Media and Time

by

Robbie Fordyce

• LAST MODIFIED: 26 February 2020
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756841-0242

Introduction

The shift to electronic computing that began slowly in the late 20th century, and has only become more widespread since, was the core of a global media infrastructure. This agglomeration of technologies, devices, protocols, users, signals, networks, and cables has become the reference point for a contemporary idea of an economy of speed. The internet is ‘fast’ and ‘instantaneous,’ enabling ‘simultaneous’ communication that folds into a ‘24/7’ online culture that is always online. Speed is underwritten by a sense of permanence, both in the idea that metadata traces are left in indelible ink for corporate platforms to retain for their big data analytics in perpetuity, and the popular culture idiom that ‘once something is on the internet, it cannot be deleted.’ Data is far less permanent than any idiom would suggest. The internet’s capacity to send information instantaneously is not uniform. Indeed even the idea that it is simultaneous is a very anthropic perspective on the matter, given that individual computers may send data encapsulated in different protocols which themselves have different relationships to speed, order, and efficiency. The internet is presently the most visible and most prevalent of current media systems, and it has impacted the temporal character of our relationships with each other. Not only have humans used a range of media at different periods throughout history, we also presently use a wide variety of media that have different relationships to time, different relationships to the past. Accordingly, media have affected our own perceptions of time in different ways: from the workplace, to interpersonal communication, through shaping our perspective of history and culture, to reflecting on the possibility of what could have been, and creating mechanisms for us to preserve something of ourselves into the future. The study of media vis a vis time has its foundations in the works of a number of key scholars including from fields of study in philosophy, economics, and sociology of science. Key developments in the study of media tend to focus on how the temporal affordances of media rearrange aspects of the economy or of daily life, with a significant focus on how temporal media shape personal experiences of work and labor. The field of media archaeology has emerged relatively recently as a methodology for understanding the social location of media technology of the past, and has quickly developed an enthusiastic community with a rigorous research agenda. This entry broadly covers a number of key scholarly contributions to the study of time in the context of media.

Temporal Foundations in Media Studies

Time is a key differentiating attribute among media. The relationship that media have to time has been established throughout history, and formalized as a key component of media studies (as distinct from communication studies) since earliest stages of the discipline in the mid-20th century. Harold Innis, recognized as one of the first modern scholars of media, observed in Innis 1950 that media could be considered a civilization-shaping technology. Electronic media, McLuhan would later claim, was effectively neither timebound nor spacebound. As he suggests in McLuhan 1964, electronic technology has “extended” our central nervous system across the globe, effectively “abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned” (p. 3). Like much scholarship of the era, Innis, and later McLuhan, distinguished between primitives or tribals and moderns or Westerners as a meaningful categorization. As such, the arguments within the work of McLuhan and Innis, as with any other scholarship of similar language, should be read with appropriate caution regarding their distinctly colonial arguments and the strongly racist foundation to many examples used. This distinction between an idea of civilization and its other is common throughout McLuhan and Innis’ work. This is not surprising given their close working relationship, and this idea can be read as feeding into the development of their theories of media as indicators of different epochal shifts in humanity along a linear model of history. Innis 1950 is the first to embark on this trajectory, to be closely followed by Innis 1951, which includes passages on the way that media can become a device for managing social time. In the final piece of Innis’s oeuvre to be published in his lifetime, Innis 1952, Innis looks to the impacts of communication speed on both politics and on economic development. Where Innis focused media technologies from the ancient era through to print and radio, McLuhan focuses on the impact of electronic media, popular culture, and broadcast industries. McLuhan correlated nativist pastoral serenity with oral cultures, implying that there are purer forms of community that modern media have made impossible. McLuhan, in McLuhan 1964, looks to electronic media systems to establish a pace of communication that would allow humanity to return to this purity of oral culture at the level of the planet. In contrast to a refined grand theory of media, Raymond Williams—ever the successor to McLuhan, and keenly aware of a need to address the cultural and social dimensions of media—in Williams 1974 presents a study of television, and notes how political economic forces in production have been used to retain the attention of its audience through the concept of “flow.”

• Innis, Harold. 1950. Empire and communications. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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  Innis proposes that media can be categorized into two categories: those that cross time, and those that cross space. Media that span space tend to be fleeting and low-energy: word-of-mouth can cover space quite quickly. Media that span time, however, tend to be durable. Stone tablets with etchings or frescos painted onto walls last millennia, allowing archaeologists to continue to uncover stories about human history. Innis’s protégé, the famous Marshall McLuhan, was to point to electronic media as the format that undermines—or at least challenges—Innis’s space/time dyad.

