contingencies with regard to the
quality of the product. On the other hand, adding a distinctive logo and
text to cellophane wrapping in some way ‘augmented’ the retail envi-
ronment.6 Although the companies’ options for conveying information
about the product through the use of cellophane, labels and text were
far more limited than the options available today through the use of AR
technology, these developments in packaging altered the organisation of
retailing in crucial ways.
The industrial production and cellophane wrapping of another staple
food can be traced back to as early as the 1910s. As Aaron Bobrow-
Strain (2012) has shown in his investigation of store-bought bread,
the entire production process of bread was transformed, along with its
supply chains and retailing environments, once bread became an indus-
trial product sold in supermarkets. In the case of bread, we can see even
more clearly the impact of the semiotic resources that accompanied and
were drawn upon in bringing about this transformation. For while the
introduction of logos and text on packaged meat products informed
customers about the production process in a very specific way, liter-
ally screening the product, the introduction of industrially produced and
packaged bread also involved the adoption of a cultural narrative related
to the social context of its emergence. As Bobrow-Strain has shown
in reference to the new industrial product of ‘white bread’, this trans-
formed production process was narrated and framed in terms of allegedly
increased levels of hygiene. This marketing strategy centred on the claim
that industrial bread, unlike the handmade bread sold in the corner-
store bakeries common in the United States at that time, was produced
“untouched by human hands” of “dirty people”, with the new bread
6The phenomenon of simultaneous symbolic reduction and augmentation is addressed in

greater depth in Chapter 6.
factories introduced as “sanitary bakeries” in pointed contrast to their

competitors whom the new producers reviled by publishing “reprinted
news reports on the ‘shocking state of cellar bakeries’” (Bobrow-Strain,
2012, pp. 37–40). Importantly, as Bobrow-Strain (2012, p. 44) points
out, while commercials for white bread stressed the relevance of knowing
where food came from, the paradoxical consequence of this emphasis was
that customers were thereby actually further distanced from actual food
production processes. Indeed it could be argued that such marketing was
just as much if not more about knowing where food was not coming
from.
Historically, bread had always been produced predominantly at home
and it was only in the late eighteenth century that immigrants to the
United States started opening ‘cellar bakeries’ to make a modest living,
i.e. the same bakeries that were later to be denigrated for the purpose
of marketing the new ‘white’ bread. When industrially produced bread
first appeared in the early twentieth century, the attribute of ‘whiteness’
was promoted not only on account of the use of white flour instead of
the wholegrain flour used by the corner bakeries but also with refer-
ence to the overall ‘purity’ of the production process, since the new
‘sanitary bakeries’ were owned by ‘white’ long-term US citizens and
introduced large laboratory-like factory settings in which the raw mate-
rial was processed exclusively by machines and the final product was
mechanically wrapped and sealed. From the 1920s onwards, machine-
processed bread was further ‘optimized’ by a new design, the streamlined
loaf—a perfectly rectangular loaf completely even in consistency and
neatly sliced before being packaged (Bobrow-Strain, 2012, pp. 57–61).
As a result of these processes, both bread and meat, while extremely
different in their original raw ‘material’, were now encountered in the
supermarket in the very same way, i.e. as processed, evenly cut or sliced
products transparently wrapped and labelled in rectangular packages.
Over the next hundred years these packages became the standard format
for the ever-expanding production of industrial food and the organisa-
tion of food retailing. Transforming food supply chains into operations
that create and proceed exclusively with rectangular, preservative and
labelled packages affords multiples advantages to enterprises. Above all,
such discrete packaging shapes abstract and formalised units that are
12 K. Hahn
‘discontinuous’ in relation to the original shape of the product or raw

material. The processing of such units contributes enormously to the
continuous flow of production and retail that is so commercially desirable
in terms of profit and market expansion. Further progress in digitalisa-
tion is attained once an industrial product has been made as universally
composable as possible with other products by way of abstraction, i.e.
by reducing the specificity of the product in terms of its use and conno-
tations. The more abstract these entities, the more easily such products
can be fitted into culturally diverse contexts, thereby greatly increasing
their sales potential—ideally to the level of universal appeal. Indeed, it
is the very fact that customers can ascribe a wider range of meanings to
more abstract and thus ambiguous products that enables these products
to attain the ultimate exchange value, again contributing to the ideally
continuous flow of sales.
A good example of a product approximating to this perfect retail unit
is the well-known Maggi bouillon or stock cube. This product was first
introduced in 1908 and has since made its way into supermarkets and
grocery stores all around the world. Although Horowitz does not refer
specifically to the Maggi cube, he does point out two aspects of food
production and consumption that seem of importance to the trajectory
of digitalisation highlighted here. The first point is that food production
became subject to frequent scientific and technological experimentation
from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards, while the second
is that the cooking of meat requires “considerable skill and knowledge for
dishes at the lower economic level as well as for elite repasts” (Horowitz,
2006, pp. 6, 130). The invention of the industrially produced instant
bouillon cube at once reflected these scientific developments and elimi-
nated the need for such skill and knowledge. Moreover, the stock cube
further overcame the problem that fresh meat products were only rarely
affordable for poor families at that time.
The original Maggi cube was developed in 1886 by Julius Maggi in
his family-owned factory in Switzerland.7 Its development reflected the
new industrialised factory-style preparation of food that had previously
7 All information about the history of the Maggi company is retrieved from the company’s
website: https://www.maggi.de/ueber-maggi/historie/. Accessed 27 November 2019.
been prepared in private households and restaurants. As in other indus-

tries, the production of the cube and other industrialised foods involved
experiments with different chemical procedures that had not previously
been part of food preparation. Second, when Julius Maggi first started
to invent soups prepared from powdered protein-rich legumes at the
end of the nineteenth century, the Maggi company insisted on its chari-
table intentions. According to this narrative, the new powdered soups,
which only had to be dissolved in hot water like the bouillon cube,
were meant to improve the nutrition of working-class people who had
neither the financial means nor the time to prepare the elaborate dishes
consumed by bourgeois households at that time, most of which relied on
the availability of live-in cooking staff.
The original cube was developed as an industrially produced substance
that substituted meat flavours previously only derived from the extract
of elaborately prepared meat. As described in a consumer study of stock
cubes by Kim et al., (2017, p. 1), stock cubes thereby solve the problem
that preparing meat broth “is important for palatable dishes of various
cuisines [but] time consuming and difficult for people who do not
have professional knowledge of cooking”. The new industrialised cube
production process followed a newly patented formula composed of
ingredients specified in precise amounts to be mixed and processed in
an automated procedure. Some of these ingredients are already highly
processed before mixing, as in the case of monosodium glutamate,
usually referred to as ‘flavour enhancer’. In this procedure, as Kim et al.
(2017) further describe, the mixture is then compressed into a square
mould by a cubing machine, with each unit having a precise weight
ranging from four to ten grammes. The units are then wrapped and
arranged in rectangular boxes of various sizes. The resulting product is
not flavoursome if eaten in its raw state but can be dissolved quickly in
any hot liquid.
Interestingly, the professional manufacture of bouillon cubes actu-
ally dates back much further than the industrial production of Maggi
cubes, as described in Rebecca Spang’s (2001) historical analysis of the
invention of the restaurant in Paris. While the cube was not central to
this invention, bouillon itself was crucial, with the stock cube only later
emerging as a spin-off. As Spang (2001, p. 2) informs us, the name
14 K. Hahn
‘restaurant’ has its origins in an abbreviation of restaurateurs, which was

