The question concerning (internet) time (original) (raw)

Time Constructs: The Origins of a Future Internet

UCLA e-Scholarship, 2018

Author(s): Paris, Britt | Advisor(s): Lievrouw, Leah A | Abstract: Technological time has been a topic of much theorization and dread, as both intellectuals and laypeople fear that human life is increasingly becoming secondary to the technological world. Feelings of despair and nihilism, perhaps attributable to social, political and economic upheavals brought by the synchronization of human life with technology, have been theorized by numerous scholars in a plethora of overlapping disciplines. What is left undertheorized is how technology develops in ways that might or might not actually foster these sensations of synchronicity, or speed. Technological development includes patterns of social coordination and consumption, as well as individual use and goals, that all relate to a sense of lived time. But what of the ways that technical design fosters these relations? What is the discourse of time in technological projects?This dissertation investigates the aforementioned questions in ...

2009, Reconceptualising Time and Space in the Era of Electronic Media and Communications. PLATFORM: Journal of media and communication 1: 11-32

PLATFORM: Journal of media and communication Vol. 1 p. 11 - 32 , 2009

This paper examines to what extent electronic media and communications have contributed to currently changing concepts of time and space and how crucial their role is in experiencing temporality, spatiality and mobility. The paper argues that media and communication technologies play a complex part in shifting conceptions of time and space, without diminishing to insignificance the concepts of time and space or subjective experiences of them. On the contrary, by challenging established conceptual approaches to time and space, electronic media could be considered to ‘mediate’ time and space, problematising the multi-layered significance of how they are experienced today. The paper is divided into three sections. First, it presents theoretical approaches to time and space, and it discusses the two seemingly contrasting approaches of ‘time-space distanciation’ and ‘time-space compression’. Second, it develops a historical analysis of the ways in which media have empirically modified the concepts of time and space, and it discusses the examples of ‘internet time’ and new ‘electronic spaces’ to challenge the argument of temporal simultaneity and non-significance of space in the new digital era, respectively. Viewing the historical changes of space in particular as intimately linked to the shifting conceptualisation of place, the third section examines the emergence of a perception of place as ‘non-place’, whilst it argues in favour of the counter-thesis of a mediated sense of place. In this regard, the paper espouses the thesis that electronic communications have succeeded in interconnecting remote places without eliminating their importance.

Media temporalities of the internet: Philosophies of time and media in Derrida and Rorty

AI & Society, 1999

My considerations are organised into four sections. The first section provides a survey of some significant developments that determine contemporary philosophical discussion on the subject of 'time.' In the second section, I show how the question of time and the issue of media are linked with one another in the views of two influential contemporary philosophers: Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty. Finally, in the third section, the temporal implications of cultural practices which are developing in the new medium of the Internet are analysed and, in the fourth section, related to the central theses of Derrida and Rorty.

The Internet and Contemporary Space-Time: A Tralfamadorian Undertaking

2017

In this dissertation, I formulate a new theory that explains how our relationship with time has changed due to the popularisation of the internet. I recognise simultaneous non-linearity, the spatial externalisation of consciousness and the acknowledgement of a new permanence of previously ephemeral moments as being the primary characteristics of this new temporality, based on which we can draw parallels between our temporality and the one experienced by the alien race in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five called the Tralfamadorians. Throughout the project, with the help of different internet art artworks, I also explore whether, in a temporality devoid of finitude, deliberate action and autonomy can be exercised, or if such a temporality only leaves space for passive participation, fatalism and constant perpetuation through replication.

The shape of time: Reconsidering time in the context of pervasive media.

Fascinate Conference 2013, 2013

Within contemporary research discussion in interaction design, HCI and pervasive media the word time is commonly used to represent a wide variety of meanings, concepts and dimensions. Often this is without differentiation between contradictory interpretations of the simple word that belies complex relationships with our world and increasingly with media. The discussion or the experience of time can be traced to many sources, from Heraclitus and the river of time, Husserl’s phenomenological concepts and the Bergsonian interpretations of time to empirical measurements of the swinging pendulum of Captain Clock conflicting concepts of time are freely used to discuss media and interaction. As Chen and Boroditsky argue even the languages we speak influence how we conceive of and verbalise our ideas of time and the effects this has on our lives. This paper considers the issues of how to describe, compartmentalise and resolve the seemingly conflicting concepts of time using the consideration of time as a volume orthogonal to three dimensional space. Taking examples from digital culture, pervasive media, life logging and the quantified self the paper argues for a new analysis of concepts of time as discussed within contemporary digital media research and HCI practice

Axel Volmar and Kyle Stine (eds.): Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time. Essays on Hardwired Temporalities. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2021 (fulltext)

2021

In a crucial sense, all machines are time machines. The essays in Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time develop the central concept of hardwired temporalities to consider how technical networks hardwire and rewire patterns of time. Digital media introduce new temporal patterns in their features of instant communication, synchronous collaboration, intricate time management, and continually improved speed. They construct temporal infrastructures that affect the rhythms of lived experience and shape social relations and practices of cooperation. Interdisciplinary in method and international in scope, the volume draws together insights from media and communication studies, cultural studies, and science and technology studies while staging an important encounter between two distinct approaches to the temporal patterning of media infrastructures, a North American strain emphasizing the social and cultural experiences of lived time and a European tradition, prominent especially in Germany, focusing on technological time and time-critical processes.

5. Infrastructuring Leap Seconds : The Regime of Temporal Plurality in Digitally Networked Media

Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time

The chapter pursues the hypothesis that the plurality of time in an age of digital interconnectivity imposes itself as a time regime to human and nonhuman entities. By looking at user practices, conventions of time measurement, and temporal operations of digital technologies it is argued that an infrastructural/infrastructuring process consists of the continuous weaving of a relational assemblage between different temporalities, which does not harmonize them, but makes them relevant to each other in their heterogeneity. Thus, the time regime of digitally networked media does not consist of the power constellation of an absolute, "true," measurable time, but of a fundamental plurality, which becomes visible on the basis of invisible processes and by that challenges all practices of temporal ordering.

Ancient past of present cyberspatialities? Recapping similarities and differences

Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges. Interdisciplinary Creativity in Arts and Technology, Ionian University. Online, May 28-29, 2021, 2021

Different understandings of space, both real and cyber-, must be kept in dialectical relation with each other if we are to understand how space and time operate in human affairs, argue geographers. This argument plus explorations of space-time are currently affecting many disciplines across humanities and post-humanities. This has not always been the case. First, the spatial parameter emerged relatively late and is still spreading.

Redefining Human Communication Space Culture and Time in the Epoch of Internet Spatiality

The concepts of time, culture and communication have undergone rapid changes since the advent of the Internet. This text examined the influence of digital spatiality on our social life based on the three concepts. The new media have detached humanity from previous understandings of space, physical setting and culture. Therefore, the arrival of any new media systems advanced the boundaries of time-space and refinement in human manipulation of massages. This paper's thrust was to critically look at the dialectic between spatiality through time, culture, and communication to define how digital spatiality has truncated our conception of reality. The human perceptions of space have shifted from previous primordial physical location and limitations to a world illimitable boundary beyond out of the grasp of the authorities and natural elements. Time, space and culture have undergone rapid changes never experienced in human history. The finding's main conclusion was that advancement of the media brought about by the ubiquitous Internet had impacted heavily has adjusted our perception of living regulated by time-space constraints. The general context was that the Internet had abbreviated our conservative understanding of the concepts, challenging the perceptions of time, space and culture and constricted them as experienced in the epoch of Covid-19 in 2020 when humanity interconnected remotely.