Mediated Time: Perspectives On Time In A Digital Age 3030249492, 9783030249496, 9783030249502

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 5
Notes on Contributors......Page 8
List of Figures......Page 14
List of Tables......Page 16
Introduction......Page 17
Time and Media......Page 19
Mediated Time......Page 20
Mediation as Moral Obligation......Page 21
Mediated Time?......Page 23
The Organisation of the Book......Page 27
Norms and Categories of Time......Page 28
Materialities and Places of and in Intermediate Time......Page 30
Always Already On: Perspectives on Media and Time over Time......Page 32
Media and Time: Mediated Time?......Page 34
References......Page 35
Part I: Norms and Categories of Time......Page 38
Introduction......Page 39
An Apodictic Law?......Page 40
Moralising Efficiency......Page 44
Speed as an End in Itself......Page 49
Conclusion......Page 54
References......Page 56
Introduction......Page 58
Power-Chronography......Page 60
Chrononormativity......Page 61
Power-Chrononormativity?......Page 64
The Interviews…Speak for Themselves?......Page 65
No Escape? Or: No Sleep for the Wicked......Page 68
Timeless Time?......Page 70
Motility?......Page 72
Instead of a Conclusion: Are We Conducting Chrononormative Research?......Page 74
References......Page 77
Chapter 4: Eigenzeit. Revisited......Page 79
References......Page 96
Introduction......Page 98
But When Times Are Different, What Might They Be Different From?......Page 99
Introducing: Eigenzeit......Page 102
Eigenzeit and Media......Page 103
Introducing the Idea of Heterochronia......Page 104
Heterochronia: Just Being Offline?......Page 107
Finding Your Pace: Making Your Own Temporal Decisions......Page 108
Choosing Certain Media for Certain Times......Page 111
From the Individual to Society......Page 113
Conclusion and Outlook......Page 115
References......Page 119
Interlude I: Categories, Norms and More: The Philosophy of Time—An Interview......Page 121
Chapter 6: It Began with an Interview…and Ended with a Text......Page 122
Part 1: Interview......Page 123
The Mobile?......Page 128
Time and Communication......Page 130
Philosophy of Time......Page 132
References......Page 134
Part II: Materialities and Places of and in Intermediate Time......Page 135
Introduction......Page 136
Exploring Prison Temporalities......Page 138
Temporalities of Datafication Beyond Real-Time and Speed: Anticipation, Prediction and Pre-Emption......Page 139
Prison Temporalities......Page 141
Smart Prisons......Page 142
Smart Surveillance and Control: Programmed Vision of the Future......Page 144
Smart Normalisation: Open-Ended Future Visions......Page 146
Conclusion......Page 150
References......Page 152
Introduction......Page 155
Approaching Media Futurism......Page 157
Early Media Time Warps: Homes of the Future......Page 160
Digitally Mediated Time Warps: Speed, Immediacy and Connectivity......Page 166
Future-Makers of a Technologized Time to Come......Page 168
Conclusion......Page 170
References......Page 173
Films......Page 177
Chapter 9: Emplacing (Inter) Mediate Time: Power Chronography, Zones of Intermediacy and the Category of Space......Page 178
Reconciling Time and Space......Page 181
Diasporic Zones of Intermediacy......Page 186
Conclusion......Page 195
References......Page 197
Interlude II: Power and Datafication of Time: A Dialogue......Page 199
Time Is Everywhere......Page 200
Technologies Versus the Technological......Page 203
Methods......Page 206
(Counter-)Strategies......Page 207
Power Chronography......Page 210
Redefining Waiting and Boredom......Page 217
References......Page 219
Part III: Always Already On: Perspectives on Media and Time over Time......Page 220
Introduction......Page 221
The Social Construction of Mediated Time and Its Conceptualisation......Page 222
Polychronicity: Potentials and Ambiguities of Abstract Time Regimes......Page 224
Acceleration: Dominant Time Mode in Digital Societies......Page 226
Polychronicity and the Construction of Memory in Journalism......Page 228
From Retrospective to Prospective Memory......Page 229
The Predictive Power of Memory in Journalism......Page 230
From Predictive Memory to Strategic Future Orientation......Page 232
Conclusion......Page 234
References......Page 235
Introduction......Page 240
Journalism, Media, Time and Space......Page 242
Methodological Design......Page 245
Analytical Frame......Page 248
Place, Continuity and Temporal Sanctuaries......Page 249
The Significance of Place in Relation to Time: Or, the Local as Continuity......Page 252
The Notion of a Temporal Sanctuary......Page 253
Conclusion......Page 254
References......Page 256
Introduction......Page 258
Soviet Reform in the 1920s......Page 261
Russian Reform in the 2010s......Page 264
Accuracy–Precision......Page 267
Public–Private......Page 268
National–Transnational......Page 269
Conclusions......Page 270
References......Page 271
Interlude III: The Time of (Your) Live: A Dialogue......Page 274
Introducing the Discussants......Page 275
Questioning Mediated Time and Liveness......Page 277
Constructing Liveness......Page 282
Differences in and Experiences on Liveness......Page 285
Caring and the Longue Durée......Page 289
Being-in-Which-Time?......Page 292
References......Page 295
Part IV: Media and Time: Mediated Time?......Page 297
Chapter 15: Polychronicity During Simultaneity: Mediated Time and Mobile Media......Page 298
Media Reception: Doing Media......Page 300
Time and Media Use......Page 302
Methods......Page 304
Parallel Usage......Page 305
Multitasking and the Perception of Time......Page 308
A Digital Blend?......Page 312
References......Page 315
Ubiquity of Mobile Phones = Ubiquity of Time?......Page 319
Media and Social Acceleration......Page 321
Theoretical Conclusion and Assumptions......Page 323
The Empirical Investigation......Page 324
Perceived Sense of Time During In-between Moments......Page 326
Further Results Regarding Acceleration......Page 330
Interpretation of the Results......Page 332
References......Page 335
Chapter 17: Time, Being, and Media......Page 339
References......Page 355
Index......Page 356

Citation preview

Mediated Time Perspectives on Time in a Digital Age Edited by Maren Hartmann · Elizabeth Prommer Karin Deckner · Stephan O. Görland

Mediated Time

Maren Hartmann  •  Elizabeth Prommer Karin Deckner  •  Stephan O. Görland Editors

Mediated Time Perspectives on Time in a Digital Age

Editors Maren Hartmann Berlin University of the Arts Berlin, Germany

Elizabeth Prommer University of Rostock Rostock, Germany

Karin Deckner Berlin University of the Arts Berlin, Germany

Stephan O. Görland University of Bremen Bremen, Germany

ISBN 978-3-030-24949-6    ISBN 978-3-030-24950-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24950-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Alex Linch shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Mediated Time  1 Maren Hartmann, Elizabeth Prommer, Karin Deckner, and Stephan O. Görland Part I Norms and Categories of Time  23 2 The Categorical Imperative of Speed: Acceleration as Moral Duty 25 Thomas Sutherland 3 The Normative Framework of (Mobile) Time: Chrononormativity, Power-­Chronography, and Mobilities 45 Maren Hartmann 4 Eigenzeit. Revisited 67 Helga Nowotny 5 Exploring “Heterochronias” 87 Karin Deckner

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Contents

Interlude I Categories, Norms and More: The Philosophy of Time—An Interview 111 6 It Began with an Interview…and Ended with a Text113 Kristóf Nyíri and Maren Hartmann Part II Materialities and Places of and in Intermediate Time 127 7 Doing Time/Time Done: Exploring the Temporalities of Datafication in the Smart Prison129 Anne Kaun and Fredrik Stiernstedt 8 Media Futurism: Time Warps of Future Media Homes in Speculative Films and Corporate Videos149 Deborah Chambers 9 Emplacing (Inter) Mediate Time: Power Chronography, Zones of Intermediacy and the Category of Space173 Emily Keightley Interlude II Power and Datafication of Time: A Dialogue 195 10 “I’m Not Looking for a Singular Conception of Time”: An Interview with Sarah Sharma197 Sarah Sharma Part III Always Already On: Perspectives on Media and Time over Time 217 11 As Time Goes By: Tracking Polychronic Temporalities in Journalism and Mediated Memory219 Irene Neverla and Stefanie Trümper 12 Local News Time on the Web239 Henrik Bødker and Niels Brügger

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13 Synchronising the Nation: Media Networks and Russian Time Reforms of the 1920s and 2010s257 Maria Rikitianskaia Interlude III The Time of (Your) Live: A Dialogue 273 14 A Dialogue About Liveness275 Philip Auslander, Karin van Es, and Maren Hartmann Part IV Media and Time: Mediated Time? 297 15 Polychronicity During Simultaneity: Mediated Time and Mobile Media299 Elizabeth Prommer 16 Really “Dead Time”? Mobile Media Use and Time Perception in In-between Times321 Stephan O. Görland 17 Time, Being, and Media341 Paddy Scannell Index

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Notes on Contributors

Philip Auslander  Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, is a professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture where he teaches in the areas of Performance Studies, Popular Music and Screen Acting. He is the author of seven book, including Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (two editions), Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music and, most recently, Reactivations: Essays on Performance and Its Documentation. His current book project bears the working title of Musical Personae: Musicians as Performers. Henrik Bødker,  PhD, is Associate Professor in the Media and Journalism Studies Department at Aarhus University (Denmark). He has published on various intersections between popular culture and media, for example music and magazines. His most recent work focuses on how digital technologies are transforming the circulation and temporality of journalism and, related to that, also how communities of journalists are contested and maintained. He has, among other journals, published in Media History, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Journalism, Journalism Studies and Digital Journalism; he sits on the editorial board of the last three of these journals. Niels  Brügger is Professor in Media Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark, in the School of Communication and Culture. His research interests are web historiography, web archiving and media theory. He has authored and (co-)edited a number of publications, among others The Archived Web: Doing History in the Digital Age (2018), The SAGE Handbook of Web History (Ed. with Ian Milligan, 2018), Web 25: Histories ix

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from the First 25 Years of the World Wide Web (Ed., 2017). He is co-founder (2017) and managing editor of the international journal Internet Histories: Digital Technology, Culture and Society (Routledge). Deborah Chambers  is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Newcastle University. Her research focuses on media technologies in the home; home cultures; networked intimacies; and children’s engagement with digital media. She is the author of several books including Changing Media, Homes and Households: Cultures, Technologies and Meanings (2016); Social Media and Personal Relationships: Online Intimacies and Networked Friendship (Palgrave Macmillan 2013); New Social Ties: Contemporary Connections in a Fragmented Society (Palgrave Macmillan 2006). Karin  Deckner  is working on her PhD about the dematerialization of “keys”. Until December 2018 she was working at the Berlin University of the Arts, Berlin as a research associate in the DFG-funded project: “Mediated Time”. She has a background in cultural studies as well as in social and business communication. Her research about objects in restaurants at the interface between guests and waiters was published under the title: “Krugende Krüge gefüllt mit Apfelsaftschorle” by Logos Verlag. Her research focuses on the interactions between media and the social construction of time as well as on material culture, actor network theory and qualitative methods. Stephan O. Görland  is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Media, Communication & Information Research (ZeMKI) at the University of Bremen and associate member at the Berlin Institute for Integration and Migration Research (BIM) at the Humboldt University Berlin. He studied communication science, psychology, law and political science in Vienna from 2006 to 2011. His research topics are mobile media, organizing of time through media and migration and media use. His PhD focused on mobile media usage in on the go situations and the resulting implications for time perception. Furthermore he works in the field of migration research, especially the smartphone use from refugees in Germany is the focal point of his research. Maren Hartmann  is Professor of Communication and Media Sociology at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). She has worked at universities in the UK, Belgium and Germany and been a visiting scholar in Denmark, Sweden and Australia. Her research has four main foci: media and

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time; appropriation, esp. domestication; media and mobilities; home and homelessness. She has published widely in these fields. Her recent research projects, both funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) include Mediated Time (2015–2018) and Marginal Publics in Motion (2019–2021). Hartmann is also involved in international organizations (Academia Europaea, the German DGPuK and ECREA) and a regular guest at international conferences. Anne  Kaun  is Associate Professor at the Department for Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University, Stockholm. She has studied media activism across different cultural and historical contexts to trace the role of technologies for political mobilization. Together with Fredrik Stiernstedt, she is developing a new project on prison media tracing the media practices and media work since the inception of the modern prison system. Furthermore, she is studying algorithmic culture through the lens of AI-enabled automation in the public sector. Emily  Keightley is Professor of Media and Memory Studies in the Centre for Research in Communication and Culture at Loughborough University. Her main research interest is memory, time and its mediation in everyday life. She is particularly concerned with the role of media in the relationship between individual, social and cultural memory. Her recent publications include three monographs: The Mnemonic Imagination (2012); Photography, Music and Memory (2015); and Memory and the Management of Change (2017). Her research project is Migrant Memory and the Post-colonial Imagination (MMPI) funded by The Leverhulme Trust (2017–2022). She is also an editor of the international peer reviewed journal Media, Culture & Society. Irene  Neverla  is retired professor for journalism and communication studies at Universität Hamburg in Germany, where she is still teaching in the Erasmus Mundus Master “Journalism, Media and Globalization”. Moreover, she gives lectures at Freie Universität Berlin. Her fields of research and teaching are journalism research, especially in relation to audience research, visual communication and photojournalism, environmental and science communication with special focus on climate change communication. She started her academic career with the topic time and use of television (habilitation treatise). Now she takes this topic up and turns her attention more to digital media in the perspective of journalists and users.

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Helga  Nowotny  is Professor Emerita of ETH Zürich and Former President of the European Research Council, ERC. She is Chair of the ERA Council Forum Austria and Visiting Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her active engagement in scientific boards includes the Walling Falls Foundation (member of the board); Lindau Nobel Laureate meetings (Vice-President); Complexity Science Hub Vienna (Chair); and others. She has received numerous awards from scientific academies and universities in Europe and abroad, most recently an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Oxford and the Leibniz-Medal from the BBAW in Berlin. Her latest book publications are “The Cunning of Uncertainty” (2015) and “An Orderly Mess” (2017). Kristóf Nyíri  is a Hungarian philosopher. He has held professorships at ELTE Budapest and at the Institute for Technical Education at Budapest University of Technology and Economics, and is Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS). He has been a Leibniz Professor at the University of Leipzig and is also widely known as the director of the Hungarian “Communications in the 21st Century: The Mobile Information Society” programme, which ran from 2001 to 2010 and was funded by the Hungarian T-Mobile company. He has been awarded a range of prizes, amongst them the Széchenyi Prize in recognition of those who have made an outstanding contribution to academic life in Hungary. Elizabeth  Prommer is Professor and Chair for Communication and Media Studies and Director of the Institute for Media Research at the University of Rostock, Germany. Her research focuses on the “moving picture” on all possible media platforms (cinema, tv, internet, mobile media and future new forms) and the changing audiences and production structures in converging media environments. She has led the project “Mediated Time” funded by the German research foundation (DFG). One other focus is the gendered media production. She has published monographs about “Gender  – Medien  – Screens” (2015), “European Perspectives on Television” (2014), as well as “Television and Lifestyle” (2012). Maria Rikitianskaia  is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Media and Journalism of Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), Lugano, Switzerland. She holds a PhD degree in Communication Sciences (2018)

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from USI Lugano, Master in Cultural Management and Bachelor in Cultural Studies from the National Research University – Higher School of Economics, Moscow. Her most recent works, among others, have been published in the Journal of Communication and books devoted to the transnational radio research and history of popular culture in World War I. Her research focuses on media history, transnational research and wireless communication networks. Paddy Scannell  worked for many years at the University of Westminster where he and his colleagues established the first undergraduate degree programme in media studies in the UK in 1975. From 2006 onwards, he became professor at the University of Michigan. He is a founding editor of Media, Culture and Society as well as the author of several books, among them A Social History of British Broadcasting, 1922–1939 (together with David Cardiff), Media and Communication as well as Television and the Meaning of “Live”. His research interests include broadcasting history and historiography, the analysis of talk, the phenomenology of communication and culture and communication in Africa. Sarah  Sharma is Associate Professor and Director of the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. She holds her faculty appointment at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology (Mississauga) and her graduate appointment at the Faculty of Information (St. George). She is the author of In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (2014). She is working on a new book about the gendered politics of exit and refusal tied to contemporary robotics, AI, the gig economy and personal media-­ technologies. This new work fits within an ongoing research project that invigorates McLuhan’s media theory via feminist technology studies. Fredrik Stiernstedt  is Associate Professor at the Department for Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University, Stockholm. He studies media work and production, as well as media policy and the relation between social class and the media. Together with Anne Kaun, he is developing a new project on prison media tracing the media practices and media work since the inception of the modern prison system. Thomas Sutherland  is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Lincoln, UK.