the term used for public rooms in Paris where traveling merchants were
served restorative bouillon: “In its initial form, then, the restaurant was
specifically a place one went not to eat, but to sit and to sip one’s
restaurant.” Produced by cooking meat into a liquid state to condense
the meat flavour and break down its proteins and carbohydrates for
easier digestion, the new commodity of salutary bouillon was marketed
as a quick means of reinvigorating merchants before they continued
with their exhausting business operations, thereby further contributing
to the overall flow of sales in this early form of restaurant. However,
the production and consumption of bouillon in this way was initially
subject to criticism. For example, this form of meat preparation was
regarded as inappropriately ‘augmenting’ the eating experience on the
grounds that bouillon served to “overstimulate the senses and provoke
pernicious eating without appetite, much like pornography” (Spang,
2001, p. 82). As has happened in the case of other ‘augmentations’
throughout modernity, however, and as is the case with AR technology
today, people eventually got used to the experience of sipping bouillon
and those who could afford it now wanted to enjoy it on a regular basis.
Demand for bouillon grew to such an extent that “an aristocratic family
obliged to travel long distances” would go to great lengths to ensure
they could have it without relying on the products of any unknown
chefs they might encounter on their journey, for example by sending
“their kitchen staff ahead in a post-chaise loaded with bottles of broths”
(Spang, 2001, p. 29). This practice ushered in the advent of “meat-extract
bouillon tablets” in the early 1760s, heralded as easy-to-carry and non-
spoiling products that guaranteed safe and healthy voyages on land and
sea (Spang, 2001, p. 29).
What is of particular interest here is not only that the bouillon cube
can be traced back 250 years to the beginnings of industrialisation
but also that the changing technologies applied in producing bouillon
cubes over time have all been deeply connected with the changing
socio-cultural contexts in which this product has evolved. Furthermore,
while describing the technical production of the stock cube captures
its digitised aspects, including its usability in many dishes indepen-
dent of regional varieties of cooking styles and cuisines, the meaning of
the bouillon cube has changed significantly over time, further differing
according to each ‘receiving’ culinary culture in which it has been
marketed.
Soon after its introduction, the Maggi bouillon cube became a glob-
ally successful product of industrialised food preparation. As Maren Jütz
(2013) has shown, the cube has proven extremely popular even in places
where its time-saving properties do not apply. In West African countries,
for example, the cube has enjoyed massive sales in spite of playing no role
in reducing the time needed to prepare food, since it has never replaced
the practice of cooking elaborate dishes in the cuisines of this region. In
these markets the cube has instead been successfully marketed and widely
interpreted as a means of ‘modernizing’ traditional cooking styles and
optimising dishes through the use of a new material technology. Maggi
advertisements in these countries depict cooking as an exclusively female
task and emphasise that the female ‘user’ of the cube will be instantly
rewarded by the use of stock cubes. A commercial from Mali and
Senegal, for example, declares “Avec Maggi chaque femme est une étoile!”
(With Maggi every woman is a star!) (Jütz, 2013, p. 357). By referring to
the cube technology as Corrige-Madame, or ‘Madam Corrector’ (Gross-
rieder, 2017), Maggi’s marketing even suggests a certain guarantee for the
quality of the dish regardless of the competence of the cook—a promise
somewhat similar to some claims made in current discussions about
autonomous driving technology. Interestingly, Jütz also observes from
her fieldwork that a number of NGOs in West African countries have
been advocating for the cube to be abandoned in favour of a return to
seasoning methods with “natural” ingredients (Jütz, 2013, p. 360). This
criticism of the Maggi cube has some parallels with contemporary rejec-
tions of material digital technology. For example, when holiday resorts
promote digital detox stays in exclusively offline environments where the
use of all personal digital devices is forbidden, this offer is often marketed
as an opportunity to reclaim a seemingly ‘natural’ or ‘sensual’ experi-
ence in welcome contrast to our ‘toxic’ frequent use of material digital
technology in everyday life.
A study by Madhudaya Sinha from 2016, neatly entitled ‘Oodles of
Noodles: Nestlé India and the Maggi Consumer Nightmare’, focuses
on some interesting alternative cultural narratives surrounding Maggi
16 K. Hahn
instant products in India. Her study first draws attention to the very high
numbers of Maggi products purchased in India and seeks to account for
this popularity by examining the ways in which the company’s marketing
strategies simultaneously draw on traditions of Indian food preparation
and address concerns about contemporary social changes that compro-
mise traditional food preparation. As in the case of Maggi marketing
in West African countries, the marketing of these products in India is
based on the expectation that it is predominantly women who prepare
food regularly for the whole family, typically preparing these family meals
from scratch according to elaborate recipes. At the same time, however,
women in India are increasingly willing or compelled to seek employ-
ment and thus ever more likely to be subject to work schedules that
interfere with their cooking chores at home. Inexpensive instant food is
accordingly marketed as a way of solving this problem by saving women
both time and money. Despite these perceived advantages of instant
food in relation to modern lifestyles, Sinha thus argues that the factor
of convenience is not sufficient of itself to explain the high sales of
instant foods in India. What makes this product attractive to consumers
in India, she concludes, is actually its evocations of traditional lifestyles
conveyed by a marketing strategy based on narratives of Indian tradi-
tions. Drawing on previous studies, and in particular a study by Tulasi
Srinivas (2006), Sinha assigns a number of labels to these narratives,
including “‘narratives of subterfuge’ where the packaged food is wrapped
in a home cooked authenticity” (Sinha, 2016, p. 24), and narratives of
“‘affiliative desire’[…] referring to food which could possibly recreate
caste, regional and other social identity groupings for the cosmopolitan
Indian family” (Sinha, 2016, p. 20). Such narratives must also contend
with critical counter-narratives lamenting the fact that global food chains
now dominate the Indian food market and questioning the nutritional
value of instant food. Sinha’s findings further suggest that, unlike in West
African countries, the narratives employed to prompt consumers in India
to use instant food do not refer to modernisation but appeal instead
to tradition. Thus, while dissolving a Maggi cube in a West African
dish connotes the use of an advanced food technology that instantly
‘modernises’ an otherwise traditional dish, dissolving the cube in an
Indian dish means instantly adding some desirable traditional element
at a time when traditional cooking procedures are increasingly having to

be abandoned in practice. As I will further demonstrate throughout this
book, such narratives are an essential compliment to digitalisation, since
we necessarily draw on multiple narratives of this kind in making sense
of our experiences of digitalised settings and processes.
For example, the multinational Nestlé corporation that first acquired
the Maggi company in 1947 has recently revived a charitable narrative
with which to sell its instant food products.8 As Klassen-Wigger et al.
(2018, p. 363) relate the matter: “Nestlé’s corporate ambition is to be
the food industry leader in nutrition, health, and wellness” in line with
a business model that “has been anchored on consumer nutrition and
health since its foundation near 150 years ago [and] has added micronu-
trients to numerous foods and beverages since they became available as
food and beverage ingredients early last century.” The introduction of
micronutrient fortification of condiments was piloted in India in 2009,
Klassen-Wigger et al. (2018, p. 364) recount, “with the launch of a new
seasoning powder enriched with iodine, iron, and vitamin A.” These
products were intended to pave the way for a “large-scale food forti-
fication program” in response to findings from studies conducted in
twelve sub-Saharan countries that no less than “79% to 99% of women
reported consumption of bouillon cubes in the past 7 days” (Klassen-
Wigger et al., 2018, p. 364). This evidence of the mass consumption
of instant food at a time when NGOs are advocating against cubes on
health grounds probably led the company to conclude “that it must
help people improve their nutrition, health, and wellness as well as to
deliver superior shareholder value” (Klassen-Wigger et al., p. 363). This
strategy is presented by the company as a form of corporate social respon-
sibility called ‘Creating Shared Value’. While successfully sustaining sales
of stock cubes and other instant products certainly contributes to the
company’s profits, however, it is not quite clear how the ‘fortification’ of
an already controversial food additive serves to promote health and well-
ness among consumers more effectively than the alternative of gaining
such nutrients from food that is not industrially processed. In any case,
8 The multinational company Nestlé still sells bouillon cubes under the brand name Maggi since
acquiring the rights. See: https://www.nestle.com/brands/allbrands/maggi. Accessed 4 January
2020.
18 K. Hahn
the company apparently relies on a strategy devised by market analysts

that depicts such fortification by chemical substances as a consumer
demand that is merely being met by industrial supply, based on the
seemingly innocuous claim that bouillon cubes “are processed foods
distributed by the private sector and, when voluntarily fortified, are an
example of market driven fortification” (Moretti et al., 2018, p. 159).
The plausibility of this argument in turn relies on a widely established
narrative that adding certain substances to one’s diet can improve one’s
health, though the particular substances added are of course subject to
frequent changes in different cultural contexts. Given this widespread
narrative, dubbing any food additive a ‘fortification’ might intuitively
suggest a somehow enhanced quality. Again what is particularly impor-
tant to note here in terms of the overall theory of social digitalisation is
that such alleged ‘fortification’ can only contribute to a continuous flow
of sales by way of referring to and fitting in with pre-existing cultural
narratives and semiotic resources.
From the examples and argumentation above it can be concluded that
the otherwise abstract cube has been fitted into various contexts with
varying commercial trajectories and accompanying narratives and that
it is precisely this digitalised abstract trait that has made the bouillon
cube universally compatible with an almost infinite range of dishes and
culinary cultures. The success of the bouillon cube is thus not merely
the result of a sales strategy but the outcome of quite complex develop-
ments in terms of both its technological production and its acceptance
in different cultural contexts. In this sense, the trajectory of the indus-
trially produced stock cube can be usefully compared to a ‘bit’ inasmuch
as it has gradually become an almost completely abstract, simple and
discrete unit quite disassociated from its original context. Paradoxically,
it is precisely on account of this abstract character that the product is
apparently able to become globally meaningful when composed among
other units in order to better ‘programme’ an intended outcome, i.e. the
aim of higher sales. While the extensive use of the cube suggests that such
a programmed outcome is highly profitable and therefore appreciated, the
meaning associated with the use of the cube can vary considerably.
1.2 Digitalised Organisation in Early

Modernity
The generation of abstract units and their composition within
programmes is obviously most readily associated today with the algo-
rithmic coding now applied in all software. When the ‘new media’
theorist Lev Manovich coined the term “software culture” in 2013,
for example, he meant thereby to emphasise the relevance of software
over hardware technology, arguing that “the production, distribution,
and reception of most content is [now] mediated by software” and
that “software as a layer permeates all areas of contemporary society”
and “reconfigures most basic and cultural practices” (Manovich, 2013,
pp. 15, 39, 33). What concerns us here, by contrast, is whether all these
crucial cultural transformations had in fact already been influenced by
digital processing before the advent of what is now called ‘software’. To
phrase this question in more technical terms: ‘Can software really be
considered as a layer imposed on cultural practices? Or did software
actually emerge from pre-existing cultural practices?’ In the remainder of
this section, I explore some further examples of digitalisation prior to
the emergence of software that suggest the most plausible answer to this
question is that software is not an added ‘layer’ but rather the outcome
of complex and entangled processes that have evolved in line with and
as part of persistent implementations of digital logic over time, i.e. the
phenomenon I term ‘social digitalisation’.
In advancing this thesis it is worth noting that in his work The infor-
mation: A history, a theory, a flood the science historian James Gleick
(2011, p. 11) clearly stresses the major and persistent role played by
abstract digital coding in the alphabet when quoting from Hobbes’
Leviathan that the “invention of printing, though ingenious, compared
with the invention of letters is no great matter”. While it is true that
alphabetic writing already made use of digital coding, however, it is
important to acknowledge that the social impacts of this system were
enormously amplified and altered by the invention of the printing tech-
nique. Here, our focus is thus on literary practices on a much larger
social scale. Insights into these impacts have been greatly expanded by
the scholarship of Jack Goody and Ian Watt in The consequences of literacy
20 K. Hahn
(1968) and Walter J. Ong (1982) on how the introduction of literacy to

