There's a good discussion over at George's about print, information technology, and materiality (a word that's gotten a lot of play lately).
While I greatly sympathize with a number of recent efforts to recuperate an appreciation of "materiality" in new media studies, and am hardly blameless myself in that regard, my sense is that it now may be time to set the m-word aside, at least for a while, and work toward some new language that both captures and refines what the word contributed, while dispensing with its analog baggage. As Manovich points out, digital media are numeric and programmable, and this really is fundamentally different from prior forms of information technology. Any construction of materiality for digital media must, it seems to me, take their numeric/symbolic pedigree into account.