Over the last two decades, the interest of many observers of society – journalists, essayists, activists, researchers, innovators, lawyers, writers, etc. – has been focused on the role played in the ecosystem of our lives by the fact that the traces (i.e. the trail of marks) an action leaves behind it of our exchanges, actions, interests and attitudes are recorded and processed by powerful actors. The feeling is that this traceability of our lives increasingly influences the definition of our identity, practices and culture. This observation, which causes some to be frightened and others to dream of control, has given rise in recent years to a number of works, manifestos and procedures.

The phenomenon is not really new, but it has undoubtedly taken on a new dimension. Many tools for producing traces of acts, events, transactions and social relationships are very old. Some of them are centuries old. The major technical devices for identifying individuals and groups (Ollivier 2007), such as social statistics, photography, sound recording, mechanography and anthropometry, are more than a century old. My generation has been confronted, without necessarily being aware of it, with an impressive deployment of conceptions of society based on the idea of the “trace” at the theoretical, political and technical levels. The conception of thought as a trace in philosophy, the definition of power based on surveillance, sociology produced from the analysis of statistical correspondence, the generalization of surveys on lifestyles and public opinion, the defense of a paradigm of indexation based on the study of traces in the humanities, all date from the 1960s and 1970s. Over the past half-century, the challenge of collecting and producing traces, initially somewhat unnoticed, has become increasingly pressing. What has brought the presence of traces within social life to the forefront of concerns in recent years is the patent nature of the knowledge and power effects associated with their processing, so much so that the idea is spreading that we are now living in a society of traces.

But in what sense? For those who have examined the considerable corpus of these topical texts, two observations are striking. On the one hand, the genesis of the idea of traces left behind over a lengthy period of time is almost totally absent; on the other hand, the omnipresence of the idea of the trace is accompanied by an obstinate sub-conceptualization – a feature it shares with other notions, such as information or data. It would seem that the use of the terms “trace” and “traceability” leads to a conceptual black hole. The trace seems to be at the foundation of everything and does not in itself need to be founded.

In the past, I often played Don Quixote (too much?) by breaking my lances against postures that seemed ideological to me and insufficiently protected from vested interests. Such a distance is certainly necessary with regard to the society of traces. However, in this book, I do not principally wish to pursue a critical aim. I take seriously the initial observation that the trace is more often invoked than defined by proposing to give it meaning. I would like to contribute, among other things, to a problematic clarification of the questions raised by the use of the idea of the trace as well as the multiplication of info-communicative devices that claim to be based on this idea. This requires considering the trace more as a scientific concept, as a circulating notion having social and cultural effects, promoting a certain way of looking at the world, giving rise to social practices, taking the form of info-communication devices, some of which are very elaborate. In other words, I take seriously the fact that the trace is difficult for anyone to think about – for myself and others – and that it is thus all the more necessary to work together to do so.

It is indeed a question of working together. This book is a personal contribution to a shared effort over time. It is part of a collective research movement to which it aims to make a specific and limited contribution. This is reflected in its publication within a collection of various research projects focused on the notion of the trace and intended to create dialogue between them. Returning quickly to this both individual and collective journey will allow me to explain what led me to identify one specific question, because it is not a matter of dealing here with all the forms of traces or all the issues related to them.

The reflection I am offering today has been largely inspired by the place of dialogue in the activity of teachers and researchers in Information and Communication Sciences (ICS), my academic discipline. The definition of the object of study gradually emerged during these exchanges. The idea of making the trace an object of research was born when I joined the Teaching and Research Unit (UFR) of Information, Documentation, Scientific and Technological Information (Idist) at the University of Lille 3 to train students in information and documentary science. It is the dialogue with my colleagues, specialists in documentary activity and information theories and with students involved in library studies, information technology systems and knowledge mediation that has made me aware of the importance of this issue. The problem has taken shape, in particular, through my lectures and the textbook resulting from them (Jeanneret 2000), and the conference Indice, Index, Indexation organized by my colleagues at the university (Timimi and Kovacs 2007).

It is thus by taking part in series of research projects developed within the framework of inter-institutional networks of researchers brought together by common questions that I had the opportunity, stimulated by these exchanges, to gradually problematize the schema of the trace¹: in particular, but not exclusively, the ICS research projects funded by media metamorphoses², the Franco-Brazilian network Médiations et usages sociaux des savoirs et de l’information (MUSSI) led by Viviane Couzinet and Regina Marteleto and the interdisciplinary program “L’homme trace” led by Béatrice Galinon-Mélénec and Sylvie Leleu-Merviel; they were opportunities for numerous scientific debates and publications³. All of these exchanges have led me to appreciate the complexity and scope of the issues raised by the trace in the most diverse fields such as that of the psyche, health, corporeal disciplines, the archaeological, historical and geographical sciences, and the engineering of information devices. This has engendered an immense space of possibilities for exchanges within the L’homme trace network, along with several invitations to conferences organized by other disciplines (engineering, history, geography, literature) and my participation in the Transformations du numérique/par le numérique project at the University of Sorbonne, which have constantly furthered my explorations. Finally, the doctoral theses I supervised and those I was given the opportunity to read during doctoral defenses played a decisive role in identifying the scientific and political stakes of research of traces.