oral cultures led to a shift towards more analytical, distanced and abstract
forms of social organisation, a shift that Ong calls in his subtitle The tech-
nologizing of the world . Elizabeth Eisenstein (2005, p. 44) has since shed
further light on this process, showing in The printing revolution in Early
Modern Europe that while recent studies continue to stress “‘the extension
of mental horizons’ produced by geographical discoveries” in moder-
nity, people’s mental horizons were in fact primarily broadened in this
period by the proliferation of books, illustrating this claim by reference
to Montaigne, for example, the seventeenth-century French philosopher
who famously spent most of his time with his books in his “tower-study”.
Beyond the advent of printing techniques, Eisenstein (2005, pp. 44)
also draws special attention to the setting of the library, since “[m]ore
abundantly stocked bookshelves obviously increased opportunities to
consult and compare different texts”, with the important consequence
that when “old texts came together within the same study, diverse
systems of ideas and special disciplines could be combined”, eventu-
ally leading to the development of new systems of thought. Moreover,
the collaborative process of producing books itself fostered combinations
of ideas (Eisenstein, 2005, p. 45): “Even before a given reference work
had come off the press, fruitful encounters between typefounders, correc-
tors, translators, copy editors, illustrators or print dealers, indexers, and
others engaged in editorial work had already occurred.”
In addition to the multiple combinatory options engendered by alpha-
betic digital coding, printing procedures and the new practices of reading
and publishing, another key trait of early digital culture was the produc-
tion of temporal linearity, with its most closely related material technology
being the clock. Characterising clock-controlled time as abstract, measur-
able, quantifiable and divisible, the German sociologist Rainer Zoll
argued that linear time was a prerequisite for the co-ordination of
modern societies since the implementation of this technology of linearity
led to wide-ranging changes in social rhythms, initially experienced in
the form of an enormous sense of “acceleration” (Zoll, 1988, p. 14).
Although precise clock time certainly played a major role in the process
of modern industrialisation, however, research suggests that people were
already time-conscious in their everyday lives even before the advent of
the factory system. In a study of historical court records documented

before the French Revolution, for example, Bruno Blondé and Gerrit
Verhoeven (2013) found that people had already started to narrate
activities according to precise clock time. Although the ownership of
individual watches was still limited to a small number of people who
could afford them in this period, which suggests that the possession
of a watch was more of a status symbol than a technology indispens-
able for organising time, the narrative format employed in the court
records presented by Blondé and Verhoeven provides ample evidence that
activities were already perceived within a linear time frame.
The much wider social implementation of linear time coincided with
a transformative digital re-organisation of geographical space. This re-
organisation was mediated by maps whose designers aimed to reconstruct
space on the basis of abstract visual symbols. Historical studies have
investigated the prerequisite conditions that led to the conception of
such maps (Behrisch 2006a). From a study by Achim Landwehr (2006)
on territorial demarcation in the region of Venice in the eighteenth
century, for example, we learn that this process of setting and confirming
borders had altered significantly since the seventeenth and sixteenth
centuries. Former demarcation practices had sought evidence of any
existing borders by conversing with locals on the ground and exploring
the physical features of the locale. The officials in charge of this process
would interview people regarding their knowledge of previous demarca-
tions and any commonly perceived borders marked by the presence or
absence of economic activities. These officials would also keep an eye
out for any physical phenomena that might be interpreted as indicating
‘divine will’ regarding certain borders. Whereas demarcation had thus
previously involved multiple contingencies, this process shifted in the
course of the eighteenth century from one of negotiating spatial struc-
tures to one of structuring space by assigning numerically conceived
demarcations.
The representation of space was henceforth no longer perceived as
a matter of experience but as a matter of abstract rational thought
patterns evolved in line with developments in the natural sciences and
mathematics in the seventeenth century (Behrisch 2006b). Above all,
this abstract representation involved the creation of continuous lines
22 K. Hahn
of demarcation in place of the limited local demarcations previously

implemented wherever—and usually only whenever—a particular need
was felt for them. As a clear example of this digital logic, Landwehr
(2006, p. 61) quotes from one document that describes this new
policy of demarcation as “formare un stato continuato”,9 highlighting the
demand to shape enclosed territories by uninterrupted demarcation lines
and exact measurements. Landwehr argues that organising these new
geographical units in this way subsequently gave rise to new geospa-
tial policies and economies as continuous demarcation lines created
new opportunities to control and exert power over the inhabitants of
newly conceived state territories. In addition to the new clear-cut and
confined spatial order based on mathematically informed measurements,
the cartographic methods already practised during expeditions at sea
were now extended inland.
The ultimate goal of these cartographic endeavours was to locate any
geographical spot in the world with the utmost precision by applying
an abstract numerical scheme of space. To this end, the Royal Society of
London issued an instruction in the seventeenth century that all expe-
ditions must henceforth follow the rule to “travel over, describe and
measure” (Despoix, 2009, p. 24). Initially, these descriptions were part
of the diaries first made mandatory following the formal Directions for
Seamen, Bound for Far Voyages issued in 1665. These diaries were anal-
ysed by both the Admiralty and the Royal Society before being archived
for reference. The instructions were gradually refined by stipulating
that the verbal descriptions of visual impressions in the diaries must
be completed or indeed entirely replaced by figures obtained through
technical measuring tools. Professional drafters were then employed to
translate these figures into diagrams that would later become maps.
Eventually a world map was conceived in accordance with this digi-
talised scheme that included numerical degrees of longitude and latitude
representing an abstract geography of the entire globe (Despoix, 2009,
pp. 81–83).
9 This quote, meaning ‘to form a continuous state’, is cited from a document dated 1752 in
which a land surveyor refers to the demarcation between Friuli in present-day Italy and the
territory of the Habsburg Monarchy in present-day Austria.
Having established demarcations and degrees of longitude and lati-

tude that confined spaces to enable the precise location of any spot, what
was still missing was a kind of ‘geo-graphy’, i.e. a description, accessible
at a distance, of who and what was to be found at each spot. At the
level of urban settlements, this demand for precise location was met
by ‘address offices’. As recorded in several in-depth studies by Anton
Tantner, these offices were established between the seventeenth and the
nineteenth centuries in the fast-growing European capitals of London
and Paris to provide addresses in return for brokerage fees. The new
offices also provided services to find travel companions, shared rides, and
domestic staff, sometimes also serving as pawnbrokers and moneylen-
ders. What is of particular interest here is that the services provided by
these new address offices were based on the generation of formalised stan-
dard units collected by the address office in the form of names, addresses
and offers of service, etc. These ‘bits’ of information were then arranged
in a specific order by the creation of a ‘register’ with the aim of facil-
itating the convenient and rapid retrieval of any of these units at any
time.
Among the many uses afforded by the mere existence of such a register,
Tantner (2011) notes that address offices were perceived as particularly
advantageous by customers interested in obtaining information anony-
mously. The opportunity to perform ‘secret’ inquiries without the need
to declare why they were looking for these addresses was often the motive
for paying a fee. Tantner further informs us that these new means of iden-
tifying places by number were of benefit to those who wished to roam
in unfamiliar places without having to ask for directions from passers-
by. In a way that is conceptually quite similar to Internet directions and
global positioning satellite devices today, house-numbering thus enabled
strangers to get around on their own without the need for any copresent
human contact.
In a follow-up study on this subject, Tantner (2015) referred to address
offices as the first “search engines”. The emergence of these search engines
offered by address offices was supported by the new concept of house-
numbering as yet another example of the formal re-organisation of social
life characteristic of modernity. In a monograph of 2007 on the history
of house-numbering in Europe between the seventeenth and twentieth
24 K. Hahn
centuries, Tantner describes how all houses had been numbered by the
end of this period, often in spite of strong opposition from house-
owners and inhabitants. Public authorities, and in some cases also private
entities, used house-numbering as a tool to exert greater control over
the residents of the numbered dwellings. Such numbering served a
variety of purposes in different regions, including for taxation and mili-
tary recruitment or conscription, as well as economic activities such as
selling compulsory fire insurance policies for each dwelling. Moreover,
house-numbering served as a powerful technology for reducing citizens’
opportunities to conceal or disguise their presence or absence (Tantner,
2007, p. 25).
An important point to note here is that while house-numbering
systems have sometimes been replaced by alternative systems and actual
house numbers would and still do occasionally change, house-numbering
is never carried out arbitrarily, i.e. the assigned numbers always stick
to a system, whether that system be applied to a single street, a block,
a quarter or an entire town. Tantner (2007, p. 23) refers to these
numbering systems as “continuous chains of figures”, and for our thesis
what is especially salient is that it was only through the creation of these
chains of figures that previously unrelated single units (i.e. houses) were
thereby able to be formally connected within a digitalised system. As
in the case of developments in cartography, these systems for organising
space formed a new synoptic and abstract perspective that was no longer
based on local knowledge and experience but on an abstract programme.
House-numbering is also comparable with the numerical Internet
Protocol (IP) address system, of course, which is similarly used for
remotely identifying and routing the physical location of a computer.
IP addresses refer to a network structure based on the total number of all
addresses. As Alexander Galloway (2004, p. 3) has shown, these addresses
are essential for the very structure of computer technology, based as it is
on a “digital computer, an abstract machine [whose] management style is
protocol, the principle of organization native to computers in distributed
networks.”
Network structures are likewise a long-established system for trans-
ferring information that can be traced back to the huge infrastructural
project that began at the end of the fifteenth century with the develop-
ment of the first postal services. Such postal services were already oper-
ating throughout most of Europe by the eighteenth century, described
by Headrick (2000, p. 184) as a system that “was reliable, and by
the standards of the day, fairly swift” at that time, with “its relay of
horses on all the main routes and up to twenty thousand messen-
gers”. While the postal service business first founded by Franz von Taxis
(1459–1517) still used the pre-established permanent relays of the Habs-
burg imperial networks, what was new in the eighteenth century was
that the postal service was now offered to the general public, albeit
again—like the services of the address offices—in return for a certain
fee (Headrick, 2000, p. 184). For those who could afford this fee, it had
become quite easy to send and receive messages without needing to rely
on other people to convey such messages on their travels. As with other
developments associated with digital processing, moreover, we can fairly
assume that the professional postal service was attractive to people not
only on account of offering greater reliability and frequency of trans-
port but also because it removed the need to establish social contact
with a messenger, thereby allowing for anonymity. Another parallel with
the Internet is that these messenger services, which had initially been
reserved for official use and primarily for military officials, were now
commodified . Indeed, the same trajectory applied in the case of telegraph
technology, the successor of the postal network, which was initially only
released for military purposes but later became a vast, privately owned
and operated business.
The science historian Frans van Lunteren (2016, p. 775) similarly
views the historical organisation of such networks as direct predecessors
of the computer age, showing how the computer not only incorpo-
rates earlier machines but above all draws on older concepts that in turn
were influenced by experiences with significant machines of their day.
In van Lunteren’s account, clocks, weighing machines (scales), steam
engines and computers have all crucially mediated society and scientific
thought. For example, it was quite common in the seventeenth century
to compare the entire world to a machine, as in the phrase machina
mundi, since the “world was now viewed as operating in the same way as
a machine” (van Lunteren, 2016, p. 766). Various machines also became
26 K. Hahn
widespread metaphors for labelling social processes and concepts: the

