Scholarship has frequently struggled with several pairs of dichotomies as it has sought to understand the digital: real vs. virtual, authentic vs. mediated, openness (freedom) vs. closure (control), and community vs. network. In order to make conceptual headway without falling into these traps, we turn in this article to the concept of indexicality. We urge an account of the digital that sees it as a resource for social action, one with the capacity to reduce and abstract as well as to differentiate and proliferate, recognizing both of these as potential projects that social actors may undertake. We offer the operation of money as an instructive analogy for how we may identify both the abstracting and the specifying dimensions of the digital.

中文翻译：

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投机（关于数字和货币）

学术在试图理解数字化时经常与几对二分法作斗争：真实与虚拟、真实与中介、开放（自由）与封闭（控制）以及社区与网络。为了在不陷入这些陷阱的情况下取得概念上的进展，我们在本文中转向索引性的概念。我们敦促对数字进行描述，将其视为社会行动的资源，具有减少和抽象以及区分和增殖的能力，承认这两者都是社会行为者可能承担的潜在项目。我们将货币的运作作为一个指导性的类比来说明我们如何识别数字的抽象维度和指定维度。