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Stefanie  Trümper  is a research fellow at German Climate Association (Deutsches Klima-Konsortium) in Berlin, which represents the leading players of climate and climate impact research in Germany. There she manages conception and organization of the K3 congress on climate-communication and society. Previously, she completed her PhD in Media and Communication Studies at Universität Hamburg and was a postdoctoral researcher in a project on digital innovations in higher education at Hamburg University of Technology. Her research and teaching relate to comparative journalism research, media systems, media memory research, temporality and media as well as science and climate communication. Karin  van Es  is Assistant Professor of Media & Culture Studies and coordinator of the Datafied Society platform at Utrecht University (NL). She received her PhD in 2014 with a dissertation on the concept of “live” in media studies. Her research interests lie at the intersections of television, new media and datafication. She is the author of The Future of Live (2017) and co-editor of The Datafied Society: Studying Culture Through Data (2017).

List of Figures

Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 12.1

Fig. 15.1 Fig. 15.2 Fig. 16.1

Average cell in one of the latest prison facilities built in Sweden (Saltvik), photograph published by the Swedish Prison and Probation Services on the Kriminalvården (2018) Web site Omkrim Magazine 2018, “Connected and save in detention,” photograph published by the Swedish Prison and Probation Services on the Kriminalvården Web site Statistics about The Huddersfield Daily Examiner, The Press and Yorkshire Evening Post. (Sources: print, circulation: Mayhew, F. Regional ABCs print: steep circulation falls for dailies the Yorkshire Evening Post and Carlisle & News Star, https://www.pressgazette.co.uk, 1 Mar 2018 [for 2017]; Linford, P. ABC figures: how the regional dailies performed, http://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk, 31 Aug 2011 [for 2010]. Website: (a) daily unique browsers, Mayhew, F. Regional Website ABCs: online growth for publishers as website figures jump year-on-year, https://www.pressgazette. co.uk, 25 Aug 2016; (b) rank in the United Kingdom, daily page views per visitor, daily time on site, total sites linking in, https://www.alexa.com; (c) ownership, Audit Bureau of Circulation [ABC], https://www.abc.org.uk) Please tell us how time moves for you at this moment. Please choose one point at the axis (translated from German) Multitasking and the ambivalence of time perception Measurement scale: “How do you perceive the pace of time right now?”

141 142

245 307 313 327

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List of Figures

Fig. 16.2 Fig. 16.3 Fig. 16.4

Respondents to the ISS provide information on the stress caused by smartphone use (n = 383)330 ESM: The eight most frequently used services and activities in interim periods (n = 284)333 Number of applications used during in-between times (ISS, n = 383)334

List of Tables

Table 15.1 Have you been using other media at the same time? If yes, which media? (n = 664, multiple answers possible) 307 Table 15.2 Usage points of parallel usage (n = 644)308 Table 16.1 Multi-level model on the influence of personal and situational variables on the perception of speed of time 329

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CHAPTER 1

Mediated Time Maren Hartmann, Elizabeth Prommer, Karin Deckner, and Stephan O. Görland

Introduction There are no media without time—and nowadays time without media is decreasing. Media are structured by specific timings as much as everyday life is structured by media times. This applies not only on an individual level but also to the perceptions of the social, the local, the national and the global. Since both people and social entities have in recent years become increasingly mobile and digital media at the same time have enabled a new kind of personalisation, the relationship between media and time has shifted—not only intensified but also become looser. One important question is how our perception of time is connected to these changes. It is exactly this intricate

M. Hartmann (*) • K. Deckner Berlin University of the Arts, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] E. Prommer University of Rostock, Rostock, Germany e-mail: [email protected] S. O. Görland University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 M. Hartmann et al. (eds.), Mediated Time, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24950-2_1

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M. HARTMANN ET AL.

relationship between media, their users and social life—and especially ­questions of transformation as well as continuity—that lies at the heart of this book. Research focusing on this question, however, has tended to appear only on the margins. Fortunately, this is currently changing, as the numerous and very diverse chapters in this volume also show. The original starting point for this book was a research project in Germany dealing with mobile media and the changing perception of time. The main question in the project was whether there is a blurring of the perceived (and constructed) boundaries of time, that is, whether time is losing its distinctness and potentially also its reliability as a structuring force in everyday life—or whether, and if so, under which circumstances, it is indeed gaining in importance again. We also asked which role different media, particularly digital and mobile media, play as time structuring forces in everyday life and in which way this is potentially changing or has already changed. The research project was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) over a period of three years, led by Elizabeth Prommer and Maren Hartmann, with Stephan O.  Görland and Karin Deckner as part of the research team.1 For the chapters derived directly from the research project, the discussion about and criticism of the acceleration of time in modern societies (Rosa 2005, 2013) as well as the changed pace of everyday life and the emerging time pressure (in work as well as in domestic and leisure time) in capitalist societies (Wajcman 2008, 2016) guided the initial research. Both while developing the ideas and when we began working on this project, we encountered other media and time researchers who broadened our perspective and added new layers to the conceptual framework. In addition to reflecting on the social acceleration and time pressure theorisations, the book therefore aims at combining existing approaches and prominent authors in the field (e.g. Sharma 2014; Neverla 2010; Scannell 2000; Keightley 2012) as well as lesser known and emerging research (Bødker 2017; Chambers in this book; Görland 2018; Kaun 2017). The book is called Mediated Time for several reasons. First of all, we adhere to an understanding of mediation that is based on Silverstone (2002) and has been widely referred to since (see below for extended discussion). We see mediation—as others have done, too—as a strong concept fitting for the question of media and time, which we also regard as an open-ended and dialectical social transformation. Along the way, we began to see a growing body of academic work concerning time and media (see Kaun et al. 2016 and the special issue about “Media Times”, or the overview in Pentzold 2018), which could also be entitled mediated time. Their use of ‘mediation,’ however, is a different one (or simply not defined). After

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the spatial/mobilities turn (Sheller 2011), we are now facing a temporal turn, which acknowledges the interrelatedness with the spatial turn— something that the term mediation clearly reflects.

Time and Media Apart from this new, intensified debate, time and space have always been important categories for the analysis of electronic media. Ever since the rise of electronic communication, sophisticated theories have been formulated as to how time and space are affected, for instance, Harvey’s (1989) idea of time-space compression, Meyrowitz’s (2005) notion of no sense of place, Robertson’s (1992) compression of the world into a single place or Relph’s (2008) concept of placelessness. All these approaches are based on the assumption that through electronic media, time and space become transformable and negotiable categories. Similarly, in The Rise of the Network Society, Castells (1996) puts forward the thesis that the emergence of information and communication technology changed the concept of time into a timeless time (Castells et al. 2007). According to Castells et al. (2007), time is now more compressed and flexible. It is no longer the clock (Mumford 2010 [1943]) that is the most essential instance of synchronisation, but the users with their interactions among themselves also constitute it. Castells et al. (2007) also put a special focus on mobile phones, to which they note: “Mobile communication is better defined by its capacity for ubiquitous and permanent connectivity rather than by its potential mobility” (p. 248)—a claim that is beginning to be disputed nowadays. However, the evolution of mobile media did not take place in isolation; it was integrated into an overarching social acceleration (Rosa 2011). The logical consequence of this seems to be that an exponential growth in computing power entails social and individual—and thereby challenging—processes of adaptation. Many authors subscribe to this assumption (e.g. Rosa 2005, 2013; Wajcman 2016; Virilio 2006). However, time is also constituted and perceived as a social frame of reference by the media. The aspect of time in media use is as a symbol and reference system (Neverla 2010), which sets fixed points in everyday life. Due to this, media use has its own reciprocal time structure (Beck 1994). In many ways, these structuring processes have become less prevalent—or rather more individualised, but they have not disappeared. Rather, they have become more complex to research.

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Mediated Time When we entitled our book Mediated Time, it was originally a pragmatic result of our research project’s attempt at translating a rather stiff German title into a shorter (and more telling) English version. However, the title eventually began to grow on us and by and by turned into a more programmatic version (and vision), as hinted at above. We realised that not only time was a complex issue but the media’s role therein/therewith was, too: What we call time, and usually view as a very simple elementary notion, is actually a complex experience grounded on different levels. There is a basic physical level of “things happening”, but this is very far from our common notion of time, because it lacks all the rich features of what we call time. Then there are approximations due to our specific scale. There is the effect of the large number (myriads) of microscopic degrees of freedom we interact with. There is the very peculiar manner in which our brains interact with the world, based on memory and tentative anticipation of the future. Finally, there is a thick emotional layer, which is what gives us the sense of the “flow” of time. The problem of understanding time is the problem of disentangling this complex tangle of structures and effects. (Rovelli 2019)

Time, hence, is first and foremost a physical/atomic element of the world. This translates into something we might—more colloquially—call natural time. Then again, there is social time, which uses natural and atomic elements, but adds many more (sometimes negotiable) layers. Individual times are shaped by this, but not pre-determined. They necessarily need to interact (and often react) to all these layers of time, and all of them could be called time-ing—as in doing time, performing time, enacting time. Does this, however, turn it into mediated (time)? The term mediation entered the Portuguese language in the 17th century, rooted in the Latin word mediare... includes three meanings: (i) to divide in two, to separate in two parts; (ii) to act as a mediator, an intermediary (to mediate a conflict between enemies); (iii) to be between, to be between (two things). Mediation, as an act, is imbricated to the media, from the Latin medium, intermediate element, mediating instrument. (Serelle 2015, p. 77)

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Mediation is most widely known as a process of negotiation between conflictual parties with the help of someone else (the mediator), that is, the second version of Serelle’s interpretation. Within media and communication studies, however, mediation has been discussed for quite some time now as something beyond this—as the process where the media intervene in some way or other between different parties (not necessarily conflictual). They are a mediating instrument in many cases. However, one could argue (in slightly simplistic ways) that the media create the problem they solve: they first divide and then attempt to close to the gap. This can either be seen as one of the central elements of how media is characterised or, as McQuail outlined in 1994, as “only” a metaphor: “In general, the notion of mediation in the sense of media intervening between ourselves and ‘reality’ is no more than a metaphor and one which invites the use of other metaphors to characterize the nature of the role played by the media” (p.  65). Even if it is “no more than a metaphor”, we would want to emphasise that it is a powerful one and one that does not only invite other metaphors but speaks for itself. If we take this metaphor seriously, at least two conceptual roads appear: one that simply takes the intervention idea that McQuail mentions seriously and considers this—or maybe the second, which takes it a bit further, as Latour (1994) does: “Like Michel Serres, I use translation to mean displacement, drift, invention, mediation, the creation of a link that did not exist before and that to some degree modifies two elements or agents” (p.  32). Hence, the intervention is potentially a modification or even the creation of something new. This also fits the approach that we would like to suggest (or rather return to). This is more radical than the simple metaphor of McQuail and defines mediation instead as a moral obligation.

Mediation as Moral Obligation Silverstone (2007) goes one step further when he characterises mediation as “the fundamentally, but unevenly dialectical process in which institutionalized media of communication are involved in the general circulation of symbols in everyday life” (p. 109). The uneven dialectics is important enough to feature again below (while we would also like to move away from institutionalised media), but let us first uncover a bit more of what Silverstone means by mediation. The term mediation refers, first of all, to the fact that the media bring together things that, without the media, would probably be separated by

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time and space (perhaps also by motivation, intention, etc.). These things can be people, ideas or something else. van Dijck (2012) more recently claimed that social relations are nowadays not simply mediated thanks to digital media, but that indeed they are brokered by digital media. Her idea of brokerage, however, which implies that people, things, ideas, and so on are brought together that otherwise would have been separated in time and space, fits Silverstone’s mediation. Mediation helps to increase the density of social life—sometimes to a high degree. Not every new addition to the equation is necessarily a good one—an ambivalence that the term brokerage manages to underline (also underlining the importance of the technological therein). However, Silverstone (2002) also offers a strong idea of mediation, which involves a transformation process in which the meaning and value of things are constructed. He begins with everyday life as a moral and social space and: presumes that it is in the everyday, and above all in the detail of the relationships that are made with others and which constitute everyday life’s possibility, that our common humanity is created and sustained. It also presumes that it is through the actions and the interactions that make up the continuities of daily experience that an ethics of care and responsibility is, or is not, enabled. I argue that no ethics of, and from, the everyday is conceivable without communication, and that all communication involves mediation, mediation as a transformative process in which the meaningfulness and value of things are constructed. (Silverstone 2002, p. 761)

Silverstone describes mediation as a dialectical process not only because there is a tension between producers and consumers of media but also because opportunities for possible engagement are distributed differently across different sectors of society. The dialectic does not necessarily lie in the media, but in the processes that take place therein. However, it also lies in the consumption of the media—both as text and as object (a double articulation hint from the domestication concept): “Mediation is a practice in which producers, subjects and audiences take part, and take part together” (Silverstone 2007, p. 38). It presupposes the active participation of all: participation in the sense of thinking, speaking, listening and acting. Ethics plays an important role in this process. This underlines a certain proximity to the ideas of professional mediation, that is, the process of

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negotiation and intervention or, in particular, mediation between different, mostly divided parties (Livingstone 2009). This form of mediation is only implicitly meant here (we will return to this). Instead, the focus is on the creation of meaning, a process which is always negotiated and within which the media mediate (sometimes in the sense of expansion, sometimes in the sense of concealment). The normative nature of the mediation approach becomes clear in these aspects. In particular, the “listening” of all participants is not only a noble claim (a reminder of Habermas’ normative ideas)—but it is also a precondition for breathing life into the ethical claim. The aim of this kind of mediation is high. It strives for unity but accepts that developments are non-linear (wherefore unity is never fully achieved). Building on Silverstone, Couldry (2008) emphasised in his earlier work how much negotiation is part of mediation processes (the dialectic) and that the concept is very useful when thinking about “open-ended and dialectical social transformations” (p.  373). Silverstone (2005) himself also emphasised that mediation is characterised above all by social processes (the aforementioned reception and consumption of media—see p. 188). The focus is on the negotiation processes, that is, the mediation. Imagination plays an important role in mediation processes—as do experience and memory. Imagination is a dimension of appropriation; experience and memory, in turn, are important components of the moral economy surrounding and supporting media use (and thus also of ontological security), understood here as moral economies on different scales (from individual to household to societal). The imaginary-discursive is precisely the point at which individual and social ideas and practices meet and are negotiated.