In this fertile scientific polyphony I have chosen, for my part, to focus on a relatively limited question, that of the mediated traces of the social world: traces produced via media devices that claim to reflect aspects of society and culture. In the first chapter of this book I will give a more precise definition of the limits of this field. At the initiative of Sylvie Leleu-Merviel, scientific director of the ISTE’s Trace collection, I undertook to gather and structure these questions accumulated over the years into a book.

However, it soon became clear to me that the task was considerable and that it could hardly be carried out within a single book. There are two main reasons for this. On the one hand, the effort to explain a theoretical problematic of the trace, even though it is to be reduced to mediated traces of the social world, has proved much more difficult than expected, both in terms of the realities to be taken into account and the theories to be discussed. This is the case, notably, if we do not intend to prefigure the work based solely on the questions that history puts forward today, which in my opinion would be a serious scientific and political error. On the other hand, as I tried to identify the current political dimension of research, I observed both a constant and diversified process of innovation, enough to cause vertigo, in the creation of tools for producing and processing traces, particularly on the part of the dominant actors in the media industries; and an astonishing productivity in empirical work devoted to social logic, professional situations and precise “branding tools”, particularly in doctoral researches and in ICS.

I therefore intend to describe and question in the near future, less partially than I have done so far in a series of articles, the current, extremely diversified and complex forms taken by current mechanisms of social traceability. I plan to do this work later, alone or with others, in a new book. However, it seemed to me more urgent and necessary today to carry out observations in order to develop fundamental tools for an analysis of the media production of the trace that is not confined to the dominant forms of this process, while allowing us to approach current events with sufficient objectivity.

I have, therefore, chosen to work in this book to construct an explicit conceptualization of how the idea of the trace could give rise to media constructions, taking advantage of the temporal distance and the readings of works that have structured how we come to think about traces. This book is based on the conviction that without this dual perspective, historical and theoretical, the anthropo-social research community may be able to nurture the changes underway, but without truly understanding what is at stake. It consists of a work of problematization, conducted in stages, through confrontations of particularly explicit texts, specifically accomplished methodological initiatives and socio-political mechanisms that demonstrate the powers of a mediatized trace. Without excluding the current state of the political and symbolic economy of the media – often referred to as digital – this investigation is not limited to it, but seeks to place it in the perspective of older practices, theories and frameworks. However, while taking a communicative approach, this volume will attempt to make the most of a reading of works borrowed from a wide range of disciplines, from history to philosophy, literary studies, socioanthropology, language sciences and aesthetics.

This book is structured into four chapters. Chapter 1 defines more precisely the space, scope and limits of this reflection by identifying the object of study: mediatized traces of the social world. It highlights the mediations to be taken into account in order not to assimilate this social production of traces as a natural phenomenon. Chapter 2 develops the notion of the schema of the trace, in order to highlight a particular socio-semiotic process which particularly involves indexical reasoning in a specific logic of which photography constitutes the social archetype. It questions the paradox of a sign that seems to be self-evident while its interpretation is extremely complex. Chapter 3 examines a particular type of trace, the written trace, considered as the prototype of the gesture of inscription, with the aim of understanding the privileged status that it has been led to occupy in the life of a culture and its reflection on the historical construction of this status. It shows that, if writing is first and foremost marked by its ability to externalize, record and disseminate thought, its character as a trace is not self-evident and raises multiple issues. Chapter 4 examines how the most complex and richest of media constructions can be used to serve a society of traces: texts becoming traces. It endeavors to show the poetic, complex and responsible nature of this activity.

The overall ambition of this volume and the path it proposes though a social and intellectual history is to participate in the scientific debate by providing avenues for analyzing current events, while avoiding taking for granted that the life of traces in the social sphere must necessarily take the forms that the industries of media capitalism favor today.

I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of Dominique Cotte who, until the end of his short life, did not stop sharing with me his penetrating reflections on the epistemological criticism of the categories of information analysis. I would like to thank my colleagues who have given me the opportunity to develop this reflection through numerous invitations to seminars, symposia and teachings in France and abroad, and the young researchers who have honored me by sharing with me, as part of their doctoral studies, reflections that have greatly contributed to the maturation of the questions presented here. I wish to thank Béatrice Galinon-Mélénec, Sylvie Leleu-Merviel and Adeline Wrona who all supported this project over the years, as well as Dominique Jeanneret who accepted that it took up too much of my time and thoughts. This book owes much to those who agreed to read all or part of it: Julia Bonaccorsi, Fausto Colombo, Jean Davallon, Maria-Giulia Dondero, Jean-Jacques Franckel, Sarah Labelle, David Martens and Aude Seurrat as well as the translation team at ISTE. I also thank Sylvie Leleu-Merviel and Michel Labour for having reread and improved the English version of the book.