Digital Inertia and Ignored Costs: An Approach from Howard Becker to the Disquiets and Controversies of Digitalization

Abstract

This article explores the current stabilization of digitalization as the mandatory mediation of everyday practices through digital platforms, smartphones, and their apps, as well as the discrepancies regarding both the form this process has taken —led by so-called Big Tech companies— and the current situation where the digital has become the only default option for carrying out a vast number of tasks, practices, and interactions. I analyze this stabilization through Howard Becker’s approach to the power of inertia and its relationship with the real and perceived costs of innovation, describing the various costs of digitalization in its current state —environmental, labor, political, social, and cultural— as well as their ignorance and invisibility. The aim is not to "apply" Becker’s theories and concepts to digitalization but rather to facilitate an encounter between this contemporary phenomenon and certain of his concepts and research sensibilities. In addition to exploring the current digital inertia, the article also follows some of the entanglements between digital culture and social deviance, following Becker’s understanding of deviance, as the current debates around the orientation of digitalization underscore the risks of its deviation from its origins as well as from the democratic principles and order.