Mediated Time? Time itself has also been mediated for a long time. As explored above, time is partly “just there” in the sense of natural time (structures of the day, times of the year, etc.), but it becomes mediated in the sense that it is conveyed, communicated to others—or even, to begin with, invented. This process also allows it to be regulated and shaped. It gets told orally or in written form, it gets painted or photographed, it can get filmed. Hence, the form of mediation can differ substantially, but time is presented to us all the time—and we, too, present time structures and perceptions to others. In earlier days, the most crucial change with regard to forming and

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communicating time has been the mechanical clock, which is not only a mechanic device but also a huge intermediary. The clock (as well as the processes that followed suit) was one of the biggest processes of standardisation (e.g. Lampland and Star 2009)—and still is, as one can see in the processes of negotiation of time zones (see Rikitianskaia in this book), for example, or in the ongoing debate around summer time regulations in the European Union. Hence, time, thanks to being standardised, became increasingly political, while originally (in the West) it was invented to adhere to God’s schedules, to not lose track. At the same time as the mechanical clock became more widespread, time also began to increasingly become mediated through media, that is, expressed in and through media. Hence, newspapers, for example, presented daily structures. Some newspapers were printed in both morning and evening editions, allowing breaking news to be covered in the second round. Again, time is an important issue here: not only do newspapers convey the (linear) progression of time in the shape of their printing and distribution date, but they also had to be produced partly at night to be ready to be sold in the morning; hence, they were structuring working times. Newspapers were habitually read at specific times of the day, shaping the perceptions of daily routines. At the same time, they offered “news”, that is, new stories, untold history and events. Newspapers were there to keep one “up to date”, while they themselves were soon outdated (who would buy yesterday’s newspaper?). They also weighed time in the sense of importance: if something is a historical event, it needs to be on the front page, while a more ephemeral quotidian story can be placed elsewhere. These aspects were all carefully constructed for the reader (and nowadays sometimes de-constructed, as the text by Bødker and Brügger in this book underlines). This kind of careful construction, as described by Scannell (2000; or his chapter in this book) in his work for radio and television in particular, applies in some sense to other media, too—or even more so. When Scannell (2000) writes that “Each viewer finds that what they see and hear seems to speak to them directly and individually” (p. 5), it is this notion of “care” that resonates with Silverstone’s (2002) (ethical) approach. Why would this be desirable in the first place though? Even in 2002, Silverstone describes the fascination that media offer: “That is, connection, true connection, across intangible space, is at last possible. The space between the ‘as if’ of representation and narrative and the ‘real’ appears to have finally been bridged by the immediate, the live and the interactive” (p. 769). Before turning to the potential disappoint-

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ment which goes hand in hand with this hope, let us consider its attraction (also explored in the chapter about liveness, i.e. our interview with Auslander and van Es). It returns us to the question of the gap that seemingly needed to be filled. It is a question of being able to be reached and to reach out, beyond the immediately available environment. It is, as mentioned, a question of imagination. Not only do we discover representations therethrough, but we manage to overcome the mirage of pure representation and somehow “touch” whatever is represented. We are here, there and everywhere—anytime. It could be seen as one answer to the gaps provided by globalisation processes, by the increasing number of possibilities available to some of us, but it can additionally be construed as a possibility to care for anyone (or anyone-as-someone, as Scannell (2000) would say). This possibility to take care is what Silverstone (2002) describes as both possibility and obligation provided by the media. It helps us to keep the right distance, while caring for others (sometimes strangers) and not giving oneself up. It implies a critical distance to oneself and the media: This kind of critical relationship to the media is a precondition for any ethical or moral interrogation of the media. It is a precondition, too, for our ability to take responsibility for mediation. Without such informed interrogation, audiences become complicit with the media’s representational strategies. (Silverstone 2002, p. 774)

Mediation is the basis for the temporary illusion of the immediate, fed, however, by a fairly informed distance to those who create the mediation structures. Nonetheless—or rather, therefore—the hopes attached to such mediation processes should not be growing too large, or as Silverstone adds: It hardly needs to be said, of course, that such transcendence is illusory. Such mediations not only preserve separation in the same breath as they appear to deny it, but such illusory connection has significant consequences for how we understand the world, and above all how we relate to the mediated other in a world where more and more of our significant others are indeed mediated. (Silverstone 2002, p. 769)

Mediation, while a great possibility, is by far not a guarantee to overcome distance. Silverstone claims that those who are responsible for the representations need to take their responsibilities for caring—their moral obligation—more seriously. The first moral obligation therefore is to make time.

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Silverstone (2002) refers to spatial images instead: the proper distance. While that, too, is important, in temporal terms, it is first of all giving time for representation, which often plays a role. This obviously becomes more complex in times where there are major players, but a clear diversification of content. How is proper distance and making time translated into social media forums? The answer is probably algorithmic. When, for example, in all this temporal dissolution and individual scheduling, Netflix begins streaming a new season of specific series on specific days of the week, then a temporal restructuring brings a new order, or when Instagram and others let content disappear after a specified period of time, this is also a temporal way to structure attention. Re-directing this attention or steering it in specific ways would be a way of following that first instance of a moral obligation. The second moral obligation, building on the first, is to take time. The audience is equally asked to engage, to critically follow media output, to listen. Nowadays, it might also be obliged to communicate, “to talk back”, but this  is not an automated response or communication simply for communication’s sake. Taking time is meant to build on making time. Mediated time then is doubly constructed—or dare we say articulated? It is time interwoven with processes of mediation as well as often (but not exclusively) media-related time. In mediated times, mediated time is an important field of engagement, but also of study, and one that is only at the beginning. Mediation is the in-between—and a necessary in-between at that, especially in a time when the future has collapsed into the present. Temporal mediation is the care structure that has the potential to keep things moving. Additionally, this is what clearly differentiates mediated time from media time or the time of the media, which, as Scannell emphasises, “means, in the first place, time for the media: available time” (see contribution to this book). He adds historical time to the mixture as well as everyday life and liveness (on all of which one can find more in chapters throughout the book). However, mediated time clearly puts an emphasis on the experience of time, the quality of time itself (not necessarily quality time). With the help of Silverstone (2002), we have proposed that it should be understood as a moral obligation—not so much of the individual than of the social.

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The Organisation of the Book The assembled authors here use a variety of terms to grasp the complexity of the relationship between media and time: beginning with acceleration, chronography, chrononormativity, eigenzeit, laboratory time, we also see the concepts of polychronicity, in-between time, timeless time, doing time, keeping time, practice time, own time, cyclical time, time flow, time of journalism and also multiplicity and simultaneity. All these different theoretical approaches to time will be touched upon in the book and connected to various media and technical devices. Inherent are also concepts of de-synchronisation, boundary dissolution (or the disembedding of time), the future and the past and their interplay with social space and society in general. Overall, an important question throughout the book is the relationship between social change and media, which often requires a long-term perspective. Therefore, historical questions are also a core focus within the book. Time is in that sense not only topic, but also methodology and method. The book aims to re-focus our current knowledge about media and time and offer up-todate insights in current research foci on mediated time from a wide range of subject areas. We begin with theoretical approaches to the “Norms and Categories of Time” in Part I, followed by our first interlude, an interview with and text about Kristóf Nyíri. Second, we will look into concrete examples, where time materialises in imagined future places and where the concepts of memory and intermediate time emerge as relevant categories (Part II: “Materialities and Places of and in Intermediate Time”). Our second interlude consists of a dialogue with Sarah Sharma about future challenges in the conceptions of time. A rather public perspective is presented in Part III, “Always Already On: Perspectives on Media and Time over Time”, where concrete examples on journalism and state intervention illustrate the connection with time over time. The third interlude consists of reflections about “The Time of (Your) Live” in a (double) interview with Philip Auslander and Karin van Es. The last Part IV finally looks at mediated time from the audience and user perspective. In “Media and Time: Mediated Time?”, concrete empirical research highlights the connection between media and time.

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Norms and Categories of Time This book begins with an insight into the norms and theoretical categories of time focusing on concepts and furthermore the implied moralities of speed. From different perspectives, Sutherland and Hartmann in their chapters debate that speed as moral duty—or to be more precise, the demand to act at a certain speed—is irrevocably inherent in our modern capitalistic societies. Thomas Sutherland argues in his chapter “The Categorical Imperative of Acceleration: Speed as Moral Duty”, that the Kantian conception of morality has become more and more implausible in an age of ubiquitous technical mediation; instead, we find ourselves in thrall to a moral law that is imposed upon us by an economic and socio-­ technical apparatus unconcerned with the finite temporalities of human thought and action: namely, a categorical imperative of speed, which incessantly pushes us toward an interminable acceleration of our labour and our everyday practices, treating the elimination of temporal lag as a moral duty. This imperative positions humans not as ends in themselves, but as the means for pursuing a teleology premised upon an abstract and unsustainable calculation of efficiency. Maren Hartmann shows likewise, in “The Normative Framework of (Mobile) Time: Chrononormativity, Power-chronography and Mobilities”, that the normative nature of time is in question and under pressure. By weaving together two different temporal paradigms—power chronography by Sharma and Freeman’s chrononormativity—and confronting them with each other as well as with a third, less time-oriented paradigm, the motilities concept, she shows how the supposed need for speed has increased. Her analytic framework is illustrated with qualitative interview material that underlines  that a simple interpretation of being always on, as the underlining theory of mobile media use, is too short-sighted. Instead, effort needs to be put into the analysis of power in the normative frameworks of time that come into play in everyday life. There is a multiplication of norms implicated in  the increase of social pressure (to use time wisely). This simultaneously opens up the question how far temporal regimes can be resisted. We are grateful for being able to (re-)publish the English version of Helga Nowotny’s latest thoughts about her former concept of Eigenzeit brought together with musings about recent developments around ICTs, such as big data and others (originally published in Nowotny 2016). She is here applying her ideas of eigenzeit, which she initially  developed in 1989, about the interplay of one’s own time and modern society, in a new version, now called “Eigenzeit Revisited”. In her first approach to eigenzeit

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(Nowotny 1989), she set out to demonstrate the qualitative changes in the individual perception of time and the corresponding experience in their manifold connections to the structuration society imposes on time. Technologies played an important role throughout, but the same was true for the globally virulent economic and political processes that added a new dimension to the nexus between power and time. In “Eigenzeit revisited”, Nowotny now shows, from a very personal perspective, how she developed her ideas and how she transforms them for the future. Today’s questions in that case have different foci: acceleration, simultaneity, global economics, big data, and so on that influence the concepts of time even more. In this understanding, eigenzeit has been added to and is increasingly moving to medial eigenzeit, further technology based and at least partly created by data. The next chapter is inspired by Nowotny’s original concept of eigenzeit and understands this as heterochronies, dealing with resistance against social time structures. Karin Deckner translates Foucault’s concept of other spaces, also known as heterotopias into a temporal context through “Exploring: Heterochronias”. Here, too, the focus is on how individual temporal negotiations are shaped in connection with media. Which other times do users generate with and also concretely without media, and how are these reflected? Deckner’s focus here is also specifically on the qualitative dimensions of time design as they are described by individuals. This first theoretical section of the book is followed by our first of three interludes, in which we interviewed important thinkers of the temporal. This is the Hungarian philosopher Kristóf Nyíri. He is one of the very few philosophers who regarded mobile communication and time. The first part is a brief interview with Nyíri. In the second part of the interlude, Maren Hartmann reflects on his work by highlighting, first of all, his philosophical take on mobile communication, which is particularly important when mobile communication is bound more closely to the question of time; and second, his take on time more specifically. In Nyíri’s view, the mobile phone is the single unique instrument of mediated communication, and in this sense, time in mediated communication changes. He stresses the changing of time and the relevance of before and after ideas that are also reflected on in the chapters of Keightley as well as Neverla and Trümper with regard to memory and photography and journalism respectively. The mediated technological communication influences time, with cyclical elements leading to a global time flow. Nyíri’s concepts offer important theoretical insights into the various forms of mediated time.

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Materialities and Places of and in Intermediate Time In this part, we assembled the chapters that focus on different forms and visibilities of time in combination with technological developments. The time concepts that are in focus relate to the future, as in Kaun and Stiernstedt, for example, or to the imagined future, as in Chambers. Keightley, on the other hand, addresses memory and intermediate time. These time concepts are analysed with empirical case studies and concrete examples of their figuration. Anne Kaun and Fredrik Stiernstedt investigate in their chapter “Doing Time: Exploring the Temporality of Datafication in the Smart Prison” the emerging temporalities linked to datafication through the lens of the smart prison. It is, hence, an exploration of time through a specific place that is put forth. Datafication and the consequent regimes of anticipation, prediction and pre-emption are increasingly discussed from a critical perspective in terms of discriminatory bias, processes of exclusion and as reinforcing inequality. At the same time, the prison and the criminal justice system are prime examples of implementing and emphasising these emerging temporal regimes. However, there is currently little knowledge and research about how forms of anticipation, prediction and pre-emption are applied in the prison context. The chapter explores this connection by looking into current debates on establishing smart prisons. It concludes with the argument that, rather than understanding prisons as removed and secluded from society, they are magnifying glasses for media-related social change and are crucial for exploring emerging mediated—and thereby data-fed temporalities. Another approach that shows how the past influences the future is shown by Deborah Chambers with “Media Futurism: The Role of Speculative Films and Corporate Videos in Creating the Time Warps of Future Media Homes”. In her chapter, she examines past and present corporate speculative films and videos of homes of the future to address a particular kind of mediated time: media futures. Guided by the concept of media imaginaries and taking a material-discursive approach, she analyses enactments of discursive fantasies within these visual narratives. The chapter explains that tech companies perform as future-makers to frame ­utopian

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visions of smart home futures. It proposes that these corporate narratives form discourses of media futurism. These imaginings entail time warps that discursively reorder time, space and events to advocate technology-­ driven visionary futures. Smart home futures foretell personal agency framed by a technologised time to become increasingly characterised by speed, immediacy and work connectivity. These corporate visions of media futures may influence present-day aspirations and sway future policy. For Emily Keightley in her chapter “Emplacing (Inter)mediated Time: Power-Chronography, Zones of Intermediacy and the Category of Space”, our experience of time is one which is produced not simply in our uses and interactions with media, but in our traversal of their multiple temporal affordances in situ. This results in an “intermediate time” (Keightley 2012, p. 221) in which the various temporalities of media do not determine temporal experience but are instead fundamental elements of its composition. However, the potential limitations of the concept of intermediacy are twofold. Mediated temporal experience is not only socially situated; it is also embedded in place. This chapter considers how zones of intermediacy are shaped and performed within specific spaces and how this forms the nature of temporal experiences that are produced within them. Second, while zones of intermediacy have been conceived as temporally mobile, emergent over time, they could be construed as spatially static. This undermines an increasing recognition of lived temporal experience as spatially mobile, produced in a state of movement between places. Using examples from ethnographic fieldwork on everyday remembering and vernacular media, this chapter seeks to spatialise the conceptual framework of zones of intermediacy and to develop a more sensitive understanding of the situated and mobile ways in which mediated temporal experience is produced in and between the everyday places of lived experience. Maren Hartmann and Karin Deckner had the opportunity to discuss with award winning Sarah Sharma the politics of time, presented in Interlude II. For Sharma, the interconnection of time and media is the core of media studies itself: “that’s what media studies is; a specific question about the rhythm of relations that particular technologies instigate or set off” (Interview in this book). This perspective enables us, in her view, to talk in an elaborate way about labour or gender or race. By thinking beyond the clock, we can understand the politics of time and power and further how time relates to power.

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Always Already On: Perspectives on Media and Time over Time In this section of the book, a societal view looks at media and time over time, as the socially constructed time of journalism or, even broader, the governmental structuration of time is reflected. Two chapters here deal with journalism and the construction of time in journalism; the other chapter looks at the time regime of a particular political system and the synchronisation efforts via clocks and timekeeping devices. Irene Neverla and Stefanie Trümper first discuss in their chapter “Tracking Polychronic Temporalities and Mediated Memory” different concepts of time and media and connect these to journalism and journalism research. They describe the links between time regime, news production and news consumption in a changing media environment and offer new insight into the journalistic construction of the past and the future. Further, they evaluate the predictive power of memory. After a brief history of theories and the social construction of time, polychronicity with acceleration and journalism as well as their interplay are shown. For Neverla and Trümper, late-­modern digital societies are characterised by polychronicity: a temporality that is defined by the core mode of acceleration and which is both constraining and emancipatory. Journalism operates within the space between past and future, and the increasing digital acceleration influences the automation of news flows and production within the social system. By means of discussing the current state of research on temporal characteristics of both, news narratives and the construction of memory or the future are temporally embedded. The final argument is that, to a certain degree, journalism seems to possess chronological flexibility and is able to shape processes of acceleration as well as of deceleration in public communication—a point that still needs further investigation. Henrik Bødker and Niels Brügger take a different viewpoint by analysing empirically local newspaper websites in their chapter “Local News Time on the Web”. As case studies, they investigate websites  of local newspapers and analyse how often the websites change, in order to see what kind of references to time and memory are made. They then compare this to empirical results of national newspaper  websites. Through textual constellations on the web, the temporality of news thus is a mediation between the news event’s “internal” temporalities and their inscription into embodied social times as these are differently manifested as likes, comments, shares, and so on, in a range of digital media. Their research

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is grounded in journalism research and connects this with the rhythm of journalism, such as the demand for updating and delivering news stories. Within this cycle, however, there are a number of ways in which the temporalities of more specific social and cultural contexts are woven deeper into the digital forms of journalism. The past as memory is an important marker for local newspaper  websites, which is always connected to the local. Bødker and Brügger discuss the idea of local news websites as temporal sanctuaries that have different temporalities than the accelerated national or international news business, where there is resistance to this time regime. Maria Rikitianskaia takes a broader societal perspective. In “Synchronizing the Nation: History of Time Signals in Russia”, she addresses the question how time is contracted for a nation. Her chapter aims at analysing how the newly established clock time in Russia was mediated via time signals and how different media framed these time signals in the course of two time reforms in the 1920s and 2010s. First, she discusses the spread of time signals with railroads and telegraph networks, attempts of centralising time by the Bolsheviks and the necessary, centralised media infrastructure. Then, the chapter draws attention to the 2010s’ time reforms and addresses an important conflict between centralised time coming from the Russian government by national media infrastructure and private clocks on digital devices. The discussion and the conclusion combine some theoretical reflections and empirical findings through the lens of three dichotomies that shed more light on relations between media and time: accuracy–precision, public–private, and national–transnational. In our third and last interlude, the concept of liveness is the central topic. It is presented in a moderated discussion between Philip Auslander and Karin van Es. Auslander is one of the “veterans” in the study of liveness and therefore one of the central temporalities we encounter in relation to media and performance arts. He published his central book on the topic—Liveness. Performance in a Mediatized Culture—in 1999, with the second edition in 2008 (Auslander 2008). Here, he is in conversation with Karin van Es, a more recent, but also a very prominent scholar in the field of media and performance studies. Her contribution to the topic was released in 2016 and is entitled The Future of Live. In it, she explicitly builds on, but also criticises Auslander’s approach (both older and more recent). The focus of the debate lies on the different views on liveness and media. The discussion is presented under the title “The Time of Our Lives”.