clock became a metaphor for linearity and continuity (van Lunteren,
2016, pp. 767–771), weighing scales became a metaphor for desired
political equilibrium and stability, while the steam engine—constantly
“transforming the chemical powers of coal into both heat and work”—
became a metaphor for a “dynamic world” based on the concept of
“energy” (including psychic energy) as “the capacity to perform work”.
The computer itself has since become a quite common metaphor for
“nature, the living world, and the human mind”, with “the universe
being pictured […] as a large machine that processes information” (van
Lunteren, 2016, pp. 773–774). Here, van Lunteren is describing the
interplay between modern thought and modern society, conceived of
largely in terms of people’s experiences of technical infrastructure. Such
interplay has in turn determined the success or failure of the implemen-
tation of certain technical infrastructures over others. Headrick implicitly
offers a telling historical example of such contextualised implementation
of technology in emphasising the co-emergence of the telegraph with
rationalising trends in both thought and technology:
The telegraph appeared at the same time that revolutionaries were

restructuring the national territory into equal departments, imposing a
homogeneous system of weights and measures, and reorganizing time
itself through a new calendar. The same mentalité led them to seek a
rational solution to the problem of communicating at a distance. The
optical telegraph was not only a response to war but also a child of the
Age of Reason. (Headrick, 2000, p. 98)
Headrick thus links the communication technology of the telegraph, i.e.

a digital system by which time and space were re-organised, to a cultural
disposition of abstracting time and space.
With regard to the organisation of systems, including systems of
thought, prior to the ‘invention’ of technology, it is also interesting to
note that the very concept of programming was not initially developed
in reference to a material technology but to actual human computers
or ‘processors’ (Grier, 2005). These were professionals whose job it was
to generate programmes and process algorithms. As described by Claudi
Alsina (2017, p. 61), such processing basically involved the structured

and multi-step organisation of a wide range of activities, including math-
ematical calculations. The ‘algorithm’, as James Gleick (2011, p. 13)
has shown, was thus “another new term for something that had always
existed (a recipe, a set of instructions, a step-by-step procedure) but
now [i.e. in the twentieth century] demanded formal recognition.” As a
way of illustrating algorithms through everyday examples, Alsina (2017,
p. 100) offers instructions on how to generate an algorithm for preparing
a dish. These can be summarised as follows:
1. Number all the tasks involved and estimate the time required to
complete each task.
2. Identify any interdependent tasks (such as shopping) and all tasks that
need to be performed sequentially.
3. In order to optimize organisation in terms of the number of co-
workers and the number of available devices (ovens, blenders, pots,
etc.), apply an algorithm to ensure that all tasks which can be executed
simultaneously are executed simultaneously and that any other tasks
are executed sequentially. (Author’s translation from German)
Other everyday life examples of the application of algorithms offered by

Alsina include industrial supply chains and door-to-door waste collec-
tion. In general terms, the generation of an algorithm follows a specific
process in which discrete units are first identified and then composed
and formulated in accordance with mathematical graph theory for the
purpose of process optimisation, typically with the aim of saving time or
money or otherwise increasing productivity (Alsina, 2017, p. 51). In this
way the entire procedure is streamlined or linearised in order to render it
calculable and economical. A prerequisite for such a programmed organ-
isation is the initial process of digitisation 10 by which the generated units
that form the digits of the final linearised procedure are first rendered
abstract.
Alsina’s proposed algorithm for preparing a dish demonstrates how an
algorithm can be applied regardless of the scale of the procedure, since
10See also the article by Desai (2014, p. 1469) in which digitisation is conceived of as the
“new steam”.
28 K. Hahn
the procedure for making a meal from scratch at home can be based on
an algorithm in fundamentally the same way as the large-scale indus-
trial production of food is organised and operated through the use of
advanced material digital technology. While scale may not impinge on
the logic of an algorithmic procedure, however, it does impinge on our
human capacities to compute, which is where the idea of mechanical
computing comes into play.
Computing was initially concerned with counting rather than with
developing algorithms. By way of example, Grier (2005, p. 94) relates
the story of Herman Hollerith, an employee of the United States Census
Bureau in 1880 whose “interest in mechanical tabulation began on a
day when he was inspecting the office operation with the census director
[…] watching the clerks repeat similar operations again and again”. This
led Hollerith to conceive the idea of a mechanical tabulation device. In
1885, inspired by observing a train conductor punching holes in a ticket,
he began recording census data in the form of holes in cards, with each
card holding the information about a single person. The card was then
placed on a frame and, as Grier (2005, p. 94) recounts: “an array of wires
was lowered upon it. If the wire encountered a hole, it would complete
a circuit and advance a counter. If it encountered cardboard, it would
do nothing”. ‘Hollerith cards’, as they came to be known, were to have
an enormous impact on the operations of the first computers, though
again this innovation in fact resembled a tool already in use in the textile
industry.
As early as 1804, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, a French weaver and
merchant, had patented his invention of a loom that connected mechan-
ical weaving procedures with a set of interchangeable punched cards.11
By making it possible for unskilled workers to weave complex and
detailed patterns, the invention of the ‘Jacquard loom’ played an impor-
tant role in automating tasks in textile production, further boosting
an industry that was booming in Great Britain and other European
regions at that time. The new weaving procedure was much faster and
cheaper than previous methods, replacing the need for a master weaver
11 All information on the history of the Jacquard loom is retrieved from the Manchester
Science and Industry Museum: https://www.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/objects-and-sto
ries/jacquard-loom. Accessed 6 August 2019.
and an assistant to work together in the production of patterned fabric.

Although the Jacquard loom and Hollerith’s tabulating machine both use
punched cards, an important difference between these two systems was
that Hollerith’s tabulation was operated by an additional, non-human
source of energy, i.e. electricity. This energy resource also operated within
a kind of network structure, i.e. the electronic circuit, and thus came
with a new operative unit based on only two levels: ‘current on’ or
‘current off ’. Later these binary states were reflected in the digital code,
consisting of the digits 0 and 1, representing the ‘bit’, i.e. the most basic,
non-specific and discrete unit of information. As such, the bit can fairly
be considered the signature unit of the ‘Information Age’.
As James Gleick has observed (2011, p. 6), the bit is the latest develop-
ment in what he terms “mathematicization”, by which he refers to part of
the process we refer to here as ‘digitisation’. In other words, the bit is the
ultimate outcome of what Gleick calls a necessary “rite of purification” of
information in line with previous processes of “simplifying”, “distilling”
and “mathematicizing” phenomena. With the conceptualisation of the
bit, Gleick argues, the term ‘information’ has ceased to refer to a quality
and come instead to denote a simplified, abstract and fundamental unit.
Such bits of information are now “everywhere”, Gleick (2011, p. 3)
observes: a meme is now considered a ‘bit’ of cultural information, for
example, while money can be understood as a bit of information about
“who owns what, who owes what”. For the theory of social digitalisation,
what is most important to note in Gleick’s account of developments in
‘information’ is that he relates these outcomes to a historical trajectory
of transforming qualities into quantities. This is clear, for example, when
he relates how “the bit now joined the inch, the pound, the quart, and
the minute as a determinate quantity – a fundamental unit of measure”
(Gleick, 2011, p. 3), thereby highlighting the persistent—indeed almost
constant—introduction of new quantitative units into social life over
recent centuries. This crucial point will accordingly be further expanded
and elaborated upon both here in this chapter and throughout the rest
of this book.
We have already seen how the bit represents but the latest in a series
of abstract units by which social life and social activities have long
since been transcoded and ‘measured’. What is equally essential to note,
30 K. Hahn
however, is that this form of digitisation has necessarily been comple-

mented by the correspondingly long trajectory of the programming of
these units. It is the evolving combination of digitisation and program-
ming that constitutes what is meant here by ‘social digitalisation’. As
such, these intertwined processes essentially drive the dynamic of what is
commonly referred to today as ‘digital transformation’. As I hope to have
clarified already, and as I shall demonstrate in the following chapters, the
theory and approach applied here does not consider such ‘digital trans-
formation’ as the outcome of any recently introduced material digital
technology but rather as a phenomenon embedded in the trajectory
of modern society and culture. Indeed, the term social digitalisation is
used precisely to distinguish the holistic approach adopted here from the
prevalent understanding of digital transformation as a process defined by
the use of material digital technology. By focusing on a set of processes
in which material digital technology is integrated but not definitive, my
aim is to uphold the standard of good social theory work set out by
John Thompson in his seminal work on Media and Modernity (1995,
p. 7), in which he argued that it is not tenable to “study the development
of communication media independently of broader social and historical
processes.”
1.3 The Logic of Social Digitalisation:

Organising Processes of Dis/continuance
As we have seen, social digitalisation refers to the organisation of
processes of digitisation and programming manifested and embedded in
specific cultural contexts. By definition, digitisation engenders discon-
tinuances, while programming aims at producing continuance. These
processes are differentiated solely for analytical purposes, however, since
in social reality we can only experience them as intertwined. For this
reason I shall hereafter refer to these processes jointly as processes of
dis/continuance. This conceptualisation of the technical operation of
social digitalisation as entailing processes of continuance and discon-
tinuance serves two key purposes. First, digitalisation does not describe
a state but a dynamic that can better be observed by distinguishing
these two different types of processing for the purposes of analysis.

