Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time

Essays on Hardwired Temporalities
Erscheinungsjahr 2021
ISBN: 978-94-6372-742-6
Verlag: Amsterdam University Press

Buch, Englisch, 314 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm

Reihe: Recursions

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Volmar, Axel

Stine, Kyle

Fachgebiete

• Technische Wissenschaften Technik Allgemein Technik: Allgemeines
• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Medienwissenschaften

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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 Anticipatory Shipping Method - 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

Über Autor(innen)

Volmar, Axel
Axel Volmar is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Collaborative Research Center "Media of Cooperation" at the University of Siegen. He is co-editor of Format Matters: Standards, Practices, and Politics in Media Cultures and Interrogating Datafication: Towards a Praxeology of Data.

Stine, Kyle
Kyle Stine teaches Film and Media Studies at Johns Hopkins University. His writings on cinema and technology have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Discourse, Grey Room, and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.