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Media and Time: Mediated Time? This last part of the book focusses on the perspective of the media user and his/her perception of time and how mediated time influences our media habits. With empirical data from our research project “Mobile Media as a Catalyst for Time Transgression? A Qualitative and Quantitative Usage Study” (in short “Mediated Time”), Elizabeth Prommer and Stephan O. Görland analyse specific situations of media use and the individual perception of time flows. The empirical data match with the theoretical concept of mediated time. Elizabeth Prommer’s chapter “Polychronicity during Simultaneity: Mediated Time and Mobile Media” looks at the relation between sense of time, simultaneity, acceleration and the use of mobile media from the user’s perspective. This chapter concentrates especially on mobile media use and how it has changed the concept of these time spans and modes of reception. We can now work anytime and anywhere, just as we can post a private blog on Facebook during office hours. We listen to music while we play a computer game and answer WhatsApp messages at the same time. This has changed our modes of media use and media reception. We use different media with different temporalities at the same time. Regarding the different time concepts, the chapter goes a step further and discusses the concept of polychronicity during simultaneity, as these phenomena can be described, and reveals that this transgression of temporal boundaries has changed our modes of media use and media reception. This is shown through empirical data from quantitative research and qualitative interviews. The perception of time and how time is paced is tightly connected to the motives for media use and the reason why multitasking, for example, is taking place. There is, however, an inherent ambivalence apparent here in that multitasking with mobile media can either promote a slow relaxed feeling or lead to a feeling of acceleration. Using the same data, Stephan O.  Görland’s chapter “Really ‘Dead Time’? Mobile Media Use and Time Perception in In-between Times” investigates the perception of time in waiting and interim situations. This chapter deals with the former so-called non-media times like waiting for the bus, commuting or even sitting in the bathroom. When it comes to these times, an often-repeated allegation is that these unproductive periods of time are now “occupied” by the smartphone. Moments in which there is no media use seem to become rarer at the same time. Görland examines these moments and discusses the time perception during these

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times according to the usage of media. Due to the exclusive smartphone use, it can be shown that these moments have an accelerated sense of time. According to the interviewees, the reason for this perceived acceleration was not only a diffuse fear of missing out, the permanence of the Internet connection, but also the sheer number of episodes of use. In the last chapter of the book, Scannell—in another re-publication for which we are grateful (here taken from his own book—Scannell 2014)— takes on a historic tour via time media and our own time throughout (media) history, beginning with Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis of time and the individual interpretation of own time or our time, as we move to the times of social media. Scannell highlights how the liveness, the presence and the nowness are main drivers for our broadcast media, beginning with the telegraph, to radio and television. Scannell eventually  connects all tele-technologies to time.  Since the introduction of recording of either radio or television, he outlines, we have a new version of liveness, which is not the same as being present or real time. One of the aspects of modern media is not only its liveness, but also its embeddedness in the lifeworld of the audience. The audience must have available time for media. Times of media are always attuned to the lives of the individuals, which becomes visible, for example, in 24/7 news broadcasts. Scannell, as most authors in the book, ultimately asks: what is the time of our lives, and how do/ can we shape it?

Note 1. We thank the German Research Foundation DFG for funding the project “Mobile Medien als Katalysator für zeitliche Entgrenzung? Eine qualitative und quantitative Nutzungsstudie” (“Mobile media as a catalyst for time transgression? A qualitative and quantitative usage study”) supported over a period from 2015 to 2018, with the Project No. 278208817.  We would also like to thank the student assistants in Berlin and Rostock that helped with the research, in particular Heike Hausmann, Maike Suhr and MarieLuise von Berg, and with the publication of this book, Anneli von Klitzing.

References Auslander, P. (2008 [1999]). Liveness. Performance in a mediatized culture. London/New York: Routledge. Beck, K. (1994). Medien und die soziale Konstruktion von Zeit: über die Vermittlung von gesellschaftlicher Zeitordnung und sozialem Zeitbewusstsein. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag.

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Bødker, H. (2017). The time(s) of news websites. In B. Franklin & S. Eldridge II (Eds.), The Routledge companion to digital journalism studies (pp.  55–63). London: Routledge. Castells, M. (1996). The rise of the network society: The information age: Economy, society, and culture volume I. Malden: Blackwell Publishers. Castells, M., Linchuan Qui, J., Fernandez-Ardevol, M., & Sey, A. (2007). Mobile communication and society: A global perspective. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press. Couldry, N. (2008). Mediatization or mediation? Alternative understandings of the emergent space of digital storytelling. New Media & Society, 10(3), 373–391. Görland, S. (2018). Beschleunigtes Zeiterleben? Zeitpraktiken mobiler Mediennutzung in Warte- und Transitzeiten. Rostock: University Rostock. Harvey, D. (1989). The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Oxford/Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Kaun, A. (2017). Our time to act has come: Desynchronization, social media time and protest movements. Media, Culture and Society, 39(4), 469–486. Kaun, A., Fornäs, J., & Ericson, S. (2016). Media times|mediating time— Temporalizing media. Introduction to the special issue. International Journal of Communication, 10, 5206–5212. Keightley, E. (Ed.). (2012). Time, media and modernity. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lampland, M., & Star, S. L. (Eds.). (2009). Standards and their stories: How quantifying, classifying and formalizing practices shape everyday life. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Latour, B. (1994). On technical mediation—Philosophy, sociology, genealogy. Common Knowledge, 3(2), 29–64. Livingstone, S. (2009). On the mediation of everything: ICA presidential address 2008. Journal of Communication, 59(1), 1–18. McQuail, D. (1994). Mass communication theory. London: Sage. Meyrowitz, J. (2005). The rise of glocality: New senses of place and identity in the global village. In K.  Nyíri (Ed.), A sense of place: The global and the local in mobile communication (pp. 21–30). Vienna: Passagen Verlag. Mumford, L. (2010 [1943]). Technics and civilization. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press. Neverla, I. (2010). Medien als soziale Zeitgeber im Alltag: Ein Beitrag zur kultursoziologischen Wirkungsforschung. In M. Hartmann & A. Hepp (Eds.), Die Mediatisierung der Alltagswelt (pp.  183–194). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Nowotny, H. (1989). Eigenzeit. Entstehung und Strukturierung eines Zeitgefühls (2nd ed.). Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Nowotny, H. (2016). Eigenzeit revisited. In H. Nowotny & B. Scherer (Eds.), Zeit der Algorithmen (pp. 32–67). Berlin: Matthes & Seitz.

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Pentzold, C. (2018). Between moments and millennia: Temporalising mediatisation. Media, Culture and Society, 40(6), 927–937. Relph, E. (2008). Place and placelessness. In Research in planning and design (Vol. 1). London: Pion Limited. Robertson, R. (1992). Globalization: Social theory and global culture. London: Sage. Rosa, H. (2005). Beschleunigung. Die Veränderung der Zeitstrukturen in der Moderne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Rosa, H. (2011). Dynamisierung und Erstarrung in der modernen Gesellschaft— Das Beschleunigungsphänomen. In J.  Oehler (Ed.), Der Mensch—Evolution, Natur und Kultur (pp.  285–302). http://link.springer.com/10.1007/9783-642-10350-6_17. Accessed 20 Mar 2019. Rosa, H. (2013 [2005]). Social acceleration: A new theory of modernity. New York: Columbia University Press. Rovelli, C. (2019). Time travel is just what we do every day…. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/mar/31/carlo-rovelli-youask-the-questions-time-travel-is-just-what-we-do-every-day-theoretical-physics. Accessed 20 Mar 2019. Scannell, P. (2000). For-anyone-as-someone structures. Media, Culture and Society, 22, 5–24. Scannell, P. (2014). Television and the meaning of live. Cambridge: Polity. Serelle, M. (2015). The ethics of mediation: Aspects of media criticism in Roger Silverstone’s works. MATRIZes, 10(2), 75–90. Sharma, S. (2014). In the meantime. Temporality and cultural politics. Durham: Duke University Press. Sheller, M. (2011). Mobility. Sociopedia.isa. http://www.sagepub.net/isa/ resources/pdf/Mobility.pdf. Accessed 20 Mar 2019. Silverstone, R. (2002). Complicity and collusion in the mediation of everyday life. New Literary History, 33(49), 761–780. Silverstone, R. (2005). Mediation and communication. In C.  Calhoun et  al. (Eds.), The international handbook of sociology (pp. 188–207). London: Sage. Silverstone, R. (2007). Media and morality: On the rise of the Mediapolis. Cambridge: Polity. van Dijck, J. (2012). Facebook as a tool for producing sociality and connectivity. Television and New Media, 13(2), 160–176. Virilio, P. (2006). Speed and politics. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Wajcman, J. (2008). Life in the fast lane? Towards a sociology of technology and time. The British Journal of Sociology, 59(1). https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2007.00182.x. Wajcman, J. (2016). Pressed for time: The acceleration of life in digital capitalism. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press.

PART I

Norms and Categories of Time

CHAPTER 2

The Categorical Imperative of Speed: Acceleration as Moral Duty Thomas Sutherland

Introduction The phenomenon of social acceleration, and the characterisation of the various processes of modernisation in terms of “a monstrous acceleration of the world, of life, and of each individual’s stream of experience”, to use Rosa’s (2013, p.  35) expression, is surely familiar now to most within media studies and other proximate disciplines. This acceleration, simultaneously material and phenomenological in nature, must be understood not only in terms of technological development, but, most fundamentally, in terms of political economy: it is an almost certainly inevitable consequence of the desire to increase profitability through greater efficiency, productivity, and market expansion. In the pursuit of a seemingly endless accumulation of surplus value, Boltanski and Chiapello argue that capitalism has gradually detached itself from any consideration of material wellbeing or ethical conduct, leading to a situation in which wage-earners “have lost ownership of the fruits of their labour and the possibility of pursuing a working life free of subordination”, and capitalists “find

T. Sutherland (*) Lincoln School of Film and Media, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 M. Hartmann et al. (eds.), Mediated Time, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24950-2_2

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t­hemselves yoked to an interminable, insatiable process, which is utterly abstract and dissociated from the satisfaction of consumption needs” (2018, p. 7). There is a fundamental inhumanity at the heart of this system: efficiency and productivity are not looked upon as goals to be reached, but rather as limitless ambitions towards which we are supposed to strive, without any illusion that there is some horizon that might eventually be reached. This is teleology in its purest, most paradoxical form: a final cause that is not an endpoint, but the direction in which a particular process of becoming orients itself—the unsustainable growth orientation of a nihilistic capitalism stripped of all purpose outside of the enjoinment to continued acceleration.1 On the surface, this teleology would seem to lack all moral authority or grounding, insofar as it makes no claim to a higher good (a summum bonum), but is content to ceaselessly highlight what we as human beings lack. However, as I wish to propose, there is still, in formal terms, a moral or ethical component to this teleology of acceleration: the economic imperative of speed is simultaneously a moral imperative. At the same time that the very prospect of secure, objective moral principles has come to seem more and more fanciful, the moral authority of economic laws has come to be more and more taken for granted. Over the course of this chapter, therefore, I will tentatively hypothesise that we can identify a categorical imperative of speed that forms the foundation of the socio-technical acceleration so characteristic of our present conjuncture. More specifically, I will submit that this imperative, as its designation implies, can be understood in terms broadly reminiscent of Kant’s ethical project: treating the elimination of temporal lag and latency as a moral duty, this is a law that is utterly unconcerned with the finite temporalities of human thought and action, subordinating human action to an economic system and technical apparatus with which we can only ever struggle to catch up, treating human beings as the means to an inhuman end.

An Apodictic Law? In his lectures of 1965, Adorno observes that philosophy “is itself a piece of culture, is enmeshed in culture; and if it behaves as if it were rendered immediate by some allegedly primal questions which elevate it above culture, it blinds itself to its own conditions and truly succumbs to its cultural conditionality” (2001, p. 129), effacing its own mediacy, its own cultural

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embeddedness and dependence. After all, “[t]here is no knowledge which can repudiate its mediations; it can only reflect them” (Adorno 2001, p. 129). Of course, when Adorno speaks here of mediation, he means it not in a technological sense, but rather in the Hegelian sense, whereby any appearance of conceptual immediacy is by necessity undercut by its own incompleteness (i.e. negation) or relationality. Two decades earlier, though, Adorno does actually articulate, albeit cursorily, a theory of technological mediation. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno propose that, under the conditions of late capitalism, “[t]he active contribution which Kantian schematism still expected of subjects—that they should, from the first, relate sensuous multiplicity to fundamental concepts—is denied to the subject by industry”, with the consequence that this Kantian model, whereby “a secret mechanism within the psyche preformed immediate data to fit them into the system of pure reason” (2002, p. 98) is unravelled.2 The culture industry places our conscious experience under the yoke of a “unity of production” (a formulaic uniformity in which all technical media, and indeed, all consumer culture, are engulfed), subsuming our experience within prefabricated categories. The unity of apperception—the synthetic ground which, for Kant, makes consciousness possible—is effectively hijacked by an exteriorised schematisation, which subordinates said consciousness to the reified logic of the market economy. The spontaneity of concepts and of synthesis is supplanted by the mechanical reproducibility of industrial culture, and the classificatory schemas that it furnishes. If we were to not only accept Horkheimer and Adorno’s claims here, but to extend them to their logical conclusion—viz., that human apperception is in some way dependent upon the technological milieu within which it is embedded—the culture industry would need to be understood as just one instance in a broader history of technological mediation, forming a condition of possibility for consciousness itself. For Kant, schematism “is a hidden art in the depths of the human soul” (1998, p. 273), and yet the ideological power of mass culture—its apparent capacity to fundamentally determine our empirical experience—conjures up the unsettling possibility that this soul is always already trespassed upon by a constitutive exteriority (see also Stiegler 2011, pp. 35–54). At the risk of recursive or even aporetic circularity, this would, in turn, suggest that any philosophical account of consciousness must in itself be understood as always already conditioned by this technological mediation. We can find an example of such mediation in Kant’s account of practical reason—that is, his account of freedom, and what it means to be a free

