Making Information Matter advances three ontological arguments: first, information is not virtual, but material, and it matters. It influences routines, values, politics, and how other matter comes into being. Second, information is in-formation. It changes and becomes lively as it travels across sites and co-creates phenomena. Third, the lively character of information, its materiality and agency is dependent on processes of making. Tools, infrastructures, protocols, ideas, and people are part of making information matter. You are making information matter. In societies where the influence of information is no longer put into question it is crucial to be aware of these dynamics. Only when we navigate the how and why of making information matter can we identify the openings for our own agency.

I spend this chapter explaining the theoretical groundwork for the book's argument. A combination of different sets of theories is needed to develop the ontology of Making Information Matter. Hence, reading this chapter demands more of your investment than reading any of the chapters that follow. You can choose to read chapters as standalone contributions. Familiarizing yourself with the book's analytic base, however, can help you to appreciate the actuality and impact of the argument and provides you with the basis for the methodology, practices and ethics discussed in Chapters 3–8. This chapter argues that making, information, and matter are intertwined and that they can also be used as a set of resources for future studies. Hence, this theorization is also a vantage point or a roadmap for reading the book as a successive text: the parts on method and empirics show how the theory is doable, and the final chapter leads us to the ethos of making matter.

In the spirit of this book's argument, I do not develop this theoretical argument alone. I draw on works from the scholarly fields of Anthropology and Physics, Information Sciences and Art, Political Theory, and Literature Studies, to name a few. What unites these works is that they emerge as an answer to static and essentialist understandings of the world and to any form of representationalism. Instead, they look at matter in-formation. From these contributions, I will deduce and develop an ontological triad of relations, becoming and interiority/agency. They are key conditions from which an integrated understanding of making, information, and matter can emerge.