Second, while social digitalisation definitively does not refer solely to the
internal technical procedures of IT technologies, focusing on processes of
dis/continuance makes the approach I propose compatible with research
into all types of digital processing from digital re-organisations of social
activities throughout history to the latest innovations in material IT. The
compatibility of this approach with digitalisation in all its forms further
enables us to observe long-term processes of digital transformation prior
to the advent of material digital technology. While it is analytically
useful to deconstruct the trajectory of digital transformation, however,
the dynamics of social digitalisation are ultimately best understood by
exploring how these deconstructed processes work and are experienced
together in combination.
Adopting a broader perspective on digital transformation has the
further advantage of allowing for the inclusion of established and even
classical social theory in the analysis of social digitalisation. Here it
should be emphasised, however, that including classical theory in the
analysis of contemporary phenomena should not be undertaken in such
a way as to risk narrowing and confining our analysis to explanatory
schemes of existing theory. Rather than merely ‘applying’ classical theory,
such theory should instead be critically interpreted with a view to its
potential contribution as an analytical tool with which to grasp or at
least plausibly account for contemporary empirical phenomena. More-
over, any analytical tool employed in the social digitalisation approach
I propose must be sufficiently flexible to be adapted to the multiple
and diverse socio-historical contexts that are addressed in applying this
approach. For while theories are considered ‘classical’ on account of their
enduring explanatory power, even classical theories need to be adapted
to the particular research context being explored. This is especially the
case when the research question refers to phenomena unknown at the
time a theory was first conceived. Even given that the explanatory power
of a ‘classical’ social theory lies in its generalisability independent of the
specific context and time frame with which it is associated, ‘compatibly’
applying a theory to a specific research focus always necessarily requires
interpretation. Although any such interpretation of classical theory is
obviously disputable, to claim ‘validity’ for a classical theory on account
32 K. Hahn
of its seemingly unchanged and ‘objective’ application would equally

constitute an interpreted and therefore disputable application of that
theory.
Proceeding on this basis, therefore, I propose that Max Weber’s clas-
sical theory of the connections between economy and society, as set out
in his 1921 posthumously published work Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft
(‘Economy and Society’),12 can be interpreted as a theory that offers
useful insights into the dynamics of digital transformation. As the title
of this work suggests, Weber observed a profound and specific intercon-
nection between society and economy established in modern Western
societies at the beginning of the twentieth century. Weber analysed this
interconnection by deconstructing and identifying key elements of its
underlying historical trajectory in order to better assess probable future
developments engendered by the interplay of these elements.
Weber’s conceptualisation of the interconnection of economy and
society was thus based on an approach by which he explored in great
depth and detail the trajectory of producing and reproducing human
subsistence. In order to better understand this trajectory, Weber drew
an analytical distinction between ‘economy’ and ‘technology’ (1978,
p. 65) and between ‘formal’ and ‘substantive’ rationality (1978, p. 85).
With this analytical distinction, he aimed to offer a more comprehensive
and accurate description of how the economy acts a driver of soci-
etal developments. More specifically, this distinction allowed Weber to
undertake comparative analysis of these developments as they unfolded
in very different cultural contexts, including historically and region-
ally diverse contexts. Through such comprehensive comparative analysis,
Weber aimed at eventually achieving a more concise and fruitful concep-
tualisation of the key characteristics of modern Western society.
The wide-ranging impacts of the economic processes identified by
Weber in modern Western society need to be considered in their various
12 My basic reference is the German fifth edition of Weber’s Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft published
in 1980 and edited by Johannes Winckelmann (Tübingen, Germany: J.C.B. Mohr, Paul
Siebeck). The original work was published in 1921/1922. In order to make the references more
accessible to an international readership, however, I quote from the English edition edited by
Gunther Roth and Claus Wittich and published in 1978 under the title Economy and Society:
An Outline of Interpretive Sociology.
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muscular atrophy (as in progressive muscular atrophy) the loss of
faradic contractility is only demonstrable in the affected fasciculi,
good contractions being obtained in adjacent healthy fasciculi of the
same muscle. The amount or extent of contraction varies pari passu
with the progress of the atrophy. The galvanic reactions of this form
of muscular atrophy are not yet well established. Muscles and
muscular groups in a condition of impaired nutrition exhibit at an
early period an interesting condition—viz. that they no longer
contract by reflex excitation. Thus in a case of infantile poliomyelitis
with paralysis of the muscles of the leg, these muscles no longer
contract when the sole of the foot is tickled, and if the thigh-muscles
are affected even so slightly as to appear of normal size and
consistence, the patellar reflex is found wanting. In these and in
traumatic cases the reflex act is prevented by lesion of the
centrifugal motor nervous apparatus, and perhaps also by the
associated muscular trophic alterations.
6 Conveniently expressed by the symbol De R.
Histological changes in atrophied muscles vary somewhat in

character in different diseases, and vary much in degree at different
periods of the atrophy. An early appearance is the presence of
proteinaceous and of fatty granules or molecules in the sarcous
substance. Later, the muscular fibres become reduced in size, lose
their striation, and show inequalities; the interstitial connective tissue
becomes active and increases in amount, at the same time that fat is
deposited. The fatty change in some cases, in others the granular or
proteinaceous transformation, ultimately completely destroys the
muscular substance, so that in the place of a muscle we find
abnormal connective and fatty tissues, blood-vessels, fatty and
proteinaceous débris, the whole presenting a pale yellowish-white
aspect. It is in this final stage of degenerative atrophy that all
electrical reactions are lost. In the pseudo-hypertrophic state the
interfibrillary and interfascicular connective-tissue growth is much
more active, and the wasting muscular fibres are buried in masses of
wavy and fatty connective tissue. In this condition also electrical
reactions may be wholly absent.
(b) Atrophy due to defective innervation sometimes affects the skin
and bones. In the former, after nerve-injuries more especially, we
observe loss of thickness, glossiness, and perverted circulation and
secretion; the hairs may fall out or grow abnormally; the nails are
slow of growth, thick, rugose, incurvated, and brittle. In other cases,
as in cerebral and spinal paralyses, the skin of the paralyzed part is
abnormally dry, rough, and furfuraceous, and it loses its elasticity. In
some varieties of so-called skin diseases the patches of altered
nutrition (eczema, bullæ, herpes, psoriasis, leucoderma,
scleroderma, etc.) are often, probably, dependent upon nervous
lesions.
In the very rare disease known as progressive facial atrophy the

skin, subcutaneous areolar tissue, and the bones undergo extreme
atrophy. The initial lesion is usually a patch of scleroderma with or
without neuralgic phenomena; the skin is thin, darker and smoother
than normal; it soon adheres to the subjacent bone (maxilla or
zygoma), which itself steadily diminishes in size. Almost the entire
half of the face (including the palate and tongue) may ultimately
show the atrophic changes. We are not yet prepared to state the
causal nerve-lesion in this disease.
The bones are abnormally fragile (fragilitas ossium) in some nervous

diseases, more especially in dementia paralytica and posterior spinal
sclerosis; but whether this condition is due directly to the nervous
disease or is the expression of more general malnutrition is now
undecided.
The complex lesions of joints observed in the course of posterior

spinal sclerosis, the spinal arthropathies of Charcot, probably belong
to this category. The affected joint (knee, shoulder, or ankle) rather
suddenly swells, and the swelling usually invades the rest of the
member or extends to the next distal joint; it is a hard, semi-elastic
swelling unlike common œdema. After its gradual subsidence it is
found that changes have taken place in the articulation itself, and
later distinct evidences of destructive disease, such as erosion of
cartilages, relaxation of ligaments, swelling, are observed. In many
cases extra-articular lesions appear in the shape of osteophitic
formations from the adjacent bones. The hydrarthrosis may persist
or disappear. So complete may be the destruction of the joint that—
for example, in a case of arthropathy of the knee—the leg may be
twisted about in all directions, and even over-extended so as to lie
upon the anterior surface of the thigh. Examination of the joint post-
mortem reveals non-suppurative destruction of all its component
parts, cartilages, ligaments, and epiphyses; the eroded, deformed
ends of the bones rub against one another in a false joint-cavity
formed of the skin, connective tissue, tendons, and remains of
ligaments. The absence of pain and tenderness in the course of
arthropathies is a striking feature—so much so that when, in an adult
patient, it is observed that manipulation or puncture of a diseased
joint is painless, special inquiry should be made for symptoms of
posterior spinal sclerosis.7
7 We have known one case in which the diagnosis of tabes dorsalis was made (and
verified after death) in this way, after the surgeon in charge of the patient had
mentioned the fact that puncturing a swollen diseased knee-joint was painless.
(c) Under the head of degenerative atrophies should be included the

secondary changes which affect certain nerve-tracts within the
nervous system itself. It is impossible in this introduction to treat fully
of this interesting category of trophic changes; the following
summary must suffice: (1) When the cerebral motor cortex or any
part of the associated pyramidal (or motor) tract is destructively
injured, there occurs, in from three to six weeks, a degeneration of
the whole tract caudad of (below) the brain. The myeline becomes
granular and disappears, the cylinder-axes are broken up and
vanish, the connective tissue (neuroglia) increases in amount; the
atrophied and degenerated area appears in a transection rather
translucent in contrast to the pearly white of the normal medullary
tissue, and when the preparation is stained with carmine the patch
takes up an abnormal amount of pigment. This is the so-called
descending degeneration, or centrifugal atrophy of the central
nervous system. (2) After total transverse lesions of the spinal cord,
besides the above-described centrifugal degeneration caudad of the
lesion, we observe frontad of (above) it similar changes in the
posterior median columns, and in the direct cerebellar tracts—
centripetal degeneration. At present we have no knowledge of
centripetal (ascending) degenerations in the cerebrum and in nerve-
trunks; and if the results of von Gudden's experimental method be
cited against this statement, it must be replied that its effects are
best seen in newly-born animals, and that its pathology is yet
unknown. (3) Lesions of the anterior gray matter (ventral cornua) of
the spinal cord, and of mixed nerve-trunks produce only centrifugal
or descending degeneration. All the nerve-fibres deriving their
innervation from the injured area in the cord, or in case of nerves all
fibres below the injury, perish—i.e. their myeline breaks up and
undergoes granular and fatty degeneration, their cylinder-axes are
segmented and disappear, while at the same time the connective
tissue of the nerve becomes abnormally active and increases.
Furthermore, in cases of this category there are, inevitably,
degenerative and atrophic changes in the attached muscles, and
peculiar electro-muscular reactions (vide supra). All these central
and peripheral nervous degenerations, due to a local lesion, are
conveniently grouped under the name of Wallerian degeneration.
2. ERUPTIONS AND ULCERATIONS.—(a) The cutaneous eruption about