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being, to have free will—which is premised upon the postulation of an “apodictically practical principle”, a moral law which is the objective and universally valid determining ground of the will (1996, p. 68). This deontological approach to ethics does not judge a good will as such on the basis of its achievement of specific goals or production of specific effects, but as a result of its volition: a good will is good in itself, in relation to the form and principle from which it stems (viz. the moral law), regardless of “what it effects or accomplishes” (Kant 1996, p.  50). However, this does not mean that there is no end or telos to such an approach; on the contrary, this determination of the will on the basis of form, rather than matter or content, allowing the rational being to think their maxims as universal laws of practical reason, leads Kant to the ideal of a kingdom of ends, wherein all such beings are treated not merely as means to ends, but as ends in themselves as well. Such a model, whereby the moral law is located within ourselves (through a pure usage of the faculty of reason), even as it points us towards the infinite horizon of the unconditioned, imagines the man of reason to be ultimately autonomous in relation to any empirical (including technical) determination.3 Surely, though, the very notion of an ineluctable striving towards an ever-receding horizon—“an uninterrupted but endless progress” (Kant 1996, p.  207)—presuming a linear trajectory directed towards the highest good (with the caveat that this will never actually be reached) is already determined by a form of technical reason? For although Kant might claim that the moral law (which has this highest good as its object) is apodictically certain, that we are conscious of it a priori in spite of the impossibility of its exact appearance within the empirical realm, it would seem that this utopian trajectory is implicitly premised upon and delimited by an occluded theoretical comprehension of time. The conception of a (partly secularised) providence guiding man towards a particular ideal of the good that is temporally situated (inasmuch as it is something to be attained, even though this actual attainment is infinitely foreclosed) is not at all self-evident or universal. Indeed, this linearly temporalised understanding of ethics would have been largely alien to the Greeks of antiquity, not to mention a multitude of non-Western cultures. The Christian narrativisation of history as a linear trajectory, argues Bottici, founded as it is upon a sequence of irreversible events and revelations beginning with God’s creation of the universe and ending with a corresponding eschaton, is not just a product of religious doctrine, but finds its material conditions in the inherently literary

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nature of the Christian faith, for “the idea of a religion with Sacred Scriptures implies that truth is revealed and that it is revealed in the definitive form of uniqueness” (2007, p.  48). Notwithstanding questions of interpretation or hermeneutics, the very notion of scripture as revelation implies a divine truth that has already been laid out, providing a fixed ideal for human action. The eschatological postulate of a coming Kingdom of God looms large over Kantian ethics.4 However, there is also a more fundamental point to be made here: these linear conceptions of time and history are dependent, at least in part, upon the medium of writing, which enables a diachronic time-consciousness supported by an accumulated body of textual works—an understanding quite distinct from those of oral-dominant cultures. Whilst we must, as Swain stresses, be wary of the “totally unfounded ethnocentric and evolutionary model which assumes there is a linear history for the West and varying degrees of cycles for the rest” (1993, p. 17), reifying a simplistic duality between linear and cyclical time which presumes that all non-­ literate cultures fall neatly into the latter category, it is nonetheless important to underscore that a linearly temporalised conception of providence is in no way self-evident or apodictic. It is not surprising that, in What is Enlightenment? Kant defines the public use of reason as “that use which someone makes of it as a scholar before the entire public of the world of readers”—his mindset is that of a philosopher steeped in the written and printed word (1996, p. 18, cf. Jordheim 2010). The material properties of textual media then (alongside many other technologies) would seem to insert a crypto-theoretical or crypto-­technical element into a supposedly pure thought of practical reason, one that is very much congruent with the dominant trends in Western thought at the time Kant is writing. As Adorno suggests: if in fact freedom and the concept of freedom fall within the scope of historical consciousness, and if they are constituted by history and are… historically ephemeral, then both the idea of freedom and freedom itself must be dependent upon the world, on the state of affairs in the world, even though by definition they are supposed to be independent of them and to have separated themselves off. (2006, p. 243)

The concept of freedom, which is supposed to be that principle of causality which “can be efficient independently of alien causes determining it” (Kant 1996, p.  94)—a causality determinable only through the moral law—ends up falling under the aegis of the same empirical determination that it is meant to have forsaken.

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Moralising Efficiency It is “modernity’s birth of the a priori free moral subject that establishes democracy as the only legitimate modern Western political form”, argues Brown, even whilst “the white, masculine, and colonial face of this subject has permitted and perpetuated democracy’s hierarchies, exclusions, and subordinating violences across the entirety of its modern existence” (2011, p. 52). Liberal democracy in its modern form, Brown suggests, has evinced little genuine interest in the principle of equality, devoting itself instead to that of “freedom understood as self-legislation” (2011, p.  52). Kant’s ethical project reflects this principle, interiorising the notion of a duty to one’s own freedom (and to the freedom of all rational beings) as an apodictic law (see also Neiman 1994, pp. 116–122). The subject seeks its own freedom through adherence to a universal law that lies within itself. Freedom consists in the manner that it “restricts all inclinations, and consequently the esteem of the person himself, to the condition of compliance with its pure law” (Kant 1996, p. 203). Although there is much to be said about the way that such a maxim can be situated within the context of Kant’s historical milieu, most important here is the sheer fact that he is able to imagine this conception of freedom, in both its formal and teleological aspects, as apodictically certain, as necessary and universally applicable. Additionally, the fact is that he sees no contradiction between the subject’s obedience to an inner (and yet objective) law and its teleological submission to an unachievable (and yet necessary) highest good. This by itself is indicative of certain ideological precepts and technical conditions that partly determine his work, limiting its frame of reference: Kant does not perceive that this division between interiority and exteriority surreptitiously reintroduces the content that he wishes to expunge, an impurity within practical reason.5 This maxim, and its particular conception of freedom, is surely nowhere near as self-evident today as it might have seemed in the late eighteenth century. As Brown observes, the “[t]heorization of a range of normative (formally nonpolitical) powers combined with devastating critiques of the Kantian subject have together rendered freedom especially complex and elusive in late modernity” (2011, p. 52), such that even just the concept of an inner law, a pure reason unsullied by empirical adulterants, appears almost quaint or naïve, reliant as it is upon a conception of the moral subject as a pre-cultural, pre-social, and pre-technical (so ultimately pre-­ empirical) unity. Adorno writes of a “categorical imperative of the culture

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industry” which “no longer has anything in common with freedom”, but instead demands an empty conformity, objectively binding and yet utterly lacking in specificity, an injunction to “conform to that which exists anyway, and to that which, as a reflection of its power and omnipresence, everyone thinks anyway” (1991, p. 104, translation altered)—a categorical imperative denuded of any pretence to freedom, leaving only the principle of duty (which is here nothing other than submission). In saying so, he expresses the fear that our purportedly inner law, the moral law with which we feel compelled to comply, might actually be an external imposition, the practical corollary to the culture industry’s expropriation of theoretical schematism discussed in the previous section. It is exactly this fear to which I will devote the remainder of this chapter. One of the best-known formulas of Kantian ethics is the claim that ought implies can: that an action “must be possible under natural conditions if the ought is directed to it” (Kant 1998, p. 540). Kant conceives of all rational beings as capable of willing their own freedom, even if they will never know such freedom within the realm of theoretical (i.e. empirical) reason. However, what if we were faced with a different imperative, one that continually enjoined us to push ourselves up to and beyond our apparent theoretical limits? Would this equation of the ought and the can not come to seem a burden, perhaps even a hindrance to our freedom? What if progress, rather than a striving towards a utopic higher good, were transformed into an increasingly strenuous endeavour to comport ourselves in relation to an ought that cared little for our welfare? After all, our socio-technical milieu is very different to that of Kant who, living on the easternmost periphery of Prussia at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, would have been almost entirely unaffected by the dramatic transformations (what has come to be known as modernisation) that would for better or worse gradually reshape Europe, and eventually the entire globe. We live in the continuing aftermath of these tumultuous processes, and the result is a very different moral law to that which Kant identifies as apodictic. There are two main aspects to this covert moralisation that I wish to identify. The first is the question of efficiency. In some measure, I am retracing well-trodden ground here. Weber sees the so-called spirit of capitalism as lying in a work ethic which, as the name implies, has a fundamentally ethical or moral tenor in its positing of “a duty of the individual toward the increase of his capital, which is assumed as an end in itself” (1930, p. 17). This maxim, which valorises an accumulation of wealth simply for its own

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sake, with no greater purpose or higher good, leads naturally to the question of the technical means by which one’s profit can be increased, and thus to that also of how an employer might secure “the greatest possible amount of work from his men” (Weber 1930, p. 23). This is fundamentally a question of time and how time might best be exploited in the name of capital—“the categorical imperative of the Protestant ethic and the capitalist ethos consists in the obligation to use time as efficiently as possible, to systematically eliminate waste of time or idleness and to give an exact accounting of how time has been spent” (Rosa 2013, p. 49). Crucial to this notion of an ethical or moral dimension to the capitalist attitude towards work—and in particular to Weber’s postulation of a post-­ Reformation concept of a “calling”, which inscribes our worldly labour within a theological register (thus travestying and ultimately obsolescing the latter)—is the way in which a law comes to be internalised as a necessary duty, as something to which we submit voluntarily. Weber views the spirit of capitalism as developing from a religious impulse, furnishing a moral justification for a particular system of social relations. Although he does not speak of Kant a great deal, Weber does mention in a footnote that “many of [Kant’s] formulations are closely related to ideas of ascetic Protestantism” (1930, p.  244), a point which deserves greater elaboration. It would not seem at all unreasonable to view Kant’s unusual characterisation of freedom as a perseverance in conformity with an apodictic inner law as the philosophical reflection of this ethic described by Weber: as Sung Ho Kim notes, what we find in Kant’s ethical project is “an instrumental control of the self and the world (objectification) according to the law formulated solely from within (subjectification)”, the latter of which “is made possible by an internalisation or wilful acceptance of an ultimate value, a transcendental rational principle” (Kim 2004, p.  53). However, if the spirit of capitalism shares with Kant its rejection of material ends, grounding itself in a purely practical teleology (viz. the pursuit of profit, without any specified utility), what differentiates it from the latter is its liquidation of any imagination of the highest good, any kingdom of ends. It is, in other words, the purest of teleologies, impelling us forwards without any substantive horizon, however unreachable, towards which we aspire. The capitalist spirit, writes Weber, eventually sheds its theological underpinnings: it “no longer needs the support of any religious forces, and feels the attempts of religion to influence economic life, in so far as they can still be felt at all, to be as much an unjustified interference as its regulation by the State” (1930, p. 34). Stripped of these religious vestiges

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(which still manifest in Kant precisely in the form of the kingdom of ends), it becomes simply duty for its own sake—a telos without a conclusion (a terma). I do not mean to insinuate here that Kant is merely a philosophical figurehead of the capitalist work ethic, but his conceptualisation of ethics in purely formal terms of duty and lawfulness is helpful for understanding the ways that we as individuals come to internalise the pressures and expectations of contemporary capitalism. Lacking any moral authority of its own (since accumulation of wealth cannot, on its own, be linked to any sense of a common good), capitalism must find justification by attaching itself to already prevalent beliefs and values derived from elsewhere, bringing with them heterogeneous requirements and expectations (see Boltanski and Chiapello 2018, p.  20). For Weber, one such justification is the theologico-­ascetic principle that to waste time is “the first and in principle the deadliest of sins” (1930, p. 104), for to squander one’s life on mundane, worldly concerns is to lose the (finite) time one could spend glorifying God. The capitalist spirit then gradually latches onto and secularises this maxim, identifying efficiency as a wholly rational means for increasing one’s wealth. “Time is money”, as the cliché goes. In the present context though, it would seem inadequate to describe this moral law of acceleration—“the imperative of time efficiency, of the intensive usage and valorisation of every minute” (Rosa 2013, p. 176)—as merely the secular extension of puritan asceticism; hence, the second aspect of our present socio-technical conjuncture which, I believe, can be characterised in terms of a demand for speed and efficiency that outstrips even the desire for wealth. Crucial here is the fact that, with the exception of certain isolated instances (e.g. prosperity theology), the capitalist spirit today has totally shed its religious character, such that it would probably not seem to have a morality at all in conventional terms, and yet nevertheless maintains that peculiar sense of duty, of striving towards a strictly formal end that is the marker of the Kantian moral law. Where Kant, however, views such striving as ultimately dependent upon the postulation of God as its condition (even whilst remaining foreclosed to theoretical knowledge), today, we might say that the justification for our striving comes instead from the overwhelmingly apparent power of the technological apparatus that engulfs us. Writing in the 1960s, Marcuse decries the way in which technology “provides the great rationalization of the unfreedom of man and demonstrates the ‘technical’ impossibility of being autonomous, of determining

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one’s own life”, this very unfreedom appearing “neither as irrational nor as political, but rather as submission to the technical apparatus which enlarges the comforts of life and increases the productivity of labor” (1991, p. 162). Technical reason has installed itself in the sphere formerly given to ethics, increasingly determining the questions of purpose and finality that were once the ambit of the latter. Practical reason—which for Kant is grounded upon a firm apodicticity—is, under the conditions of industrialism, revealed to be historically contingent, technically conditioned and gradually stripped of any presuppositions of freedom or autonomy. The technicised instrumentalisation of reason leads to the legitimation of domination. Whilst we do not need wholly subscribe to Marcuse’s rather pronounced pessimism in the face of our technological milieu, it is nevertheless important that we recognise the way in which the ever-­ increasing saturation of our lifeworld by technical media feeds into this demand for efficiency, this injunction to accelerate. In one respect, the difficulty that we face as humans—who for sure have a remarkable degree of cognitive and somatic plasticity, but are still nevertheless ultimately finite beings (even if we do not ever really know the boundaries of this finitude, to paraphrase the Spinozist formulation)—is that we have been so extended through various electronic media that we have become embedded within a technological (but also economic, political, etc.) milieu that operates at such high speeds and with such levels of algorithmic complexity that we can only ever try to catch up with it. This is a fundamentally inhuman apparatus, one that will constantly set benchmarks in regards to performance, efficiency, productivity that we cannot match—a grotesque extension of the already dehumanising Taylorist logic of the scientific management of workers in the name of economic efficiency. One might say, slightly facetiously, that such media, which operate on the basis of symbolic and calculative operations not only imperceptible to the senses but fundamentally inaccessible to human apperception, furnish a certain noumenality (in the strictly Kantian sense of an object that may be thought, but cannot be cognised), highlighting the inadequacy of theoretical reason for phenomenally grasping the operational dynamism of solid state circuitry and data flows. This noumenality or alterity, a material exteriority which remains for empirical experience a mere regulative principle (gesturing to its boundaries or limitations), becomes for practical reason an ideal of moral perfection: holiness is replaced by efficiency. In another respect, if we take Rosa’s suggestion that the acceleration of our social existence is fuelled by the ideological maxim that “[o]ne who

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lives infinitely fast no longer needs to fear death as the annihilator of options” (2013, p. 183), such that infinite acceleration comes to seem to offer the means by which we might take advantage of all the possibilities open to us, enriching our inner lives through a never-ending cascade of novel experiences for which we must accordingly make time, we can start to observe the ways in which a very particular technological (and more precisely, post-industrial) mentality increasingly determines our own inner sense of time. The notion of richness of life understood chiefly in terms of the false freedom of an always unfolding profusion of possibilities to be actualised (and through which to actualise oneself) is not at all a natural or inevitable conclusion, but is at least partly the corollary of the logic of incessant technological invention. It places the very idea of the good life, the flourishing or prosperous human life (eudaimonia), in thrall to a cyclical logic of perpetual development and obsolescence that ultimately supplants the former idea in its entirety.

