When Bit Strings Get Social Power

A floppy disk used to occupy a social position. It had rights: people put it in drives, read from it, trusted it with their backups. It had responsibilities: store data reliably, fit in a pocket, travel between machines. The position existed before any particular disk arrived. When floppy disks disappeared, the position did not vanish right away. It atrophied. The rights and responsibilities faded, slowly, as fewer situations called for that kind of object. I think about this every time I read Faulkner and Runde (2019), because they give IS researchers a vocabulary for something most of us have been circling around without naming: digital objects are not just technical artifacts. They are occupants of social positions, and those positions have structures that precede the object and outlast it.

Faulkner and Runde start with a deceptively simple definition. A digital object is an object whose component parts include one or more bit strings. The bit string is the nonmaterial component, sequences of zeros and ones, whether program instructions or data files. The material component is the bearer: servers, hard drives, chips. Most digital objects are hybrid. They need both. A smartphone app is code (nonmaterial) running on silicon (material). The definition draws a line that matters. A purely physical chair is not a digital object. A purely abstract concept like justice is not a digital object. But a Bitcoin wallet, a hospital information system, an AI chatbot? Each has a bit string as a component. Each is a digital object.

The bit string part got my attention the first time I read it because it grounds the argument in something concrete. But the real weight of the paper lands on the second move. Digital objects occupy social positions. A social position is a definition of rights and responsibilities expected of whatever occupies it. The PhD student position at UNT existed before I filled it. It comes with rights (access to the library, faculty mentorship) and responsibilities (publish, pass comps, teach). When I leave, the position remains. Faulkner and Runde apply this same logic to digital objects. When you design an app, you are designing it to fill a position that already exists in the social structure. The app has rights (access to location data, permission to send notifications) and responsibilities (protect user privacy, function reliably). The position shaped the design before a single line of code was written.

This is where Orlikowski and Iacono (2001) come back into the picture, and I wrote about the IT artifact identity question before. Their five views of the IT artifact diagnosed a problem: 88 percent of reviewed ISR papers were not using the Ensemble view. The Ensemble view is the one that treats the artifact as embedded in social practice and tightly linked with human action. Most papers treated technology as nominal (present but untheorized), computational (all algorithms, no organization), tool (instrumental means), or proxy (a stand-in for something else). The Ensemble view demands more. It says you cannot study the artifact without studying the social action around it. Faulkner and Runde give the Ensemble view its object. Orlikowski and Iacono said the artifact must be theorized with social action. Faulkner and Runde say: here is the object, a digital object defined by its bit string and its social position. The chain is tight. Orlikowski and Iacono demand sociotechnical theorizing. Faulkner and Runde supply the thing to theorize about.

Then Sarker et al. (2019) tell you where on the sociotechnical axis that theorizing should land. Their 5+1 typology classifies IS research by how social and technical dimensions interact, and the sweet spot is Type IV, genuine sociotechnical interplay. Only about 13 percent of published IS research reaches Type IV. Most clusters at Type I, purely social, where IT is just background noise. Sarker et al. give Type IV four subtypes. The one that connects directly to Faulkner and Runde is Type IVd, inscription. In inscription, social values and choices are embedded into the technical design of the artifact. When a researcher decides what social position a digital object should occupy, and designs the bit string accordingly, the values are inscribed into the code. Algorithmic bias is an inscription problem. Accessibility features are inscription. Privacy-by-design is inscription. The point is that design decisions are not neutral engineering choices. They are social choices, and they get baked into the technology.

In our class, Dr. Sidorova put it directly: social position is what makes the focus on a digital object part of sociotechnical research. If you are doing design science research and you are only engineering a technical artifact, you are not doing IS research yet. You cross into IS territory when you start asking what social position the artifact is designed to fill, what rights and responsibilities come with that position, and how the artifact actually performs when it occupies the position. This reframes what counts as a contribution in DSR. It is not enough to build something that works. You have to theorize the position it occupies.

Faulkner and Runde also describe how social positions for digital objects change over time, and this is where the floppy disk example finds its footing. Positions can atrophy. The position fades as the object becomes obsolete. Physical media positions have atrophied as cloud storage took over. Positions can mutate. The camera position shifted in scope and role when digital photography made every phone a camera. And new positions can emerge. The activity tracker position did not exist before fitness wearables. None of these three modes is just a technology story. Atrophy is not about hardware becoming slower. It is about a social position losing its rights and responsibilities because the social structure no longer calls for them. Mutation is not about adding features. It is about a position expanding or shifting its role in a network of other positions. Emergence is not about inventing a gadget. It is about recognizing that a new set of rights and responsibilities has appeared in the social structure and designing an object to fill it.

I keep coming back to the Transport Test from Sarker et al. when I think about this. The Transport Test says: take your research model out of an IT context and put it in a non-IT context. If nothing changes, your model is Type I. The IT was not doing any real work. Applied to the Faulkner and Runde framework, the test sharpens. If your study of a digital object does not reference its social position, its rights and responsibilities, or the way the position is inscribed into the bit string, then removing the technology from your model would leave the model intact. The artifact was nominal. You mentioned it but never theorized it. The social position vocabulary makes the Transport Test easier to apply because you can point to something specific: the rights of the position, the responsibilities, the atrophy or mutation trajectory. These are not nebulous "social factors." They are the structural logic of the position the artifact occupies.

Why does this matter for design science research specifically? Because DSR is the branch of IS where people build things, and building things without theorizing the social position of what you are building is just engineering. Gregor (2006) classifies Type V theory as design and action, the kind that tells you how to build something and what it will do. But if the "what it will do" only covers functional requirements and not social position requirements, the theory is incomplete from an IS perspective. I wrote about delegation theory and agentic systems and argued that Baird and Maruping (2021) replace "use" with "delegation" for good reason. The same kind of replacement is happening here. Faulkner and Runde are not just saying digital objects are sociotechnical. They are giving you the conceptual tools, bit string, bearer, social position, atrophy, mutation, emergence, to say exactly how and why.

This is the part I am still working through. When a position mutates, who decides? When a new position emerges, is it because the social structure evolved or because a designer created an object that forced a new position into existence? Faulkner and Runde seem to say both. The position exists before the object, but the object can also reshape the position through enactment over time. That recursive quality, positions shape objects, objects enact and reshape positions, is where the strongest sociotechnical research lives. It is also where design decisions start to look less like optimization and more like governance.