whose nervous origin there is the least doubt is that known as
herpes or zona. This manifests itself, with or without paræsthesiæ
(pain, itching, formication, etc.), as vesicles upon deeply-inflamed
spots of skin distributed in the territory of one or more sensory
nerves, and almost always unilaterally. The destructive process in
the derma is so profound as to leave scars which are indelible as a
rule. In general terms it might be stated that herpes may occur in the
range of any sensory nerve distributed to the skin or mucous
membranes. The neuralgia attending its development may be
severe, and in some cases lasts for years after the healing of the
eruption. The pathology of this affection appears to be inflammation
of the ganglion of the posterior root of one or more spinal nerves
(including the trigeminus and glosso-pharyngeal) or of their trunks.
Herpes may appear in the course of spontaneous and traumatic
neuritis; and in the last-named conditions a variety of eruptions have
been observed in the area supplied by affected nerves, such as
eczema, bullæ, etc.
(b) That ulceration may result directly from a nervous lesion is shown
by the history of herpes, where a destructive process takes place in
the derma under such conditions as to exclude the action of external
agencies. But the same cannot be said of the ordinary ulcerations
and gangrenous lesions observed in a number of nervous diseases,
as the bed-sores of myelitis or of spinal injuries, the ulceration of the
cornea in trigeminal anæsthesia, the digital ulcers and gangrene of
lepra, asphyxia of the extremities, and nerve-injuries. As regards all
these, the proper explanation is, it seems to us, that the anæsthesia
existing as a predisposing cause (leading to imperfect protection of
the part), the ulceration itself, is directly, actively caused by external
agencies. Let me briefly cite a few instructive experimental and
pathological facts bearing on this question.
It is well known that in animals and man lesions of the trigeminus

nerve sufficient to produce anæsthesia (of its first branch more
especially) are frequently, if not invariably, followed by ulceration and
perforation of the cornea and phthisis bulbi. These were long held to
be true dystropic changes, but about thirty and twenty years ago
Snellen and von Gudden demonstrated independently and by
different methods that these ocular lesions could be entirely
prevented by absolute closure (perfect protection) of the eyelids prior
to the experiment on the trigeminus. Not long afterward Brown-
Séquard showed that the sloughing ulcers which occur about the
foot of an animal whose sciatic nerve has been cut may be entirely
prevented by care, cleanliness, and soft bedding. The conclusion to
be drawn from these observations is that in almost all cases the
ulcerations and sloughing observed in man during the course of a
nervous disease sufficient to produce anæsthesia, such as traumatic
neuritis, lepra anæsthetica, traumatic or simple myelitis transversa,
disease of the trigeminal nerve, etc., are in reality produced by
external agencies, injuries to the cuticle, action of filth, and, we think,
the entrance of bacteria, which are well known to possess
extraordinary powers of penetration into tissues whose protecting
epithelial layer is removed. Clinical observation corroborates this
view, for, with strict antiseptic treatment and under sealed dressings
(collodion to ulcerated finger-tips), these ulcerations heal rapidly and
completely, while the anæsthesia remains unchanged and the
nervous lesions may even progress. At the same time, while we
believe the above to be the pathology of so-called trophic ulcers, we
would admit the possibility of spontaneous neuritic ulceration and
gangrene, as shown more especially in herpes.
3. ALTERED SECRETIONS.—Under the influence of disordered

innervation secretions may be altered in quantity and in quality.
Symptoms of this class may be caused by neural or by central
lesions, and the mechanism of their action may be direct or reflex.
(a) After section or lesion by disease of the cervical sympathetic

nerve we observe increased activity of the entire skin in the affected
area of the head and face: there is more perspiration, lachrymation,
and more cerumen is found in the ear. In cases of lesions of a
certain part of the oblongata we find one result to be polyuria. In
many cases of nerve-injuries the sweat-glands and hair-follicles of
the parts supplied by the affected nerve appear to be sometimes
abnormally active, or in other cases inactive. In some rare cases of
insanity profuse salivation and extraordinary growth of hair are
striking symptoms. Lastly, in some functional nervous affections the
various secretions and excretions may be altered to extraordinary
extremes (e.g. the polyuria and anuria of hysteria).
(b) Qualitative modifications of secretions also occur, as exhibited in

the many variations in the composition of the urine in various neuritic
conditions, the watery urine of hysteria, the phosphatic urine of
neurasthenia. Injuries of a part of the floor of the oblongata (and very
probably other lesions of the nervous system) give rise to the
appearance of sugar, and sometimes of albumen, in the urine. Under
the influence of disease or of an emotion the breast-milk may
become toxic to the nursing child, causing diarrhœa, convulsions,
etc. In some forms of nervous dyspepsia large quantities of acid or of
alkaline fluid may be rapidly poured out into the stomach as a result
of disturbed glandular and vaso-motor action. In a few cases of
neurosis malodorous or perfumed perspiration has been observed.
In a general way it may be stated that, inasmuch as the normal

function of glands is largely, if not exclusively, under direct and reflex
nervous control, their secretions may be quickly altered in quantity or
quality by rapid nervous disease or by functional disorders. It is
probable that much of our future progress in the semeiology of
nervous diseases will be in this direction by the aid of improved
medical chemistry.
4. ASSIMILATION, METAMORPHOSIS OF FOOD, TISSUE-LIFE, and BLOOD-

MAKING are probably under nervous control to a certain extent, but
our knowledge is not now in a state to speak positively and definitely
of alterations in these processes as symptoms of nervous disease.
THE PRINCIPLES OF DIAGNOSIS.
Having in the preceding pages surveyed the field of neurological

semeiology in an analytical way, it remains to briefly indicate how far
and in what manner these data can be best utilized for logical
diagnosis in the present state of science. If we may be allowed an
illustration, we would say that the foregoing sections contain a nearly
complete vocabulary of the language of nervous diseases, and that
the following pages express an attempt at formulating its grammar.
In the first place, it is important to classify the symptoms observed

according to their probable immediate cause in the nervous organs,
whether they are due to irritation or to the destruction of parts. The
extreme value of such a distinction in practice was first emphatically
brought forward by Brown-Séquard in his famous Lectures on the
Physiology and Pathology of the Central Nervous System (Philada.,
1860); and to the observance of this law of genesis of symptoms we
believe that a large part of the subsequent extraordinary progress of
neurological science is due.
The symptoms produced by irritation of nervous organs are usually

hyperkineses or paræsthesiæ in their various forms. The symptoms,
spasm, pain, or numbness, are usually, though by no means always,
intermittent. That paralysis and anæsthesia may occur from irritation,
by an inhibitory process, is not to be denied, yet we must maintain
the extreme rarity of such a mechanism. The phenomena of
inhibition are so prominent in the normal nervous system that a
physician who looks at nervous diseases from the standpoint of the
physiologist may well be excused for seeing morbid inhibitory
processes where others do not.
The symptoms due to destructive lesions—i.e. those indicating

destruction of parts of the nervous system—are paralysis,
hyperkinesis, and anæsthesia, of absolutely or relatively constant
presence. Thus, for example, the paralysis of common hemiplegia
due to destruction of the motor part of the internal capsule is
constant and permanent, while the accompanying tonic spasm (late
contracture), which is considered an even more positive sign of
serious destructive injury to the cerebral motor tract, is permanent,
but intermittent—i.e. it is absent in profound sleep, and reappears as
soon as the patient awakes.
The association of symptoms of irritation and those of destruction is

frequent but variable. In many cases, as in cerebral tremor and
posterior spinal sclerosis, spasm and paræsthesiæ precede
paralysis, anæsthesia, and ataxia. In other cases (in many at a
certain period) they coexist. In a small group of cases the irritative
symptoms follow those indicating destruction, sometimes occurring
years afterward, as in post-hemiplegic epilepsy and neuralgia due to
cicatrices. We would repeat that very often, more especially in
organic nervous affections, much light is thrown on the diagnosis by
careful noting of the topographic distribution and chronological order
of appearance of the symptoms.
In the second place, it is necessary to group the symptoms of
disease of the nervous system in two great classes—viz. those
representing demonstrable lesions, macro- or microscopic, and
those dependent upon perverted functions or molecular malnutrition
of the nervous organs or elements. The first group is designated as
organic diseases; the second as functional affections. Mental
diseases, so called, can also be classified, according to their
symptoms, in either of these groups.
The symptoms of the first group, that of organic nervous diseases,

are characterized by definiteness of distribution, by permanency, by
relative invariability, and by the predominance of objective signs.
Another important characteristic of organic diseases is their
progressive or fatal tendency, either with reference to life in general
or to that of parts or organs. A third peculiarity of these diseases is
that they do not occupy the patient's attention as strongly or as
constantly as neuroses: in other words, the Ego is less involved.
The symptoms of the second group, that of functional nervous

affections (neuroses and psychoses), are characterized by generality
and indefiniteness of distribution, by relative variability, by easy
removal or spontaneous disappearance, and by the preponderance
of subjective symptoms. The affection may endure for many years or
for a lifetime without fatal result and without special aggravation. The
Ego is very strongly and deeply affected, fear, depression, and
constant dwelling upon the symptoms being prominent features.
These are general statements intended to serve as guides for the