Speed as an End in Itself It should go without saying that this general imperative of speed, and the accelerative processes that come along with it, is enormously overdetermined and is certainly not reducible to the two highly schematic causes noted above. Likewise, it would be highly problematic to view this socio-­ technical acceleration as a smooth, homogeneous, equally distributed movement: although these time pressures do exist on a global scale, primarily thanks to the globalisation of markets that has occurred particularly in the past three decades, there are vast disparities and asymmetries in how such tendencies manifest, their material effects and the means by which individuals and communities resist them. Reflective of the inextricability of European modernisation from European imperialism, the very structure of this world market ensures that the particular effects of acceleration experienced by scholars such as myself living in Western, post-industrial countries are founded upon a continued exploitation of labour, the subjects of which often receive few if any of the positive ramifications of such processes and are, at the very least, likely to experience the ramifications of this acceleration in a quite different manner. There is a “highly complex social differentiation” (Massey 1993, p. 63) that must be accounted for in the study of such processes. In spite of these concerns, however, I would still provisionally propose that underneath such power differentials lies an a priori principle—a pure,

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ideal law—that provides an ideological justification, one amongst many, for the development and continuing expansion of this world market. This is not a deliberate ideological imposition or obfuscation; it is rather the product of a gradual accretion, the progressive internalisation of a series of social and moral injunctions centred upon a normalisation of efficiency and productivity as the twin benchmarks of human efficacy. This accretion is then bolstered by our increasingly quotidian, routine engagements with technologies that are designed with the primary intention of increasing the pace of production (a desideratum that reaches back to the Industrial Revolution), and which establish measures of speed that simply cannot be matched by human minds and bodies. The degree to which such a law is actually internalised by individuals may vary greatly, and yet it nevertheless has a significant influence on the social and productive relations that impact almost all aspects of our lives (beyond the boundaries of labour as it is traditionally figured). In a way, we might say that such an imperative is the nightmarish underside of the Kantian conceptualisation of a pure law, which insists upon a continuance of human striving, even whilst acknowledging the ultimate fruitlessness of such striving, inasmuch as its ends remain unattainable. A categorical imperative of speed is, in short, a moral law (which is to say that it involves a form of self-legislated duty), premised upon the straightforward maxim that it is good to act with speed, that one is obliged to do things as quickly as possible. This enjoinment is not teleological in the normal way that we would understand this term: it makes no claim to an upshot that follows from such acceleration. In this sense, it is not straightforwardly convertible with the canonical Enlightenment image of an ineluctable progress, for such a notion of an ever-augmenting perfectibility of humankind is built upon a confidence in the moral and social improvement of humankind, an end that is entirely liquidated in the formulation that I am proposing. Nor is it simply synonymous with the Weberian characterisation of the spirit of capitalism—even if it does preserve the representation of worldly labour “as a performance of duty in a calling” (Weber 1930, p. 108)—for its primary fixation is not even wealth, but speed for its own sake. Replacing the Kantian kingdom of ends with a compulsive pursuit of acceleration, this categorical imperative is the crypto-moral foundation of a globalised economic system that regards efficiency and productivity as the principal criteria by which our value as human beings is judged.

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The “cardinal doctrine” of political economy, argues Marx derisively (referring specifically to the bourgeois political economists who preceded him), is “the denial of life and of all human needs”, preaching that “[t]he less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theater, the dance hall, the public-house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save—the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour—your capital” (1988, pp. 118–119). The less you actually live, the more you will save. This is not, however, the same principle that I am identifying. The categorical imperative of speed does not perpetuate the puritanical doctrine that one’s labour (and one’s accumulation of wealth) should not be directed towards self-indulgent ends; on the contrary, this imperative is driven in large part by the insinuation that, if one were only capable of saving, managing and spending one’s time more effectively, one could fit more into a day, one could do more things, have more experiences, live a more fulfilling life. It is then broadly reflective of the blurring of the work/life balance emblematic of post-­ Fordism, whereby the criterion of efficiency—a category that was once assumed to be pertinent solely to the sphere of productive labour and was often explicitly counterposed against the leisure associated (for men) with the domestic sphere—comes to be presumed applicable and exigent to all aspects of life.6 However, of course, to reduce leisure and the use of one’s leisure time to a calculation of efficiency or productivity—premised upon the idea that one should always be doing something, conceiving of freedom only in terms of choice or possibility—is to disregard the subjective (and affective) question of the benefits that might come from such time, whether it be active or inactive, subordinating such concerns to a maxim that cannot account for pleasure, recreation, entertainment and so on. It is, in other words, ultimately a denigration of experiential content for the sake of a formal imperative. The consequence of this demand for incessant, unbroken dynamism, whereby “almost all one’s stock of knowledge and property is constantly threatened with obsolescence”, argues Rosa, is that “[e]ven in those intervals of time during which a subject has free time resources at her disposal, her surroundings continue to change at a rapid pace” (2013, p. 134), such that she will feel the need to catch up with that which seems to have changed in the meantime. This sense that one’s own inner sense of time (and accordingly, one’s own action) is somehow out of synchronisation

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with or inadequate to an objective movement external to oneself—an anxiety that is in many ways driven by the endless flow and circulation of data furnished through the ubiquitous media platforms with which so many of us engage—results in a compulsion to further accelerate one’s activity. Ultimately, such anxiety is born of a tension between a desire for presence (a time devoid of all lag and latency) and the latter’s continual deferral: it is not merely an anxiety in relation to one’s media usage; it is, on the contrary, an anxiety in relation to our lifeworld (and the intersubjective relationships through which our world is at least partly constituted), a relation mediated through that usage. The interactions that so many of us face on a daily basis with a manifold of interconnected media devices and platforms, and the sheer onslaught of data, the never-ending bombardment of new content, and the constant regeneration of information targeted at us through such media inevitably have a profound effect upon not only our temporal experience of these interactions, but also upon our time-consciousness more generally. These incessant data streams, furnishing the image of a world moving at an overwhelming, disorienting tempo—the sublimity of an acceleration that seems to outpace all sensibility, and thus all empirical givenness—do not offer a future figured in terms of the (perpetually deferred) fulfilment of a higher good, but instead merely hold out the phantasmic prospect of synchronising one’s inner sense of time with this gathering momentum, which exceeds the boundaries of possible experience. There is no sense of progress here, no hope for the future; on the contrary, it is a feeling of being perpetually left behind, of chasing a rapidly elapsing time. Optimism and pessimism, argues Ahmed, both “involve the temporality of the promise: they see the future in terms of what it promises to deliver or not to deliver, in terms of what there is or is not left to drink from the glass of the present” (2010, p. 174). Stripped of any such promise, the image of time proffered by the categorical imperative of speed largely forecloses both of these potentialities, and thus the future as a whole: it (re-)presents to us an image of ceaseless acceleration, but with no imagined outcome. A becoming that has no direction, only momentum, is in the end not a future at all. In Kant’s formulation, it is as a consequence of the fact that the human being is a finite being—which is to say that they have a pure will, but not a holy will, the latter of which would be incapable of acting in a way that clashed with the moral law—that the moral law is presented to it in the form of an imperative, which supplies the subject with a kind of internal

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constraint or resistance working to counteract those heteronomous desires that arise from external causes. This central distinction between autonomy and heteronomy is fundamentally one of interiority against exteriority: the autonomy of pure practical reason, the formal condition of the moral law, is a pure self-legislation, unfettered by any dependence upon either natural laws or subjective inclinations. The categorical imperative of speed that I am positing, by contrast, puts to rest any such separation, illustrating the ways in which culturally, socially or technologically imposed expectations can come to be internalised as seemingly autonomous necessitations. On one hand, this folding of the external onto the internal, the interleaving of autonomy and heteronomy, reveals some of the limitations of the Kantian project and its reliance upon the equation of autonomy with a transcendental purity of reason: as Bottici observes, “the mistake of the Enlightenment is precisely to have identified all that is not grounded on an altogether pure reason with heteronomy and superstition” (2007, pp. 149–150). As we have already seen, Kant’s assertions of apodictic certainty within the realm of practical reason are undermined by his dependence upon a historically and culturally mediated and contingent understanding of time and its relationship to labour. On the other hand, what it also highlights is the inhuman character of this contemporary categorical imperative of speed qua imperative or duty (something of which Kant’s model cannot really be accused), which dispenses with any concern regarding the subject’s self-determination of its own capacities (i.e. what it can do), in the pursuit of a teleology grounded in a purely formal calculation of efficiency. This imperative does not implore us to treat humans as an end in themselves, nor does it appeal to any notion of freedom (beyond that of a banal freedom of choice); it treats humans instead as the means to furthering a goal which can offer very little to them in terms of their own wellbeing, however we might define this. Whereas Kant’s practical philosophy aims to place the subject back within the divine moral order that his theoretical philosophy seems to foreclose to it, positing an idea of God in possession of a pure holiness of will, which rational beings are duty bound to approximate, the categorical imperative of speed situates our subjectivity within a technologically driven, extra-moral logic of acceleration to which it is not only inevitably inadequate (in spite of whatever effort we might muster), but with which it is ultimately incompatible.

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Conclusion It is important to emphasise that for one to say that we need to slow down—or more precisely, that we should not submit to a moralised enjoinment of speed or acceleration—is not to say that everything needs to be slow, that we must effect a total deceleration. It is not “a choice between, on the one hand, the hyperactive, overfilled, accelerated temporality of the moment and, on the other hand, a serene, cumulative, ‘organic’ temporality” (Eriksen 2001, p. 164), but a question of affirming a manifold of heterogeneous temporalities appropriate to specific situations and circumstances. There is nothing inherently bad about speed, acceleration, efficiency, productivity and so on and so forth; there is, however, something deeply concerning about a society in which these abstract quantities are treated as ends in themselves, as instrumentalised duties or necessitations. The question of how we might achieve such a slowdown is, of course, immensely difficult, offering us no easy solutions. At the very least though, it would seem crucial that we reflect upon the way in which media scholarship is implicated in such questions. After all, perhaps more than in any other discipline in the humanities and social sciences, media studies scholars so often find themselves chasing a cycle of technological development that will always outstrip their research—obsessively concerned with their inability to keep pace with this increasing succession of invention and obsolescence. It would seem to me that rather than decrying media theory’s incapacity to synchronise itself with this frenzied (and ultimately unsustainable) rate of technological development, we might embrace and even extol the dissonance between the (ideally) measured pace of scholarship and its object of study. Could media theory be utilised as, in McLuhan’s words, “a means of arresting the wheel of existence” (2011, p. 6), rather than as an instrument for exacerbating the frenetic temporalities and fabricated novelties of the media industries themselves?7 To suggest that theorising or philosophising should try to conform to ideals of efficiency, whilst certainly an increasingly common managerial imposition within the confines of the academy, is to reproduce the notion that it is our duty to accelerate our labour and to entrench the presumption that all activities are performed better when they are performed faster. To take just one example, Braidotti’s proposition that “we need new theories and practices that encompass the speed and the simultaneity of the semiotic and material practices that surround us, not those that perpetuate

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their disconnection” (2002, p. 115), although appealing in its affirmation of a theoretical praxis that does not fall into an instinctual conservatism, nevertheless fails to consider that it is precisely this disconnection that renders such theorisation meaningful, lending the latter a crucial power of critical negativity. Although we have no need today for a recapitulation of the metanarratives of progress to which Kant’s ethics are beholden, we must ask ourselves whether it might be possible to restore some form of hope for the future and by what means this might be effected. An imperative of speed— and with it, necessitations of acceleration, efficiency, productivity, and so on—cannot furnish such hope, for it cannot account for the future in any terms other than a repetition of the present. An acceleration without purpose (i.e. acceleration for its own sake) is, in the end, a liquidation of the future. Perhaps, as Adam argues, we need to reconceptualise our sense of duty and its relationship to a world yet to come, such as we imagine it, so as to involve “explicit cognizance of the future, not the prediction of the future based on knowledge of the past but a mindfulness of the future, a regard for the future which takes responsibility for potential outcomes of present actions and incorporates this into present plans and decisions” (1995, p. 174). It is this question of responsibility, not only for our own lives, but for the lives of others, for future generations, of which the categorical imperative of speed ultimately leaves us bereft.

Notes 1. For a more embryonic formulation of this argument, see Sutherland (2014). 2. Kant introduces the concept of schematism in order to explain how sensible intuitions come to be subsumed under concepts of the understanding, positing it as “a third thing, which must stand in homogeneity with the category on the one hand and the appearance on the other, and makes possible the application of the former to the latter” (Kant 1998, p. 272). 3. Technical propositions are, in Kant’s conception, ultimately theoretical (rather than practical), for they rely upon a connection and identity between cause and effect, asking how one might bring about what one wishes to exist. 4. “The doctrine of Christianity, even if it is not regarded as a religious doctrine, gives…a concept of the highest good (of the kingdom of God) which alone satisfies the strictest demand of practical reason” (Kant 1996, pp. 242–243). 5. On Kant’s teleological impulses, see Moran (2012, pp. 25–48).

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6. By the end of the twentieth century, the work ethic described by Weber “tends to make way for a premium on activity, without any clear distinction between personal or even leisure activity and professional activity. To be doing something, to move, to change—this is what enjoys prestige, as against stability, which is often regarded as synonymous with inaction” (Boltanski and Chiapello 2018, p. 155). 7. For further reflection on this question, see Sutherland (2018).

References Adam, B. (1995). Timewatch: The social analysis of time. Cambridge: Polity. Adorno, T.  W. (1991). The culture industry: Selected essays on mass culture. London/New York: Routledge. Adorno, T.  W. (2001). Metaphysics: Concept and problems. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Adorno, T.  W. (2006). History and freedom: Lectures 1964–1965. Cambridge/ Malden, MA: Polity. Ahmed, S. (2010). The promise of happiness. Durham: Duke University Press. Boltanski, L., & Chiapello, È. (2018). The new spirit of capitalism. London/New York: Verso. Bottici, C. (2007). A philosophy of political myth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Braidotti, R. (2002). Metamorphoses: Towards a materialist theory of becoming. Cambridge/Malden, MA: Polity. Brown, W. (2011). We are all democrats now…. In Democracy in what state? New York: Columbia University Press. Eriksen, T. H. (2001). Tyranny of the moment: Fast and slow time in the information age. London/Sterling: Pluto Press. Horkheimer, M., & Theodor, W.  A. (2002). Dialectic of enlightenment: Philosophical fragments. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Jordheim, H. (2010). The present of enlightenment: Temporality and mediation in Kant, Foucault, and Jean Paul. In C.  Siskin & W.  Warner (Eds.), This is enlightenment (pp. 189–208). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Kant, I. (1996). Practical philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. (1998). Critique of pure reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kim, S.  H. (2004). Max Weber’s politics of civil society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marcuse, H. (1991). One-dimensional man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. London/New York: Routledge. Marx, K. (1988). Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844 and the communist manifesto. Amherst: Prometheus Books.

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Massey, D. (1993). Power-geometry and a progressive sense of place. In J. Bird, B. Curtis, T. Putnam, G. Robertson, & L. Tickner (Eds.), Mapping the futures: Local cultures, global change. London/New York: Routledge. McLuhan, M. (2011). Wyndham Lewis: His theory of art and communication. In E.  McLuhan & M.  McLuhan (Eds.), Theories of communication. New  York: Peter Lang. Moran, K.  A. (2012). Community and progress in Kant’s moral philosophy. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. Neiman, S. (1994). The unity of reason: Rereading Kant. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rosa, H. (2013). Social acceleration: A new theory of modernity. New  York: Columbia University Press. Stiegler, B. (2011). Technics and time, 3: Cinematic time and the question of malaise. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Sutherland, T. (2014). Getting nowhere fast: A teleological conception of socio-­ technical acceleration. Time & Society, 23(1), 49–68. Sutherland, T. (2018). Searching for stillness in the flux of the electric world: Vorticular media theory from Wyndham Lewis to Marshall McLuhan. Explorations in Media Ecology, 17(1), 7–22. Swain, T. (1993). A place for strangers: Towards a history of Australian aboriginal being. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, M. (1930). The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. London/New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 3

The Normative Framework of (Mobile) Time: Chrononormativity, Power-­Chronography, and Mobilities Maren Hartmann

Introduction Sarah Sharma, in her work on the issue of temporality and cultural politics, emphasises that “the discourse of speedup is not likely to slow down” (Sharma 2014, p. 138). And since this discourse of speed(up)—societal, but also academic and quotidian—shapes people’s practices to some extent, it needs to be more closely regarded. Indeed, the discourse of speedup has become a—maybe the—normative social framework of today (see also the Sutherland chapter in this book), but as Sharma also puts it very clearly, “The discourse of speed continues to offer a completely inadequate and limited view of the temporal” (2014, p. 15). These kinds of discourses are not neutral, since they devalue and elevate certain practices and thereby play them against each other. Therefore an analysis of the discourses and the practices alike is necessary. These dynamics are powerfully captured in the following quote from an online magazine which focuses on disability and tries to get away from stereotypical engagements therewith: M. Hartmann (*) Berlin University of the Arts, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 M. Hartmann et al. (eds.), Mediated Time, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24950-2_3

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My time passes, but it does not progress in a linear way. It is a politically fought about category. In it, we see the extensions of uneven conditions, central to the construction of inequalities. Only from this perspective time seems to follow its seemingly natural path. Powerful imagination concerning the “right timing” get covered up this way. (Arztmann 2017)1

Let us begin our analysis of this normative framework of quotidian temporalities with some truisms. The first one is that time is embedded in a process of social construction (for a differentiation of this argument, see below). This social construction process is closely related to (changing) societal norms, but also embedded in (and negotiated in) societal power structures as well as everyday practices (including appropriation). When we consider processes of mediated time—and additionally take mobile media into consideration—we are confronted with a normative framework in flux. The aim of this chapter then is to take a closer look at this (or rather these) normative framework(s) and its (their) current shifts. It will do so theoretically with reference to two temporal frameworks in particular: Sharma’s power-chronography (Sharma 2012) and Freeman’s chrononormativity (Freeman 2010). Additionally, a third framework with a rather different emphasis will be introduced: the motilities concept. This shall serve to (re-)emphasise the uneven distribution of normative powers as well as begin to link these to the question of mobilities. Last but not least, the newly developed framework will then be interwoven with empirical material, that is, interview material from our recent study (two cases in particular). This chapter is embedded in current research projects in a twofold manner. First of all, the empirical material it uses stems from a recently completed research project on mediated time, which focused on mobile media and the question of temporal dissolution processes (see also the Introduction to this book). Second of all, the development of the theoretical framework is embedded in the build-up of a larger theoretical framework, entitled mobilism. Therein, the sociological discourse around  mobilities is combined with mobile media and communication research. It additionally includes an emphasis on mobilisation (see Hartmann 2018), momentum, as well as hindrances, contexts, sociality and—last but by far not least—temporalities. The mobilism framework only features indirectly here, but the addition of motilities is based therein. All will be further introduced below.

