Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time: Essays on Hardwired Temporalities (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 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 Digital media everyday inscribe new patterns of time, promising instant communication, synchronous collaboration, intricate time management, and profound new advantages in speed. The essays in this volume reconsider these outward interfaces of convenience by calling attention to their supporting infrastructures, the networks of digital time that exert pressures of conformity and standardization on the temporalities of lived experience and have important ramifications for social relations, stratifications of power, practices of cooperation, and ways of life. 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.