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• Innis, Harold. 1951. The bias of communication. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press.

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  Innis categorizes different forms of relationship to time by reference to the different communal measures that societies have held as common reference points. For instance, social time as a socially specific rhythm of behavior; linear time as a culturally specific epistemology of time; biological time as the rhythms of the nature of bodies. Innis charts the shift of authority over time from religious institutions to industrially managed forms of “clock time.”

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• Innis, Harold. 1952. Changing concepts of time. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press.

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  Innis argues that communication speed has a significant impact on social life. Innis points to the development of industrial printing as fostering changes in advertising, the rise of magazines, and the feasibility of state and corporate censorship, which he contrasts with the use of radio. Innis also notes that technological communications developments tend to increase the pace of communication, and those that can take advantage of this will tend to accumulate wealth and power in the form of economic monopolies.

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• McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding media: The extensions of man. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

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  McLuhan adds electronic media to Innis’s temporal mapping of media. McLuhan’s electronic media are predominantly networked, global, and popular. Electronic media would gather together the disparate populations of the earth into a constantly communicating global village; circadian rhythms that would distinguish territories by their day-night cycle would no longer apply. McLuhan‘s linear history epochalizes different eras as defined by forms of temporal relation: oral cultures “act and react” simultaneously, while Western cultures “repress” the various “feelings and emotions” to another time (p. 85–86).

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• Williams, Raymond. 1974. Television: Technology and cultural form. London: Fontana/Collins.

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  Williams’s influence on media and time studies is not founded on ideas of a general or innate impact of media on time. Instead Williams addresses the reciprocal relationships between cultural production and media affordances. Williams’s key idea relevant for the study of time and media is the idea of “flow,” which is a concerted attempt by television producers to “hold on” to audiences from program to program. Williams presents this as a conscious attempt to occupy time in user’s lives.

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Epistemologies for Time and Media

Philosophical traditions have addressed the existence or experience of time across human history. The scholars are broadly familiar, and include those such as Kant, Deleuze, Heidegger, and Leibniz. The scope and nature of time as a universal concept that has impacts across all forms of thought and being does create something of a tendency for a universal subject of ‘man’ and a corresponding dramatic flair. These philosophers tend to try and account for what time is, in terms of an ontologically consistent philosophical schema. Within media studies there remain two figures whose perspectives on time have had somewhat more direct impact on scholarly research into the relationship between time and media: Henri Bergson (b. 1859–d. 1941) and Henri Lefebvre (b. 1901–d. 1991). The impact of these scholars is heightened due to their research being framed less around the ontological and more around the individual perception or experience of time, and as such they sit outside the scientific models of time that have dominated research over the 20th century. Bergson’s work is diverse and addresses concerns such as methodologies for studying subjective experience of time, as in Bergson 2001. Bergson 2007 presents a taxonomy of temporal characteristics and acts as an effective introduction to his broader oeuvre, while Bergson 1965 engages in a critique with the emerging scientific models of time from his debates with Albert Einstein. Canales 2016 provides a history for this debate between Bergson and Einstein, and accounts for the competing conceptions of time. Lefebvre and Régulier 1999 is a precursor text that lays out the fundamental aspects of the “Rhythmanalytical Project,” noting the technologies and rhythms that operate to organize daily life; this is followed by Lefebvre 2004 which addresses the layering of multiple competing rhythms that overlap within capitalism.

• Bergson, Henri. 1965. Duration and simultaneity: With reference to Einstein’s theory. Translated by Leon Jacobson. New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company.

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  Inspired as a response to a debate held with Albert Einstein, this book by Bergson argues against the hegemony of scientific models of time. Highly specific with regard to early-20th-century debates, the book returns to many of the same arguments raised in Bergson’s other works. However it raises these arguments specifically against special relativity and the consequential mechanistic understanding of time that follows from Einstein’s theories. Originally published in French as Durée et Simultanéité (Paris; F. Alcan, 1922).

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• Bergson, Henri. 2001. Time and free will: An essay on the immediate data of consciousness. Translated by F. L. Pogson. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.