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Power-Chronography Power-Chronography is a concept that features prominently in Sharma’s work on time (2014, 2012; as well as an interview in this book). It is one of the few concepts that manages to centrally emphasise the power relationships in temporal regimes. Temporality for Sharma is not a neutral concept, but it creates an “awareness of power relations as they play out in time” (Sharma 2014, p. 4). The temporal is political. It is not based on any specific media technology, and it does not only emerge now, in the time of (potential) speedup. Instead, the temporal—rather than time— “results from a material struggle over meaning, resources and power” (Sharma 2012, p. 70). For Sharma, this implies a materialist approach to time, which begins with an acknowledgement of the multiplicity of time as encountered and lived by different actors. She, hence, differentiates between temporal infrastructure, temporal order, and temporal labour as important sub-aspects of power-chronography. In her initial introduction of the power-chronography concept (Sharma 2012), she uses Innis’ work to attack what she perceives to be a spatial bias in media and communication research (and social science more generally). If Innis has shown that specific media technologies shape specific visions about space and time in our respective eras, Sharma moves beyond this. Starting with an everyday statement—that new media “change space and time”—she manages to show that this always involves others and is specific rather than general, that is, how space and time are perceived to change depends very much on the individual position—and often on the work of others. Media, too, are embedded within “other media forms, discourses, bodies, money, and labor” (Sharma 2012, p. 68) that altogether make up the experience of the temporal. This also implies that time nowadays is not experienced primarily through the clock: It is no longer the clock that speeds up the routinized day. It is email, the iPhone and instant computerized warfare. (Sharma 2012, p. 69)

These arguments were most prominently developed in her book In the Meantime, in which she develops power-chronography as an extension of Massey’s often-cited “power-geometry” (1994). While Sharma underlines that time is multiple, she offers the relational as an important aspect. The relational offers us the possibility to think about sociality and move beyond individualistic notions (this will become important again later),

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but Sharma also underlines that these play out very differently for different people. She therefore focuses on the question of work and time. She asks “how different time sensibilities are produced” and focusses therein particularly on “people whose labor is explicitly oriented toward negotiating time and the time of others” as an example of the aforementioned power relationships (Sharma 2014, p. 15). In order to answer her own question—“What does power-chronography have to do with lived temporalities?” (Sharma 2014, p.  15)—her empirical material encompasses interviews, participant observations, and other approaches. In her study, she engaged with mental coaches, jetlag specialists, taxi drivers, workplace yoga instructors, and others. In terms of definition, she does not spell out power-chronography much more than this. Her overall book, however, excellently fills in the blanks with reference to the just-mentioned empirical material. In the following, I would like to pick up the idea of power-chronography in relation to individual reactions to the discourses that dominate. In these, so the claim presented here, lies a normative power that can both be abused and productively used. First, however, I turn to work that has more explicitly dealt with the question of norms in relation to the temporal.

Chrononormativity Sharma herself, in the introduction to her book, refers to chrononormativity (Freeman 2010) in passing (or rather: in a footnote). She translates the idea into the biopolitical (which is part of Freeman’s concept, while it is not limited to this), that is, the idea that bodies are intervened with, bound up in the institutions of (temporal) power. This can be the working body, but increasingly, so Sharma’s claim, it is also the enhancement of the qualitative experience of time (Sharma 2014, pp. 18–19). One of Freeman’s interests lies in the analysis of how state and corporations offer particular forms of temporality at specific historical moments. This could, for example, take place through a quickening and synchronising of some parts or offering other parts as leisure time or similar examples. Freeman’s main interest, however, lies in the subversion thereof. Overall—and here, her work matches that of Sharma quite well—Freeman shows that temporalities are bound up in larger forms of power and that this dominance is not necessarily denied. She is critical of these power formations and underlines the range of examples of all kinds of resistances, but she also goes to specific places to look for these. Also, it soon becomes

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clear, the temporal is such a hegemonic category that even recognising its constructed nature in relation to existing power relationships is a struggle. The most detailed version of the idea of chrononormativity is outlined in Freeman’s book Time Binds—Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Freeman 2010). In her earlier work, she already addressed those social and political processes that reproduce norms of the family, citizenship, health, and work through the exercise of time as “temporal mechanisms” (Freeman 2005, p. 57; see also Grabham 2014). With Time Binds, however, these concerns began to be tied together more closely, and a whole theoretical framework emerged. Chrononormativity is an important element therein. Freeman defines it as “the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity” (Freeman 2010, p. 3). This individual human body is at the same time grouped in, as Freeman calls it, “particular orchestrations of time” (Freeman 2010, p. 3). Similar to the concept of chronobiopolitics, chrononormativity helps institutions to rule without this rule being felt. Temporal experiences are naturalised and thereby also certain values around time (and more). However, this naturalisation is embedded in an asymmetrical system (Freeman 2010, p. 3). Freeman tries to show not simply the forces of chrononormativity but also their subversion through queer temporalities. Central to Freeman’s argument is not only the concept of chrononormativity but also, as the book’s description states, “temporal drag, the visceral pull of the past on the supposedly revolutionary present; and erotohistoriography, the conscious use of the body as a channel for and means of understanding the past.”2 Time Binds emphasises the critique of temporality and history as crucial to queer politics. This critique can take on diverse forms; the abovementioned forms of temporality offered by the state and corporations are examples thereof. Similarly, Nowotny (see Nowotny chapter in this book) and others have emphasised that institutions are crucial in upholding and shaping temporalities.3 In terms of the objects of her own analysis, Freeman’s emphasis is on the seemingly useless, the non-­sequential forms of time (her examples for this include poems, the unconscious, but also haunting, reverie, and afterlife). She analyses videos, films, and literature as well as cultural histories and subsequently reads these—very eloquently—with a queer lens of re-appropriation. In contrast to this, my use of the term chrononormativity does not adopt many of the layers of Freeman’s work and is more concerned with a seeming social mainstream (which appears as such only on first sight). The main elements to be taken from Freeman are, first of all, her basic ­definition

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of chrononormativity and, second of all, the emphasis on the domestic. In fact, chrononormativity is exemplified primarily through reference to domestic time (Freeman 2010, pp. 39ff.), which has been characterised in modernity as the necessary antidote to working and other public times. Thereby industrial time was brought into the house in an extremely gendered and, at the same time, hidden fashion. Hence, “progressive, linear time and the cyclical time” (Freeman 2010, p.  6) can actually continue because domestic everyday life offers the necessary interruption to the other time. The public and even nationhood rely on domestic time to work this way. On a more concrete level, the emergence of this kind of domestic time in modernity relied on gendered work and on the illusion of the household as pure temporal plenitude (quality time): Within the ideology of normative domesticity, the proper maintenance of cyclical schedules and routines produces the effect of timelessness. (Freeman 2010, p. 40)

This timelessness not only needs a lot of concrete work at home but it also needs the ideological framework for it to uphold and defy any possible attacks. Much of chrononormativity is indeed so normalised that it is sometimes difficult to think beyond: Some examples of chrono-normativity might include the supposedly “normal” timeline of childhood, puberty, courtship, marriage, children, and retirement, from which we all deviate to greater or lesser extent during our lives; or the time of the working day and working week, shaped through contestation over labour rights and pay; or the temporal idea, for queers, of “coming out”, for immigrants, of “becoming citizens”, or for offenders, of “doing time”. (Grabham 2014)

What concerns us here is not the set state of normality, but the process of becoming so, since the temporal is used in these contexts to keep the individual in his/her place. My own use of the term chrononormativity is a recontextualisation, that is, I am less concerned with the queer reading of norms (as relevant as they are) than more general social rules of power that are also expressed in Sharma’s concept of power-chronography. Instead of working days or life stages or other temporal regimes on the subjective level, this chapter therefore focusses on temporal regimes on a societal level that play into the individual lifestyle. There is a media-related

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chrononormative framework at play here that our respondents seem to struggle to come to terms with or rather have struggled to affirm their agency within.

Power-Chrononormativity? The combination of power-chronography and chrononormativity as power-chrononormativity doubles the normative framework—while also opening up the question in how far overlaps between these two might become places of liberation from or at least resistances to the existing regimes of time, of temporalities. The aim is to understand temporal norms and their relation to power relations. Before we turn to the material, I would like to very briefly introduce yet a third framework: motility. In many ways, it reiterates core points of the other two, but at the same time focusses on mobilities and inequality (ignoring the temporal). Mobilities are important insofar as we are dealing with mobile media. While none of the frameworks introduced in this chapter were used in the beginning of our research project, the motilities aspect is even more difficult to clearly detect in the material, since it would have afforded a different focus in the questions we asked. Nonetheless, the material gave enough hints that this is an important point and would strengthen the overall theoretical framing. It is, therefore, an exploratory addition. The concept of motility is embedded with the so-called mobilities paradigm (e.g. Sheller and Urry 2006; Urry 2007), which proposed movements of diverse kinds as central elements of current society. Motility, more specifically, is the “capacity of a person to be mobile” (Kaufmann 2002, p. 37), according to Kaufmann, who coined the concept. He continues to specify that motility is “the way in which an individual appropriates what is possible in the domain of mobility and puts this potential to use for his or her activities” (Kaufmann 2002, p. 37). Motility puts the emphasis on not only the individuals’ competence and aspirations but also circumstances and capacities of all kinds (see also: Kaufmann et al. 2004, p. 750). At the heart of the motility concept is, therefore, not movement as such, but instead it asks what hinders/enables an individual to move. In that sense, a differentiation of mobility is taking place: the body and its abilities are added to the equation as are the aspirations (here: to be mobile or not), the technological affordances as well as their appropriation, but also space, time, and movement constraints. In short, Kaufmann summarises these as access, skills, and appropriation (Kaufmann 2002, p. 38).4 This differentiation is part of his critique of the (then) dominant

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paradigm of mobility as desirable (and achievable). This links us back to two points: (a) Massey’s (1994)—and therefore also Sharma’s (2014)— emphasis on the unequal distribution of space, time, and increasingly also mobility and (b) the discursive/moral framing of these distributions. The interlinkage between these aspects is in the foreground, that is, on the one hand, the question of the temporal aspects of mobility, on the other hand, the mobility aspects of time. Motility then underlines the necessary preconditions for a potential to move. It is the interlinkage between this potential and the temporal in relation to mobile media that will be the focus of the analysis of the empirical material.5 As often with empirical material, the link needs to be uncovered.

The Interviews…Speak for Themselves? The following interview quotes stem from a three-year research project on mediated time, which combined interviews in Berlin and Rostock in North-Eastern Germany with an automated experience sampling method delivered via mobile phones.6 Our primary research question to begin with was which role mobile media played in the processes of temporal dissolution. We were hoping to find out how not only time use and design but also the sense of time had potentially changed thanks to the use of mobile media. The idea of the dissolution of time as well as the related idea of acceleration, which we had originally used as one of the theoretical frameworks, began to become more difficult to uphold the further our project progressed. It seemed that additional theoretical work was necessary. From my perspective, the concepts explored in this chapter fulfilled this role best. I will begin my discussion of the material with a key quote from media and time biographical interviews. It is a key quote in the sense that it summarises the phenomenon of power-chrononormativity rather well, wherefore it will be a further reference point. At the same time, the quote underlines the need for differentiation and a close, contextualised reading. It stems from a 15-year-old young woman who describes what she perceives as the general expectations concerning her status of being online— including, vice versa, her expectations of others. Her being online is closely connected to her smartphone and her constantly carrying it around— without question. Although she is generally rather reflexive about her technology use, she does feel a certain pressure:

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I have a bit the feeling that one by now generally assumes—or at least that I assume that I will be online all the time…I believe most people around me know that I am usually available all the time, right? And I probably also send out the expectation that I assume they will be online and available all the time, too. (Pauline, female, 15, Berlin)7

On first sight, this quote is not very surprising: this young woman assumes—and acts accordingly—that she has to be online all the time. This is not only a fairly typical assumption, in general, but it is equally reiterated in many academic discussions and concepts: from always on (e.g. Boyd 2012) to permanently online, permanently connected (Vorderer 2015). This translates into many newspaper headlines (e.g. Hasse 2014; Spiegel Online 2014; Ohlheiser 2018), and it both stems from, but also translates back into practices. Building on scholarship that has in recent years tried to establish a practice turn, the term practice already entails discursive formations, linking them with quotidian routines and other actions. However, the point here is to stress that the power of the discursive is sometimes ignored when it is subsumed under such large formations as practices. In fact, Pauline’s smartphone use is by far not as unlimited as the 24/7 quote above might suggest. While she has a smartphone and expects the availability of herself and others, she has a clear structure of non-use. This is partly not her own choice, but that of her parents’, but it is also characterised by many interests that simply do not fit constant connectivity. Her parents structure her day through setting offline times. Hence, she has to put her phone away at 9 o’clock in the evening, and she is only allowed to use it again (albeit briefly) in the morning once she is dressed, had breakfast, and is ready to leave for school. This is why she feels partly left behind, since she cannot watch all the series that others watch on their smartphones at night, nor can she keep up with certain Instagram stories. The latter provides an important example of the temporal aspects that programmes and apps such as Instagram bring with them. Pauline’s feed is full of US accounts whose time zones do not overlap with hers. Since the stories have both a set time—24 hours before they disappear again—it is crucial to still catch them in time. However, in Instagram, the user can also highlight the story or add it to the feed for it not to disappear as quickly. Highlighting it, on the other hand, doubles the expectation: it communicates a claim to relevance and asks others for their attention. The programmed nature of disappearance increases the idea of ephemerality of content (see also Hartmann 2016),

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while it also emphasises an idea of technological Eigenzeit (Ernst 2013), something outside of the control of the user. Hence, Pauline’s use and appropriation are given temporal limitations to deal with. This has to be taken into consideration just as much as the rules and regulations of a temporal order that her parents impose on her. She is quite aware of the limitations that the parental rules impose (as much as she is aware of the more general observation that her parents thereby still determine quite a bit of her smartphone use). At the same time, she also knows that there are definite advantages (she gets to sleep in time, doesn’t get lost in her use). Additionally, there is limited access in school—and equally limited access in her various hobbies and occupations (drawing, boxing, making music, private tuition, and others). Hence, while she complains a bit about some restrictions, she seems generally well versed in her digital skills and very able in using her access for the things she needs and wants (such as following artists and their work, finding out about ways to draw, etc.). Hence, the notion of connectivity and her normative framework of availability do not necessarily directly translate into a practice of constant availability, but rather a differentiated web of practices. It should be noted, however, that Pauline is still at school and lives in a comfortable home with her parents who support her entirely (both financially, but also otherwise). Hence, the life phase and social framework is a particular one. The idea of the differentiated web of practices reflects the problems that frameworks such as acceleration pose, as for example, Wajcman (2016) and Sharma (2014) have also outlined. While Rosa emphasises that “the growing mismatch between our to do list and our time budget” is “a form of de-synchronisation between our social existence and our individual capacities” (2017, p.  40) and that we tend to turn to time-­ saving devices that ultimately cannot save us, Wajcman calls for a closer look on several levels (media usage is only one): The question, then, is not so much whether new media accelerate the pace of life. Rather, we need to explore the degree to which the uneven diffusion of media usage throughout different aspects of daily life affects our sense of time. (Wajcman 2016, p. 155)

