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.

Tatjana Seitz is a PhD researcher at the CRC 1187 »Media of Cooperation« at Universität Siegen. Her research focuses on API studies at the intersection of economic, aesthetic, and data driven concepts within the context of networked social interfaces. She is equally interested in technically informed critical concepts and methodologies for the study of computational cultures.
Marcus Burkhardt is a lecturer in media studies at University of Siegen and principal investigator at the Collaborative Research Center 1187 »Media of Cooperation«, University of Siegen.
Carsten Ochs is a researcher in the area of sociological theory at Universität Kassel. Since ten years he has been active in the research cluster »Privacy«. His work deals with the relationship of the developmnt of democracy, artificial intelligence and privacy. His habilitation deals with digital transformation of privacy.
Jonathan Kropf is a research associate in the area of sociological theory at Universiät Kassel and currently works in the project »Fair Digital Services: Co-Evaluation in the Design of Data-Economic Business Models (FAIRDIENSTE)« (funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research).