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  In this work, Bergson builds from a critique of psychology to argue that there is a problem with the understanding of a mind as being composed of separate ‘states’ that might be meaningfully separated out from the continuity of an individual life. From this argument he suggests that the same problem resides in our separating individual ‘instants’ out of the stream of time, and that new methodologies will be necessary for accurate study. Originally published in French as Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Paris: F. Alacan, 1889).

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• Bergson, Henri. 2007. An introduction to metaphysics. Translated by T. E. Hulme. Edited by John Mullarkey and Michael Kolkman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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  Bergson addresses the quantitative method of understanding time (days, minutes, seconds) that takes an external perspective on the objects studied. From this, Bergson notes that there is methodological room for addressing experiences as interconnected multiplicities through a qualitative mode that draws the researcher into the durational experience under examination. This essay is shorter and written in broad strokes, and is recommended as an entry point to Bergson’s work and rhetorical style. Originally published in French as Introduction à la Métaphysique (Paris: Suresnes, 1903).

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• Canales, Jimena. 2016. The physicist and the philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the debate that changed our understanding of time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

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  Canales’s work covers the debate between Einstein and Bergson that led to the hegemony of the scientific model of time that dominates popular conception of how time is measured and understood.

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• Lefebvre, Henry, and Catherine Régulier. 1999. The rhythmanalytical project. Rethinking Marxism 11.1:5–13.

  DOI: 10.1080/08935699908685562Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Translated by Mohammed Zayani, this essay is a precursor to Lefebvre 2004, which sets out the fundamental concept of rhythmanalysis, and notes the importance of biology, clocks, and sunrises as key examples of the rhythms that coordinate daily life. Original published in French as “Le projet rythmanalytique” (Communications 41, 1985). Available online by subscription or purchase.

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• Lefebvre, Henri. 2004. Rhythmanalysis: Space, time, and everyday life. Translated by Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore. New York: Continuum.

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  As the key text of the “rhythmanalytical project,” this work addresses the multiply nested nature of repetitions, as well as their function in organizing cities and urban spaces. Lefebvre notes the way that rhythms can be harmonious or disharmonious depending on the relationship between specific and general conditions, and observes the demanding toll of the rhythms of capitalism on the life of the worker. Originally published in French as Éléments de rythmanalyse (Paris: Syllepse, 1992).

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• Stiegler, Bernard. 1998. Technics and time. Vol. 1, The fault of Epimetheus. Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.

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  Stiegler poses a phenomenological approach to technology and humanity that suggests that the evolution of humans and the development of technology have been hand in hand, and neither exists nor proceeds without the other. Technological development is an “exteriorized” transferal of biological evolution. For Stiegler, this cohabitation with technology that causes the human species to externalize memory, society, and culture in devices also allows us to experience the past, anticipate the future, and create the conditions for human time.

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Media Acceleration

A key research field in the study of media and time is the study of how new media formats have reordered the temporal dimensions of leisure, labor, and the distinctions between these two realms. Technologies such as email, mobile and SMS services, and the internet more broadly have saturated contemporary life. Research of this type tends to assess how this media saturation has engaged in a temporal reordering and blurring of social and laboring aspects of life. This reordering is generally theorized as a tendency to include a demand for more and more outputs, in smaller and smaller increments of time, often addressed by reference to an economically motivated quickening of the pace of the capitalist cycle of production. Simmel 1990, a translation of a 19th-century work, addresses the mediation of value in currency forms, its limits on economic growth, and examines the commensurate acceleration of exchange in currency media. Whether acknowledged or not, Simmel’s ideas sit at the core of a wide range of recent scholarship into financialization technologies and high-frequency trading, particularly those approaches that note the impact of finance on other areas of work. Toffler 1977 is a prescient account of the way that informational production and commodity exchange would be shaped by an accelerationist logic in the coming decades. Gleick 1999 addresses personal media technology as the primary scapegoat for contemporary social acceleration over a longer period of time than Toffler. Rosa 2003 presents a “social” model of acceleration, while Hassan 2003 argues for the existence of a “network time” where the specific rhythms of the local are upturned by international temporal rhythms distributed through personal media technologies. Gane 2006 is a metareview of the field, and suggests that the concept of the social will become more elusive as it is disrupted by changes in media. Tomlinson 2007 proposes that telecommunicative media is shifting us from an order of “speed” to an order of “immediacy.” Wajcman 2008 consolidates a great deal of prior research to propose the emergence of a field of research into “social acceleration.” Hassan 2010 offers a counterpoint to Wajcman 2008, and argues for an increased speculative component in the theorizing of media acceleration, to which Wajcman 2010 provides a rejoinder. Mackay and Avanessian 2014 is a collection of core readings for accelerationist politics.

