With the proliferation of smart devices such as smartphones, smart watches, and smart speakers as well as the ongoing push toward smart cities, humans, technologies, and environments have become entangled in increasingly complex yet seemingly frictionless infrastructures of datafication and computation. A seemingly frictionless user experience, however, conceals the contradictions, power asymmetries, and polarisations that shape our digital cultures. This issue of Digital Culture & Society takes the notion of frictions as a starting point for a situated analysis of our digital present. Frictions are sites where criticism is sparked, value conflicts are negotiated, and design alternatives are explored. By bringing together research from media studies, science and technology studies (STS), and sociology, this issue begins to synthesise and systematise the structural inconsistencies that frictions expose.

Marcus Burkhardt is a lecturer in the media studies department at the University of Siegen. Together with Karin Knorr Cetina, he heads the project »Agentic Media: Formations of Semi-Autonomy« in the DFG Collaborative Research Centre 1187 »Media of Cooperation«. He has a background in media studies, philosophy, and computer science and received his doctorate at Justus-Liebig-University Gießen with a thesis on the media theory of digital databases. His research interests include the history and theory of digital media, especially the logi(sti)cs of database technologies, big data, and algorithmic media as well as digital methods.