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.
Author(s): Axel Volmar, Kyle Stine
Series: Recursions
Edition: 1
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Year: 2021
Language: English
Commentary: TruePDF
Pages: 316
Tags: Digital Media
Cover
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Infrastructures of Time: An Introduction to Hardwired Temporalities
Kyle Stine and Axel Volmar
Part I: Media Philosophies of Time Patterning
1. The Suspension of Irreversibility:
The Fundamental (and Futile) Task of Media
John Durham Peters
2. Time and Technology: The Temporalities of Care
Gabriele Schabacher
3. Problems of Temporality in the Digital Epoch
Yuk Hui
4. Suspending the “Time Domain”: Technological Tempor(e)alities of Media Infrastructures
Wolfgang Ernst
Part II: Microtimes
5. Infrastructuring Leap Seconds: The Regime of Temporal Plurality in Digitally Networked Media
Isabell Otto
6. Life at the Femtosecond
Geoffrey C. Bowker
7. Artificial Intelligence and the Temporality of Machine Images
Andrew R. Johnston
8. Intervals of Intervention: Micro-Decisions and the Temporal Autonomy of Self-Driving Cars
Florian Sprenger
Part III: Lifetimes
9. Grounded Speed and the Soft Temporality of Network Infrastructure
Nicole Starosielski
10. Unruly Bodies of Code in Time
Marisa Leavitt Cohn
11. Screwed: Anxiety and the Digital Ends of Anticipation
James J. Hodge
12. Beep: Listening to the Digital Watch
Sumanth Gopinath
Part IV: Futures
13. Captured Time: Eye Tracking and the Attention Economy
Alexander Monea
14. Ahead of Time: The Infrastructure of Amazon’s Anticipato
Eva-Maria Nyckel
15. Artificial Neural Networks, Postdigital Infrastructures and the Politics of Temporality
Andreas Sudmann
16. Technics of Time: Values in Future Internet Development
Britt S. Paris
Index