• Berry, David. 2011. Real-time streams. The philosophy of software: Code and mediation in the digital age. By David Berry, 142–171. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave McMillan.

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  Berry notes a shift in the manner in which platforms present data occurring around 2009. The shift is from a Web 2.0 interactivity of destinations on the web, defined by moments of retrieval interspersed with customization, into an era of real time streams of data. These real time streams of the web, Berry argues, are a kind of financialization of the self, as the rational homo economicus of modernity becomes aware of its own constant production of value, but are also a leveraging of statistical information of the change in the economic values and risks associated with the future. The agility and speed of real time is, of course, undercut by a bulky growth in infrastructure necessary to house and distribute these streams.

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• Gane, Nicholas. 2006. Speed up or slow down? Social theory in the information age. Information, Communication and Society 9.1: 20–38.

  DOI: 10.1080/13691180500519282Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  This meta-review of scholarship demarcates contemporary scholarship into broad camps: acceleration optimists or acceleration pessimists. Gane’s own position reflects on the consequences for social theory about itself, and suggests that with increased speed will come a lack of clarity about what “the social” represents at any one point in time. Available online by subscription or purchase.

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• Gleick, James. 1999. Faster: The acceleration of just about everything. New York: Pantheon.

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  Gleick’s book is not an academic work; however it does present a historical context for the key arguments of media acceleration. Gleick poses a history of the communicative determinants of current social acceleration, but especially points to the role of scientific use of media for the purposes of research (e.g., Muybridge’s “instant capturing” photography in the 19th century) through to contemporary experiments in capturing the brief lives of nanoparticles.

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• Hassan, Robert. 2003. Network time and the new knowledge epoch. Time & Society 12.2–3: 225–241.

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  Hassan proposes a key definition for the study of time and networked media: “network time.” Building from the conception of clock time as a key mechanism for capitalist control of the workplace, network time is the form of control that emerges when the portions of time are assessed in smaller and smaller portions over larger and larger geographic areas. Network time is fostered by networked ICTs, which span multiple time zones and creates a generalized acceleration of everything it touches, while ICT efficiencies become new demands directed at workers. Available online by subscription or purchase.

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• Hassan, Robert. 2010. Social acceleration and the network effect: A defence of social “science fiction” and network determinism. British Journal of Sociology 61.2: 356–374.

  DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2010.01316.xSave Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  In this article Hassan critiques a component of the argument in Wajcman 2008, specifically the degree to which she reads critique of time and media as being contingent on a “science fiction” approach in theory, arguing that speculation is key to understanding what we might face in the future. Hassan critiques Wajcman’s suggestion of an epistemological separation between “everyday life” and the “networked society.” Despite this, Hassan agrees that there is a need for more discussion between theory and data-gathering research agendas, but argues that theoretical frameworks be given precedence. Available online by subscription or purchase.

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• Mackay, Robin, and Avanessian, Armen, eds. 2014. #Accelerate#: The accelerationist reader. Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic Media Ltd.

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  The accelerationist reader, as it is known, combines a number of contemporary and classic works that inform the accelerationist position, including Marx, Lyotard, Deleuze, and Guattari, alongside Toni Negri, Tiziana Terranova, Luciana Parisi, Sadie Plant, and Reza Negarestani, as well as Nick Land.

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• Rosa, Hartmut. 2003. Social acceleration: Ethical and political consequences of a desynchronized high–speed society. Constellations 10.1: 3–33.

  DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.00309Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Rosa builds on the work of Paul Virilio to pose a theory of social acceleration. She critiques Gleick 1999, and suggests that social acceleration is neither universal nor uniform in its operations. Available online by subscription or purchase.

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• Simmel, Georg. 1990. The philosophy of money. Translated by Kaethe Mengelberg, Tom Bottomore, and David Frisby. London and New York: Routledge.

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  In the final chapter of The Philosophy of Money, Simmel indicates the materiality of money as a key component of the pace or speed of an economy. Economies are shaped by the rate and convenience of exchange: lighter and smaller currency facilitates a faster economy, while a shift to paper and credit notes increases the potential size of transaction beyond the fixed-face coins. Much of the scholarship on the mediatized acceleration of capital draws on arguments that emerge from Simmel’s work.

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• Toffler, Alvin. 1977. Future shock. London: Pan.