preliminary study of a case. It must be remembered that they are all
liable to exceptions, and that each patient must be separately
considered. It should be borne in mind that what to-day appears as a
functional affection, chiefly indicated by subjective symptoms, may in
a few months present distinct signs of organic changes in the
nervous system. Also, it must be added that in the present state of
knowledge we sometimes are not sure as to the presence or
absence of organic changes even after careful study of a case; as,
for example, in some epilepsies and neuralgias.
Furthermore, allowance must be made for the following sources of
error:
Anatomical variability; as, for example, in the distribution of

peripheral nerves and in the amount of decussation of fibres of
the pyramids;
The coincidence of diseases and multiplicity of lesions;
The toxic effects of drugs taken by the patient previous to our

examination; as, for example, bromism.
I. The Diagnosis of Organic Diseases of the Nervous System.
This should invariably consist, in the observer's mind at least, of

three separate diagnoses, each formed by the application of widely
different sources of knowledge, and each requiring a different logical
process. One diagnosis forms the indispensable preliminary to the
others, and the last one, when correct, demonstrates that the
neurologist is a physician as well as a specialist. A further utility of
this procedure by the method of the threefold diagnosis is, in our
opinion, that it constitutes the sure inductive reasoning to be
employed in the search after the pathology of new diseases, and
must prove of help in the future growth of neurological medicine.
These diagnoses are—
The diagnosis of the symptoms or symptom-group;
The diagnosis of the location of the lesion;
The diagnosis of the nature of the lesion or of the functional

disorder.
1. The diagnosis of the symptom or symptom-group is to be made by

—(a) careful inquiry into the manner of appearance, development,
and chronological order of the symptoms as related by the patient or
by his friends, and more especially by (b) an exact, and in some
directions minute, determination of the symptoms, obvious or latent,
present in the patient. This valuable method of exact observation is
sometimes, no doubt, carried to a ridiculous extreme, entailing much
loss of time without corresponding results; but in medical practice, as
in all forms of professional work, there enters a sort of genius, partly
innate, but largely developed by cultivation, which enables the
observer to seize at once, apparently by intuition or in the course of
a few minutes of study, the really valuable and suggestive
phenomena; and it is in this line, the line of important and correlated
facts, that observation cannot be too minute and exact. In following
this method technical terms must be correctly used and definitions
rigidly adhered to, as superficial and loose records nearly always
mislead. Sometimes in the course of the examination a symptom is
discovered or a hint is thrown out by the patient which suggests new
lines of inquiry, and occasionally necessitates an entire
rearrangement of the data obtained. Consequently, it is important
that the observer should approach a case tabula rasa, and should,
as far as possible, prevent his being biassed by anticipations of, and
immature guesses at, the third or final diagnosis.
Besides exactness of observation, it is necessary that the physician

should have a thorough knowledge of nervous nosology in order to
complete the first diagnosis: he must be acquainted by book-study
and by personal observation with the numerous types of symptom-
groups which fill up our present classification of diseases, so that he
can at once say, approximately at least, in what category the case
before him belongs.
2. The second diagnosis, that of the location of the lesions, is to be

arrived at by the application of the observer's knowledge of the
anatomy and physiology of the nervous system; and therefore it is
here that special training is of the greatest advantage. The anatomy
and physiology of use in this connection are not the bare sciences as
taught in ordinary text-books, but a higher sort of knowledge,
corrected and extended by the teachings of pathology and
pathological anatomy. The physician must be well versed in the
recent revelations of experimentation and of autopsies bearing upon
the architecture and functions of the central nervous system, and
should be able to apply this knowledge deductively to the case in
hand. In this manner the now abundant material grouped under the
term Localization of Cerebral and Spinal Diseases (vide the next
article) can be made of the greatest utility in every-day practice. The
solution of the problem of localization of the lesion is much simplified
if it be first accurately determined whether the lesion is peripheral,
spinal, or cerebral.
3. The final diagnosis is with respect to the nature of the lesion.

While the second diagnosis may be said to possess the greater
scientific interest, this one must be admitted to possess paramount
practical importance, as from it we derive the indications for rational
treatment and the data of prognosis. The third diagnosis is to be
made by the application of the observer's knowledge of general
pathology and etiology; hence it is in this field that the best-trained
physician succeeds—where the experienced practitioner may
sometimes eclipse the brilliant specialist. The truth of this is
maintained by those who hold, as we do, that it is unwise to embark
in specialism without having had good hospital advantages and
extensive general practice.
In order to arrive at the diagnosis of the nature of the lesion we must

consider the family history, trace out predispositions, study the
various causes of disease to which the patient has been exposed,
and by a thorough examination of the various functions and the
objective condition of the patient ascertain what pathological
processes are active in him. Often the clue to the diagnosis is found
in signs afforded by non-nervous organs, as nervous syphilis by
nodes and cutaneous cicatrices, cerebral hemorrhage by renal
disease and increased arterial tension, cerebral tuberculosis by
pulmonary lesions, etc.
A purely empirical form of knowledge of some utility in proving the

pathological diagnosis is that of the relative frequency of certain
lesions in the two sexes, at different ages, in various professions,
etc.—a statistical knowledge which is to be applied deductively to the
case under study.
Considerable uncertainty sometimes remains even after the most

careful analysis of a case, and often, after stating the first and
second diagnoses quite positively, scientific caution and due regard
for truth compel us to state the third diagnosis in alternative
propositions or as a diagnosis of probability, to be finally settled by
the appearance of new symptoms, or in some rare cases only by a
post-mortem examination.
II. The Diagnosis of Functional Nervous Affections (Neuroses

and Psychoses).
In some diseases of this class—as, for example, epilepsy—it is

desirable to make the triple diagnosis as stated supra, but usually
the two problems to be solved are—What is the symptom-group?
and what is the pathology of the affection? The question of
localization is less important and less easy of solution, as the
symptoms are more usually generalized, often vague, and
sometimes purely subjective.
1. The first diagnosis is to be made in the same manner as already

stated, but besides, in many cases, a close psychological analysis is
required to ascertain the emotional and mental state of the patient.
Not only is this indispensable in cases of insanity, but it is often of
great utility in other conditions, as hysteria, hypochondriasis, and
simulation. In the course of this study we are frequently brought face
to face with a most difficult problem—viz. the correct estimation of
the degree of pain experienced by a patient. Is it a quasi-objective,
correctly-portrayed sensation? is it magnified by abnormal
sensitiveness or by true exaggeration? or is it simulated for a
purpose? These questions demand the greatest freedom from
prejudice and most delicate tact for their solution, and occasionally
the most experienced physician is deceived. More especially are
caution and scientific doubt to be exercised when this symptom
(pain) stands alone or nearly so, as in some medico-legal cases and
in certain hypochondriacal states where self-delusion seems to
constitute the only real disease.
2. The diagnosis of the pathological nature of the functional

disturbance (functional lesion) is to be made only by an exhaustive
study of the patient's personal and family history and of his general
condition. The following are the principal lines of inquiry to be
followed:
(a) As to hereditary predisposition: direct or indirect inheritance of

neurotic tendencies, of psychic peculiarities, and as to the presence
of the various psychic and physical signs grouped under the term
psychic degeneration.
(b) As to personal habits: overwork, masturbation, the abuse of

tobacco, alcohol, or coitus, injudicious diet, abnormal postures,
injurious avocations, etc.
(c) As to dyscrasic and hæmic conditions: uræmia, lithæmia,

anæmia, malarial and syphilitic infection, etc.
(d) As to the condition of important organs: of the eye in connection

with headaches and vertigo; of the ear in relation to vertigo and
epileptiform attacks; of the heart (and arterial tension) in various
head-symptoms; of the sexual organs in hysteria, hypochondriasis,
epilepsy, etc.
A serious stumbling-block in this last line of inquiry is the ever-

recurring question as to the causal relation between the symptoms
observed. Is the asthenopia the cause of the headache, or does the
neurasthenia, giving rise to the headache, cause the asthenopia?
Does the extremely slow action of the heart in a given case produce
the epileptoid attacks, or are both due to a lesion of the medulla?
Does ovarian hyperæsthesia and neuralgia (with or without organic
changes) cause the hystero-epilepsy, or is the ovaria one of the
numerous peripherally projected sensory symptoms of the hysteric
state? Does the lithæmia, oxaluria, azoturia, or phosphaturia found
in a patient give rise to the nervous symptoms complained of, or are
they (the morbid excretions) the result of defective innervation? The
candid neurologist, looking at his cases from the standpoint of the
general physician rather than from the loophole of narrow
specialism, must admit that these questions vex him daily, and that
they are often not to be resolved in the present state of knowledge
except by a recurrence to the therapeutic test.
For this extremely difficult diagnosis of the pathology of functional

nervous affections we would obtain much immediate assistance if
observers had the courage to publish their cases in continuous
series, instead of giving us successful cases, which often only serve
to mislead. For example, how greatly would the question of the
relation between ovarian symptoms and epilepsy (also hystero-
epilepsy) be advanced if we had the final results of all cases of
removal of the ovaries for these diseases at a period not less than
one year after the operation! And so with the attempts made to cure
headaches by the correction of errors of refraction and weakness of
the interni. The profession has a right to demand a frank and full
report of the experience of those who practice and teach in these
directions.
THE LOCALIZATION OF LESIONS IN THE

NERVOUS SYSTEM.
BY E. C. SEGUIN, M.D.
There are two ways in which this important subject may be treated.
Of these, the more interesting and logical would be to systematically
expose the results of anatomical researches and of physiological
experiments which tend to demonstrate the organic independence
and the functions of various parts of the nervous system, and to give
a classified series of results of autopsies bearing on localization.
This would be all the more satisfactory because the questions
involved, although of much importance in practice, are in reality
physiological. The localization of functions being known, the
physician could from the symptoms (i.e. perverted or abolished
functions) present make a deductive diagnosis of great exactness. A
treatise on medicine, however, cannot allow the space necessary for
such a treatment of the topic which is best suited for monographic
writing. The other method of exposition, the one we will follow, is that
of summary statement of the association of the symptoms with
definite lesions, with occasional anatomical and physiological
explanations. This will, after all, be a series of diagnostic
propositions stated as concisely and classified as practically as
possible. With this end in view we divide the subject into five parts:
The localization of lesions in the peripheral nervous system

