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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.
List 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 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
About the author
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. 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.