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  Writing in the 1970s, Toffler predicts a shift in modernity that includes higher rates of commodity turnover, a change in the industrial profile of the world, and rapid global displacement and relocation of different types of work.

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• Tomlinson, John. 2007. The culture of speed: The coming of immediacy. Los Angeles: SAGE Publications.

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  Tomlinson argues that the “culture of speed” that has dominated modernity is being replaced by an incipient “condition of immediacy,” a phrase that consciously centralizes the word “media.” This transition is neither smooth nor universal and is reliant on the saturation (to the point of ubiquity) of long-distance communication technologies across and within society. Tomlinson looks to resistant practices to see how decelerationist “slow” movements have tried to reclaim personal time under immediacy, but also looks to other scholars for affirmative accounts of immediacy’s benefits.

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• Wajcman, Judy. 2008. Life in the fast lane? Towards a sociology of technology and time. The British Journal of Sociology 59.1: 59–77.

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  Wajcman’s article is a key reference point for STS-related research on time and social life, points to the emerging field of study of social acceleration, and poses a synthesis of theories of technological speed, increased pace of social change, and increased speed of social life. Wajcman argues that these categories, alongside the general terminology that is raised in these contexts, are not coherent or adequately defined across the social study of time and technology. Available online by subscription or purchase.

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• Wajcman, Judy. 2010. Further reflections on the sociology of technology and time: A response to Hassan. The British Journal of Sociology 61.2: 375–381.

  DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2010.01317.xSave Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  The third piece in the debate between Wajcman and Hassan, with Wajcman responding to Hassan 2010. Wajcman makes two key arguments; the first suggests that the privileging of theory is associated with gendered divisions of labor within the academy, and secondly that theoretical frames will tend to extremes of optimism or pessimism (but mainly pessimism). Available online by subscription or purchase.

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Divisions of Labor and Breakdowns in Work/Life Balance

Research of this nature is less concerned with the way that media has influenced a form of acceleration of social life, and is more concerned with how technologies impact “work/life balance,” especially insofar as technologies confound and complicate easy delineations between these two categories. In this sense, the focus is on how any idea of clean delineations (if these ever existed) between different organizationally separate categories of human life start to break down and become less distinct. This extends to ideas of being ‘on call’ or having one’s schedule and commitments automated and distributed by technologies outside of one’s control. Technologies of time take on a character of governing labor in ways that differ from other rhythms, a fact that Mumford 1934 recognizes. Ever-present email and mobile media mean that leisure time is increasingly blurred with work time, work time is increasingly multitasked and distracted, technological efficiencies privilege workplaces at the expense of domestic spaces, and precarious employment disrupts household organization and intensifies reproductive labor in an unequal manner. Kraut, et al. 1998 presents some of the earliest empirical research into the effects of internet use on users’ management of work and socialization time from an HCI perspective, concluding that social experiences on the early internet displaced socialization in other contexts. Gregg 2011 is a rich account of the nature of contemporary work that addresses the consequences of the media-facilitated blurring of work and leisure time across a range of employment contexts, including precarious labor, flexible working conditions, and freelancing; Gregg 2011 particularly focuses on the affective and emotional mechanisms that enable these new workplace arrangements as well as the emotional costs that this blurring produces. Hassan 2011 suggests that Media Acceleration is generated by media technologies acting as a vehicle for capitalist imperatives of speed, while Sharma 2014 locates the exercise of a geographic-temporal power. Wajcman 2015 suggests that the way out of this impasse might be to intervene in the social components of time.

• Gregg, Melissa. 2011. Work’s intimacy. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

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  Gregg’s work has become something of a touchstone for research into the overlap of work and life. This book combines affect theory, a feminist perspective, and interviews regarding precarious labor in order to critique the colonization of private time of leisure by mediated employment obligations.

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• Hassan, Robert. 2011. The age of distraction. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

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  Hassan addresses how knowledge production is shaped by mediatized disruptions. Hassan’s primary focus here is specifically on the way that converged portable networked media devices create organizational efficiencies as much as they allow multiple competing demands of their users at any time. Ubiquitous media is not solely to blame; primarily it is the effects of capitalist cycles of production on time, attention, and value. The main effect that Hassan critiques these technologies for is the way that they disrupt organizational and reflective time necessary for effective, unharried thought.

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• Kraut, Robert, Michael Patterson, Vicki Lundmark, Sara Kiesler, Tridas Mukopadhyay, and William Scherlis. 1998. Internet paradox: A social technology that reduces social involvement and psychological well-being? American Psychologist 53.9: 1017–1031.

  DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.53.9.1017Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  This early research paper exploring the social and domestic aspects of internet use proposes a theory of leisure time displacement, wherein the internet is responsible for overtaking other leisure activity times, to the detriment of socialization with family in domestic settings. Available online by subscription or purchase.

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• Mumford, Lewis. 1934. The monastery and the clock. In Technics and civilization. By Lewis Mumford, 12–18. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.

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  Mumford contradicted his contemporaries to argue that neither steam engines nor assembly lines were as central to the industrial revolution as the clock. This allowed an organization of labor through hourly wages: the clock “is a piece of power machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes” (p. 15). This standardized and compartmentalized different forms of labor, and attached discrete values to these divisions: “[a]bstract time became the new medium of existence” (p. 17).

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• Sharma, Sarah. 2014. In the meantime: Temporality and cultural politics. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.

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  Using Doreen Massey as an antidote to Harold Innis, Sharma observes that media theories that reference spatiotemporal developments bias toward either time or space, with temporal arguments being fixated on “speedup.” Sharma’s “power-chronography” considers how both slow and fast rhythms introduce power dynamics, and is applied analytically with interview methods. Sharma notes that “most critical treatments of speed [rely] on theorists’ observations of their own experiences of the assumed fast world” (p. 15).

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• Wajcman, Judy. 2015. Pressed for time: The acceleration of life in digital capitalism. Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press.

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  Argues for a greater degree of attention to social phenomena in research into how always-on culture contributes to a mediatized acceleration of everyday life. Media and social time exist in a feedback loop of acceleration. Wajcman specifically opens up the social as an area of inquiry as this allows for interventions in how technology shapes social life, and focuses on interventions in social conceptions of time as perhaps a way forward from the teleology of media acceleration.

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Experiencing Time

Several scholars have labored over distinguishing between, on the one hand, a subjective, individual experience of time and, on the other, an objective, ‘real’ form of time that exists outside of individual experience. Durkheim 1915 argues for a “social” conception of time and addresses how time both organizes and is organized by social forces. Lee and Liebenau 2000 studies an attempt by Swatch to create a commercially branded universal framework for time, and present a comparatively early foray into the effects of networks on social time. Hansen 2009 explores the degree to which media technology allows direct experience of time itself. Ernst 2016 poses the idea of the microtemporal—a form of event that is so small as to be imperceptible, yet still necessary for the operation of most digital technology.

• Durkheim, Émile. 1915. The elementary forms of the religious life. Translated by Joseph Ward Swain. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd.

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  In this work, Durkheim first presents his perspective on time as a specifically social phenomenon as distinct from a scientific exterior or an individual subjective experience. Originally published in French as Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (Paris: F. Alcan, 1912).

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• Ernst, Wolfgang. 2016. Chronopoetics: The temporal being and operativity of technical media. London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield.

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  Ernst’s early writings on microtemporality are comprehensively summarized here in English. Microtemporality describes a perspective on the operational level of digital media; it is a perspective on digital technology that is neurologically inaccessible and separate from direct human experience. The term bridges the gap between the digital calculations in an electronic machine, and human experiences of these events as seamless and “real time.” The microtemporal is exposed to us through media archeological methods, but especially those digital methods that statistically convey imperceptible differences across archives in the form of graphs, lines, and other arrangements.

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• Hansen, Mark. 2009. Living (with) technical time: From media surrogacy to distributed cognition. Theory, Culture & Society 26.2–3: 294–315.

  DOI: 10.1177/0263276409103109Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Hansen draws on Kittler, Stiegler, Warhol, and Simondon to argue that the focus on media as agents par excellence of temporal measurement and the key shapers of society requires clarification. Humans may “temporalize in conjunction with and on the basis of” temporal media (p. 298), but there is an underacknowledged gap between technologies and their subjects: the time of temporal media cannot be “experienced or understood [directly] by human cognizers” (p. 300) Hansen explores this through artworks that present an idea of a time-concept. Available online by subscription or purchase.

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• Lee, Heejin, and Johnathan Liebenau. 2000. Time and the internet at the turn of the millennium. Time & Society 9.1: 43–56.

  DOI: 10.1177/0961463X00009001003Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  This article commences with a description of an experimental universal time invented by Swatch, and proceeds to review how the internet may have shaped our conception of time collectively. Available online by subscription or purchase.