(including the cauda equina);
The localization of lesions in the spinal cord;
The localization of lesions in the medulla oblongata;
The localization of lesions in the encephalon.
Cranio-cerebral topography.
I. Localization of Lesions in the Peripheral Nervous System.
In general terms, it may be said that lesions of peripheral (cerebro-

spinal) nerves give rise to various sensory symptoms in the area of
cutaneous distribution of the affected nerves, and to a flaccid
atrophic paralysis in muscles supplied by the same nerves. These
muscles almost always exhibit the De R. in varying degrees, and
other trophic and vaso-motor symptoms are common. Many of these
symptoms also occur in cerebral and spinal diseases, so that, after
all, the diagnosis of peripheral localization depends largely on a
correct knowledge of the course and distribution of nerves; of the
relative distribution of the sensory and motor filaments of nerve-
trunks; and of the frequent anomalies which occur. The subject of
collateral innervation at the periphery must also receive attention, as
involving a source of error.
Of extreme importance is the law of the relative distribution of motor

and sensory filaments derived from one nerve-trunk. This, Van der
Kolk's law,1 has hardly received the attention it deserves from
practical neurologists. Briefly stated, it is that of the two sorts of
fibres in a mixed nerve the sensory filaments go to those parts which
are moved by muscles innervated by the motor filaments of the
same nerve. The reader can verify for himself the exactness of this
law by making sketches of an extremity and tracing the motor and
sensory distribution of its various nerves. There are partial and
apparent exceptions to the formula, but this objection applies to
almost all our medical laws. In the cranial system of nerves it is
necessary to consider the trigeminus as the sensory companion of
the six anterior motor nerves; the pneumogastric as the associate of
the spinal accessory (in part).
1 Van der Kolk, On the Minute Structure and Functions of the Spinal Cord, etc., p. 7,
New Sydenham Soc. transl., London, 1859; Hilton, On Rest and Pain, p. 101, Am.
ed., N. Y., 1879.
(a) Irritative lesions of nerves, as tumors, punctured wounds,

perineuritis, moderate pressure, etc., are indicated by pain,
numbness, and other paræsthesiæ in their cutaneous distribution,
and of spasm or cramp with paresis only, in the associated muscles.
Pain is the most prominent symptom by far, and many cases of so-
called neuralgia belong to this category. As a rule, there is no
anæsthesia, and the electrical reactions of nerves and muscles
remain normal, or at least they do not present De R. In some cases
vaso-motor spasm (coldness, white or bluish appearance of parts)
shows itself in the most peripheral distribution of the nerve. The
cutaneous and tendinous reflexes are variable, but usually
preserved.
(b) Destructive lesions of nerves, by section, severe pressure, true

neuritis, etc., are characterized by anæsthesia with or without
paræsthesiæ, by motor and vaso-motor paralysis, and by loss of
superficial and deep reflexes. Later, there occurs degenerative
atrophy of the paralyzed muscles with fully-developed De R., and
dystrophic changes in the skin, etc. supplied by the sensory
filaments of the injured nerve. In these anæsthetic parts ulceration is
easily caused by traumatism and want of cleanliness.
The abnormal electrical reactions of the paralyzed muscles are of

much importance for the diagnosis of the amount of injury done to
the nerve and for the purpose of prognosis. They may be
summarized as follows, assuming a case of complete section of a
nerve-trunk:
α. The Faradic Reactions diminish rapidly in degree in both nerve

and muscles from the third or fourth day, and in the nerve they are,
as a rule, completely lost at the end of from ten to fifteen days. In the
muscles complete loss of faradic reaction is noted only somewhat
later, and is absolute. A return of musculo-faradic contractility is a
most positive sign of recovery of the nerve.
β. The Galvanic Reactions.—In the nerve, distal of the lesion, the

result is similar to that stated above—viz. after a few days (from five
to fifteen) all reaction disappears. The anatomical cause of the
complete loss of the faradic and galvanic reactions in the nerve is its
disintegration by the Wallerian degeneration. In the attached
muscles the phenomena are widely different, and present interesting
and complicated variations. In the first place, during a variable
number of days there is increased excitability—i.e. the paralyzed
muscles, deprived of innervation, contract to a much weaker current
then do the homologous normal muscles. This is best shown in
cases of peripheral facial paralysis (Bell's palsy) in the second and
third weeks, by placing the electrodes in the median line, one upon
the cervical vertebræ, the other (a small testing interrupting
electrode) on the chin; on closing a very weak current of from four to
eight elements it will be seen that the muscles on the paralyzed side
of the face (the lower muscles) contract distinctly, while those on the
normal side remain quiet. In the course of time, many weeks usually,
the excitability diminishes, and falls below the normal, and in some
cases ultimately disappears. These are known as the quantitative
changes in musculo-galvanic reactions. During the long period
preceding recovery, or without it, various qualitative changes are
also observed in the reaction. The normal general formula of CaCC
> AnCC (with rapid, jerking and full contractions of the muscle)
becomes CaCC = AnCC or CaCC < AnCC. Often, too, distinct
opening contractions occur, usually AnOC. The muscular
contractions also tend to the tonic type or tetanus, expressed as
CaDT or AnDT, etc.
The form of the contractions obtained is much altered. Throughout a

practically endless period in some cases, or until regeneration of the
nerve takes place in others, it is observed that musculo-galvanic
contractions are delayed, are slower, less jerking, or assume an
undulating wave-like character, easily passing into tetanus. This
change from the rapid, jerky, and full normal muscular contraction to
one which is slow and wave-like we consider to be the most positive
and reliable evidence of neuro-muscular degeneration and of the
cutting off of the spinal-cord influence. Fig. 4 shows the characters of
a human degenerative myogram contrasted with a normal one, Fig.
3.
FIG. 3.
Contraction of Normal Abductor Indicis, CaCC, with
strong current (Amidon2).
FIG. 4.
Contraction of Paralyzed Muscle on thirty-first day of Bell's palsy of the

face. CaCC. 20 El. (Amidon). Shows retarded contraction and slow
contraction, with tendency to tetanus.

Social Digitalisation Persistent Transformations Beyond Digital Technology 1St Edition Kornelia Hahn All Chapter

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Social Digitalisation: Persistent

Transformations Beyond Digital

“The focus on social digitalisation theory offers an original contribution to

ISBN 978-3-030-79866-6 ISBN 978-3-030-79867-3 (eBook)

Cover illustration: Hugh Williamson/Alamy Stock Photo

significance most of us were still only beginning to grasp. Worldwide,

with such actions and decisions often taken in a highly non-transparent

this approach to the analysis of some key modern settings in order

Salzburg, Austria Kornelia Hahn

1 Introducing Social Digitalisation 1

3 Digitalisation and the Production of Bourgeois Privacy 85

6.5 Co-programming Technologically Programmed

Preliminary definition: ‘social digitalisation’ refers to the dynamics entailed

on the cover of this book. Digital organisation and transformation have

1.1 Digitalisation Beyond Technology:

to increase productivity in the grocery business have always relied on the

2 According to information at: https://foodlicensing.fssai.gov.in/PDF/Food_Categorization_C

clerks and sales assistants or to each other when shopping, of course,

As we have already seen in the case of ‘digital fruits’, food wrapping

the first transparent packaging material available for consumer prod-

5The introduction of the self-service supermarket will be addressed more comprehensively in

6The phenomenon of simultaneous symbolic reduction and augmentation is addressed in

factories introduced as “sanitary bakeries” in pointed contrast to their

‘discontinuous’ in relation to the original shape of the product or raw

been prepared in private households and restaurants. As in other indus-

‘restaurant’ has its origins in an abbreviation of restaurateurs, which was

at a time when traditional cooking procedures are increasingly having to

the company apparently relies on a strategy devised by market analysts

1.2 Digitalised Organisation in Early

(1968) and Walter J. Ong (1982) on how the introduction of literacy to

the factory system. In a study of historical court records documented

of demarcation in place of the limited local demarcations previously

Having established demarcations and degrees of longitude and lati-

widespread metaphors for labelling social processes and concepts: the

The telegraph appeared at the same time that revolutionaries were

Headrick thus links the communication technology of the telegraph, i.e.

Alsina (2017, p. 61), such processing basically involved the structured

Other everyday life examples of the application of algorithms offered by

and an assistant to work together in the production of patterned fabric.

however, is that this form of digitisation has necessarily been comple-

1.3 The Logic of Social Digitalisation:

these two different types of processing for the purposes of analysis.

of its seemingly unchanged and ‘objective’ application would equally

Histological changes in atrophied muscles vary somewhat in

In the very rare disease known as progressive facial atrophy the

The bones are abnormally fragile (fragilitas ossium) in some nervous

The complex lesions of joints observed in the course of posterior

(c) Under the head of degenerative atrophies should be included the

2. ERUPTIONS AND ULCERATIONS.—(a) The cutaneous eruption about

It is well known that in animals and man lesions of the trigeminus

3. ALTERED SECRETIONS.—Under the influence of disordered

(a) After section or lesion by disease of the cervical sympathetic

(b) Qualitative modifications of secretions also occur, as exhibited in

In a general way it may be stated that, inasmuch as the normal

4. ASSIMILATION, METAMORPHOSIS OF FOOD, TISSUE-LIFE, and BLOOD-

THE PRINCIPLES OF DIAGNOSIS.

Having in the preceding pages surveyed the field of neurological

In the first place, it is important to classify the symptoms observed

The symptoms produced by irritation of nervous organs are usually

The symptoms due to destructive lesions—i.e. those indicating

The association of symptoms of irritation and those of destruction is

The symptoms of the first group, that of organic nervous diseases,

The symptoms of the second group, that of functional nervous