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Digital Games and Time

The new media format of videogames has been notable for its colonization of mobile media and its seeming ubiquity. Accordingly, the habitual and repetitious nature of videogaming, and by extension, gambling, appears to colonize leisure time in much the same way as work colonizes waking hours. Apperley 2010 accounts for how games shape social and bodily life; Moran 2010 articulates how the experience of games exists across complex representations of time; Dow Schüll 2012 uses ethnography and interviews to explore gamblers’ experiences of time in the casino, and conversely Zagal and Mateas 2010 presents a typology of temporal orders that players experience in the course of playing games. Pias 2011 identifies how a number of different technologies of ‘ping’ and ‘pong’ connect infinitely small moments to larger humanistic experiences.

• Apperley, Thomas. 2010. Gaming rhythms: Play and counterplay from the situated to the global. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.

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  Taking an ethnographic approach within Lefebvre’s epistemology, Apperley’s work poses a set of theories of the diverse rhythms that shape gameplay. Chapter 2 in particular (pp. 34–53) addresses how the biological rhythms of the player are in tension with the rhythms of many games.

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• Dow Schüll, Natasha. 2012. Addiction by design: Machine gambling in Las Vegas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

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  Dow Schüll’s work on gambling includes an assessment of the way that machine gambling affects people’s experience of time (chapter 7, pp. 189–210). Her work primarily reports on the way that people use gaming to suspend a connection to the outside world and its obligations, observing the way that people dissociate from time-based concerns.

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• Moran, Chuk. 2010. Playing with game time: Auto-saves and undoing despite the “magic circle” The Fibreculture Journal Issue 16.

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  Moran’s work addresses the idea of “undoing” in gameplay, which allows players to experience multiple variations of “game time” within their experience of play. Moran argues that videogames are a medium that regularly operates with multiple contingent timelines, and that, unlike other media, videogames engage in this multiplicity as a matter of course, rather than in limited special cases.

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• Pias, Claus. 2011. The game player’s duty: The user as the gestalt of the ports. In Media archaeology: Approaches, applications, and implications. Edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, 164–183. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press,

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  Pias draws a connection between the network diagnostic tool “ping” submarine detection mechanisms, and the video game Pong from 1972. The argument that Pias draws is that these technologies take microtemporal moments and “suture” these to humans. Whether rendering the transmission time of a network event in microseconds, or precisely timing the arrival of a virtual bat to an ephemeral ball, the humanizing of microtemporal events undergirds the utility of digital media (p. 180).

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• Zagal, José P., and Michael Mateas. 2010. Time in video games: A survey and analysis. Simulation & Gaming 41.6: 844–868.

  DOI: 10.1177/1046878110375594Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  In this piece, Zagal and Mateas present a typology of overlapping systems of time encountered by players during gaming experiences. Real-world time is the time of biology and exterior social life; gameworld time is the time of play within the represented game experience; coordination time is the ordering logic that provides structure to both play and narrative, and is present in ideas such as rounds and levels; finally, fictive time is the implied time of the story of game. Available online by subscription or purchase.

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Media Histories and Archaeologies

There is a certain durability to the idea of epoch-defining media formats that persists well outside of the study of media, and is found in such eponyms as the “Information Age” or the focus on the Gutenberg press as crucial moments in a linear trajectory of history. Perhaps because of this durability, a number of theorists have attempted to classify media from a temporal perspective. Alongside this, the field of media archaeology involves the assessment of the appearance and disappearance of media forms over human history. In this frame, time is influential in terms of its effects on media, as opposed to other research strands which tend to focus on the way that media affect time, and thus the media archaeology methodology can be read as a system of inquiry in parallel to the epochal histories. Media archaeology operates as an evolutionary perspective on media, observing which forms have died off, and which have survived. The works of McLuhan 1964 and Innis 1950 (cited under Temporal Foundations in Media Studies) engages in this epochalization of media technologies. Flusser 2011 and Baudrillard 1983 both account for different stages of societal logic, as driven by changes in media practices; Flusser’s focus is on the method of inscription, while Baudrillard addresses the nature of representation. Kittler 1999 and Gitelman 2006 each present analyses that are tied more closely to specific transitory periods around the development of digital media, both making comparisons to mass media technologies from the 19th and 20th centuries. More recent scholarship has engaged with this idea of historical trajectories for media through the method of media archaeology. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka have been the primary mobilizers of this method in recent years, with Huhtamo 1996 effectively defining the method, Zielinski 2006 extending the method’s application, and Huhtamo and Parikka 2011 providing an excellent edited collection on the subject. Ernst 2013 examines how storage media are tied into the domain of history, especially with regards to media history, while Parikka 2012 offers a summative account of the method’s approach, and Parikka 2015 contextualizes media archaeology within the era of the Anthropocene.

• Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman New York: Semiotext(e).

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  Baudrillard proposes an epochalization of society predicated on the social role of representations that can be categorized into four different “orders” of abstraction from nature. The first order society emerges in the European Renaissance and is predicated on “corrupted” representations, the second order emerges in the industrial era and is reliant on analogous representations, while the current order is reliant on code that generates a hyperreal existence with a fourth, future order presenting a reality entirely detached from nature.

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• Ernst, Wolfgang. 2013. Digital memory and the archive. Edited by Jussi Parikka. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

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  Ernst’s contribution to media archaeology lies in the focus on the positivist aspects of the media “archive” as a historical and material object that accumulates a life of its own next to— rather than within—its contemporaneous cultural history. Ernst focuses on storage media, distinguishing between analog (i.e., film) and digital (i.e., database) archives. For Ernst, the “immateriality” of digital archives lends them tremendous circulation (p. 88) and a discontinuity of objects that are networked to other archives (pp. 113–114).

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• Flusser, Vilém. 2011. To abstract. In Into the universe of technical images. By Vilém Flusser, 5–10. Translated by Nancy Ann Roth. Minneapolis and London: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

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  Flusser’s short chapter divides human history into five stages of development. Using writing as his focus, Flusser separates media technologies in terms of their capacity to represent increasingly nonrepresentational forms of information, from simple pictograms through hieroglyph and written characters to the zeroes and ones of data.

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• Gitelman, Lisa. 2006. Always already new. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

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  Gitelman critiques the idea of ‘new’ media as a category for describing specific media types. Gitelman notes that over history, many different media have been new at the time of their emergence; instead, she argues, we should read new media as a category of disruptive technology. These new media emerge out of the chaotic developments of postindustrial society, but are also invisibly attached to long histories of technology that are often ignored or sublated.

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• Huhtamo, Erkki. 1996. Time traveling in the gallery: An archeological approach in media art. In Immersed in technology: Art and virtual environments. Edited by Mary Anne Moser and Douglas MacLeod, 233–271. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

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  Writing at the cusp of a widespread domestic internet, Huhtamo examines a range of “old tech” as a kind of readymade art that exists both in and outside of the gallery space. Huhtamo’s contribution is to try and formalize a way of examining these technologies in a systematic way, by looking to the commonalities in the way these technologies are represented as being old, but also how their various histories are at times obscured in the present.

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• Huhtamo, Erkki, and Jussi Parikka. 2011. Media archaeology: Approaches, applications, and implications. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.

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  This edited collection presents a wide array of useful case studies, methodological developments, and speculative proposals, and contextualizes these against the discovery of the historical aspects of media technology.

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• Kittler, Friedrich. 1999. Gramophone, film, typewriter. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.

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  Kittler’s most well-known work presents an epochalization of a pre- and postmodern media culture. Premodern media, Kittler argues, was dominated by a linear textual system that had well-established systems of meaning that have been subordinated to what Kittler calls the “cipher” of information—data without meaning.

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• Parikka, Jussi. 2012. What is media archaeology? Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

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  Describes the scholarly history of media archaeology; demonstrates its application in and across digital, analog, and hybrid media; and notes the utility of the method in exploring conceptions of the future as embedded in discursive investments in media technology from specific eras.

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• Parikka, Jussi. 2015. A geology of media. Minneapolis: Minnesota Univ. Press.

  DOI: 10.5749/minnesota/9780816695515.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Parikka’s work takes the question of geology quite seriously, and examines how various tastes in consumer media purchases and production lead to the production and accumulation of material waste, which then becomes a time capsule of archaeological information for future research.

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• Zielinski, Siegfried. 2006. Deep time of the media: Toward an archaeology of hearing and seeing by technical means. Translated by Gloria Custance. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

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  Zielinski sets out a process for exploring forms of media as they have existed in history with an approach that prioritizes moments of heterogeneity and seeks out points of tension and confusion. Zielinski does this so as to enliven and enrich existing theoretical paradigms in new ways, and introduce greater rigor into existing media theory that projects theories of the present into the future.

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