The acceleration framework that Rosa offers leaves too little differentiation between individual routines and forms of appropriation on the one hand and societal developments as expressed in massive discourses on the

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other. The discourses, however, get picked up and shape self-perceptions. Hence, many of our interviewees felt the need to defend their own use and to blame themselves for not acting according to an unnamed ideal of limited use: “Well, I create this stress myself…either you look at it, you always have the time in sight… through this smartphone, I have my time so-to-say under control,” states Lars, a 22-year old from Rostock, but while he feels in control, he also muses that less time online, “not being available all the time…would be easier.” He even concludes, “I could, I think, relax better and could, I think, be a bit more productive. Now it’s rather quantitative, is more oriented towards quantity for me than quality” (Lars, male, 22, Rostock). The normative power of the temporal availability has become one of the defining features of how mobile use is portrayed—and hence also perceived. There is, however, another normative framing lurking underneath: the idea of wasteful time use. While the expectation of permanent availability is both articulated and experienced, it is also judged. This judgement is primarily negative, that is, the underlying framework harkens back to the Protestant work ethic, where time was not to be wasted (on not working and thereby serving God). Lars exemplifies this through his reference to a relaxation that is immediately linked with productivity, doing less in order to do more. The idea is that media take you away from something. This is not the normative framework that has yet reached Pauline to the same extent. Her usage instead  fits the dominant chrononormative framework of temporal availability quite well. Once the safety cushion of being taken care of and the security of certain paths gets shaken, however, the power of temporal framing becomes even larger. This can best be explored with the help of another interviewee, who had been unemployed for the last four years before we interviewed him: Alexander. Before we turn to him, we will briefly explore the Protestant work ethics framework.

No Escape? Or: No Sleep for the Wicked Waste of time is thus the first and in principle the deadliest of sins. The span of human life is infinitely short and precious to make sure of one’s own election. Loss of time through sociability, idle talk, luxury, even more sleep than is necessary for health, six to at most eight hours, is worthy of absolute moral condemnation. (Weber 2005 [1930], p. 104)

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As Weber outlines clearly, time is a central issue in Protestant ethics—not only is time money, but wasting time is a sin. This moral condemnation implies that the opposite is the dominant paradigm: [T]he categorical imperative of the Protestant ethic and the capitalist ethos consists in the obligation to use time as efficiently as possible, to systematically eliminate waste of time or idleness and to give an exact accounting of how time has been spent (Rosa 2013, p. 49—also quoted in the Sutherland chapter in this book)

This obligation, according to Rosa, has been the basis for acceleration— our need to fill any available empty time with more action and the increase of activities achieved within a certain time unit. The efficiency paradigm took over private lives. Adaptation and appropriation do not feature much in this approach, since it is proclaimed to be either impossible or simply a delusion. There is reason to be sceptical of this view. Despite an often-­ critical understanding of potentially disenabling mechanisms, the pressure is felt and created by many of our interviewees: Because I use it a lot and write a lot. I do actually expect an answer. Minimum at the end of the day…I actually expect, before that person goes to bed (laughing), well, actually a bit extreme, that he or she has to answer me. So, if you say it very strictly, because I also try to answer quickly. I know that one can answer quickly. Yes, it is not so that one cannot answer. And I know everyone who has a mobile, looks at it at least once before going to bed… Well, we have already arrived at such a society that one, I think, expects this from people, if we communicate that quickly in the end. (Jan, 32, male, Berlin)

This expectation, as Jan outlines, is partly a social issue, but this social framework is also deeply intertwined with the technological one: not only is one often made aware of new claims on one’s time (pop-ups, sounds, etc.), but whether and/or when one attends to them is also visible to others, sometimes in real time. Also, whether a message has been sent, received or read is visible and decipherable through different numbers of ticks and different colours. This socio-technical chrononormative framework of instantaneity and speedy communication, as previously expressed by Pauline, often leads to the well-known phenomenon of a communication and information overload.

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There are days when I get one after the other—just as now—and they simply don’t stop, and then there comes this point when one says, “Ey, I shouldn’t have had a mobile.” It is hard work…Actually, one cannot answer anymore. The messages move to the bottom… and then I really don’t want my mobile anymore. (Laura, 19, female, Berlin)

This is also the reason that the acceleration framework is often taken on board as an appropriate description of individual’s lives: “And now, I don’t know, one is always so AWARE to ANSWER immediately…Everything is quicker today…The pressure rises then as well” (Luisa, 28, female, Rostock). While this quote underlines the experience of external forces changing one’s life, some interviewees stress the opposite awareness, that is, that “one is a part therein. One does it oneself” (Eva, 28, female, Berlin), which returns us once more to the Protestant work ethics.

Timeless Time? Schedules, calendars, time zones, and even wristwatches inculcate what the sociologist Evitar Zerubavel calls “hidden rhythms;” forms of temporal experience that seem natural to those whom they privilege. (Freeman 2010, p. 3)

As outlined above, these hidden rhythms are now added to and made more complex through less hidden rhythms in the form of the visibility of presence/absence even in supposedly non-synchronous forms of communication—a new kind of presence is created. This shift has not taken away the power of the privileged to perceive their temporal experience as natural, and it imposes new pressures on those who are less privileged—as Alexander, one of our interviewees, underlines in his protest against a temporal order that he does not feel able to or does not want to partake in: That you can only be a human being if you have structure and you can structure your time, blah, blah, blah, prattle, prattle. Somehow, I don’t think so. I think I am not so badly off, because I do it differently. (Alexander, 32, male, Rostock)8

Alexander is quoted here stating that he is somewhat better off, since he can choose not to structure his time, and he is, therefore, free to do what he wants. However, the “freedom” of unemployment in a society whose core identity is based on notions of work and related issues remains a

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t­wo-­sided sword. As Alexander also describes, his renewed attempt at using a calendar has recently failed (he tends to buy one every two years or so). His reason for at least trying it was twofold: (a) his mobile is nine years old and does not have any of the calendar features (plus he does not have a contract and therefore rarely enough credit) and (b) he is partly annoyed by not doing anything: In between, it really gets on my nerves that I hang around and have nothing to do. Plus—that doesn’t happen rarely—I have three dates at once or I manage to piss off two friends because I arranged to meet them at the same time…but that happens if you do not own a mobile that you can programme in this way—what do I know—these new reminder functions or so. (Alexander, 32, male, Rostock)9

Alexander is an extremely ambivalent case: in the interview, he was quite emotional and opiniated. He kept emphasising that his lifestyle was actually quite liberating—a state of mind that he had worked hard to achieve (the first three years after he finished his studies of archaeology and history, he suffered from being unemployed; now, he claims, he got used to it). He also emphasises that organising himself timewise has always been an issue, wherefore he is happy to be free of such commitments (he has a small extra job that he is free to do whenever it suits him). At the same time, he expresses a love for the regularity of the commitments he has (impro-theatre, running) and yearns for structure. He gets up at 7:00 every day, eats at regular intervals, and knows exactly when he moved in with his flatmate. Time is clearly an issue—but temporality is, too. While Alexander emphasises his freedom, his general attitude in the interview is one of defence. He is clearly expected to perform a different lifestyle—and he himself partly longs for one, too, while he is equally horrified at the idea. Without being able to articulate it exactly, he seems to suffer under the power of the chrononormative regime, particularly the dominance of regular employment as a criterium for social acceptance. His involvement with media is at least as ambivalent. On the one hand, he is very media savvy, albeit in an outdated way, but even more so, he is very reflexive about his media use. He uses his technologies consciously, knows exactly what the machines and the contracts allow him to do—and what not. He structures his day with the media—he gets up and begins his day with a film (since film is his passion and he cannot function properly in the morning), and this passion is a biographical continuity—having

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been born in East Germany, he was five years old when the Wall fell and new television programmes, videos, games, and so on entered his life and became his world (although rather young at the time, he narrates this as an important shift in life). He worked in a video store while he studied and continues these passions. At the same time, he is adamant about digital— especially mobile—media presenting a threat to social life, his and others’. He gets into a rage when asked about the WhatsApp ticks (watching other people use them), speaks of hate (“great hate”)—partly about people staring at them, but more so about the fact that digital media limit self-determination.10 At the same time, Alexander reports that he cannot stop checking his emails several times a day, although he hardly gets any mails, let alone relevant ones. The need for this potential for communication, the promise that this possible communication holds, still has a strong hold over him. At the same time, it reinforces his feeling of being left behind, being left out, since not getting mails underlines this fact. The difficult relationship between self-determination and the desire to take part is once again visible here. In this sense, not only those “in the mainstream” of society experience what Rosa (2013) calls the slippery slope phenomenon—the feeling that you need to do more and be faster in order to keep up, but instead increasingly feel that everything is getting too fast and too much—is also partly visible here. Hence, the categorial imperative of speed(up) does not differentiate socially although it is experienced differently.

Motility? Well, I have a smartphone, but this is already nine years old and is able to do hardly anything. Someone else had it before me and I don’t even have a contract, therefore I always have to look out for Wi-Fi, where it works. And then it still works rather badly. But yes, this is…this gets on my nerves, massively…it would be so much easier if you could use it while being mobile. (Alexander, 32, male, Rostock)11

The ambivalence continues. Alexander feels limited in his mediated movements because his smartphone is too old and he does not have a contract. Hence, he depends on the availability (and quality) of public Wi-Fi—he needs to know where to go. He appreciates at least some of the possibilities that mobile communication holds while on the move (he mentions navigation apps, an organiser as well as a tracking app [for running]).

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Hence, here, too, he is technology savvy (knows what exists and what he could use well), but more in knowledge than in practice. At the same time, he simply cannot afford such technologies and the ensuing costs, and his scepticism concerning the implications remains strong. In combination with the technological question, this is an issue of motility. He cannot communicate-in-movement in ways that others can (and communication here involves information seeking). Instead, he actually has to physically move to get the same access that others have: he has to spot the Wi-Fi. At a certain point in his life, when he was homeless for four months, this need to move became even more pronounced: [E]specially in these four months where I did not have a flat, I also didn’t have Internet. I was only able to go online at my friends’, and therefore I actively went to the “New Market/Neuer Markt” (a square in Rostock) and I knew, “Okay, here I now have an hour free [Internet access]”… I really knew the hotspots and then ACTIVELY went there all the time, at least once a day, to take a look at what’s happening. I planned it that way. (Alexander, 32, male, Rostock).12

He describes himself as being interested in the world, and he did not want to lose track of what was happening, even at times when this required an extra effort. Hence, suddenly, movement becomes important. His motility in terms of resources was rather limited, but this was counteracted through his capabilities (physical as well as mental). Forced through these circumstances, the movement itself (to the right spots) enabled Alexander to at least partly partake in social and public life that he considered both necessary and desirable. This is an important point in relation to not only power-chronography and the chrononormative but also motility: Alexander has a past which contained the promise of a different kind of future that has now become his present. This past provides him not only with skills and resources, important for motility, but also a chrononormative framing that he cannot fulfil (and therefore needs to reject) and a less clear powerchronographic relation. However, his earlier quoted statement that he still keeps checking mails as well as his fond memories of work trips (archaeology field trips to France, which he remembers as “beautiful phases” because everyone was offline and therefore “just themselves”) underline that his imagination still places him in that web of relations that characterise our relationship to time, but also the realisation that parts of that might have been lost and he is increasingly less part of this.

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The relational nature of time does not necessarily play to his advantage, and his discourse of freedom does not necessarily affect the societal powerchrononormative framing.

Instead of a Conclusion: Are We Conducting Chrononormative Research? It would have been fairly easy to construct a research interpretation of the given material that builds on the idea of a chrononormative framing of ‘always on’. In order to understand individual ways of dealing with societal and peer pressure to partake in digital media practices, to be online, to be available, there is indeed a need to address this. At the same time, however, this particular reading of the chrononormative would be far too simple (and not, I assume, what Freeman had in mind). Instead, we might need to trace the way we conduct research in a power-chrononormative manner. How far do we tend to expect participation and frame non-use as a lack? The abovementioned cases, however, underline a rather different emphasis: (a) albeit often ambivalent, appropriation is a key driver for practices and (b) the power-chrononormative frameworks that this kind of mediated time is embedded in can only be unpacked through contextualisation efforts. More importantly, another methodological challenge remains unaddressed: how can we involve the discursive powers at play in the framing of both people’s perceptions of their actions and our own research? Last but by far not least, the concepts of both power-chronography and chrononormativity have proven to be useful companions for the analysis of our material.13 They should be read together though in order to make them even more powerful. The addition of motility has proven to be more difficult. This returns us (yet again) to the methodological: asking about mobile communication is not yet asking about mobility (and/or motility). A wider framework, a “materialist, non-media-centric media studies” (Morley 2009) approach is necessary, a framework that combines questions of mobilities with those of mobile media. Another project is necessary.

Notes 1. “Meine Zeit vergeht, aber sie schreitet nicht linear voran. Sie ist eine politisch umkämpfte Kategorie. In ihr zeigen sich die Auswüchse ungleicher Verhältnisse, wesentlich für die Konstruktion von Ungleichheiten. Nur aus

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dieser Perspektive folgt Zeit ihrem scheinbar natürlichen Lauf. Machtvolle Vorstellungen ‘richtiger Zeitlichkeit’ bleiben so verdeckt” (Arztmann 2017). 2. https://www.dukeupress.edu/time-binds. Accessed 4 April 2019. 3. Nowotny actually misses institutional self-reflection and asks for this to be implemented in order to contradict too self-exploitative structures (see Nowotny chapter in this book). 4. Sheller (2018) has recently extended the question of motility in her concept of mobility justice. For Sheller, mobility justice involves three aspects: (a) self-determination of movement, (b) mobility capability, and (c) the potential for mobility, that is, motility. While I find an emphasis on justice extremely helpful for the public debate, I always understood motility to already include an emphasis on skills (i.e. capability), but also self-­ determination (partly a question of access, partly of appropriation). In order not to add too many definitional layers, I, therefore, stick to motility in the context of this chapter. 5. Massey’s (1994) often-used quote in this regard still holds strong: “For it does seem that mobility, and control over mobility, both reflects and reinforces power. It is not simply a question of unequal distribution, that some people move more than others, and that some have more control than others. It is that the mobility and control of some groups can actively weaken other people. Differential mobility can weaken the leverage of the already weak. The time-space compression of some groups can undermine the power of others.” (p. 150). 6. The project was funded by the German research foundation and included two PhD researchers (both are co-editors of this book). The project consisted of 24 media- and time-biographical interviews (12 in Berlin, 12 in Rostock) conducted with a range of people from different genders, ages, and social backgrounds. We also conducted 100 mobile experience samples and triangulated the material. Both parts were conducted primarily in 2017. 7. The names of the interviewees were changed in order to protect their anonymity. Other distinguishable features were also changed. The original German quote can be found in the related footnote. Here it is: “… ich habe so ein bisschen das Gefühl, dass man eigentlich mittlerweile generell davon ausgeht, zumindest bei mir davon ausgeht, dass ich sowieso ständig online bin. …, glaube ich/ die meisten Leute in meinem Umfeld wissen, dass ich eigentlich ständig erreichbar bin, quasi, ne? Und vermutlich sende ich auch an andere manchmal das Gefühl, dass ich das auch von anderen erwarte.” 8. “Dass man doch nur ein/ unter anderem ein Mensch sein kann, wenn man Struktur hat und seine Zeit so strukturieren kann, bla, bla, bla, laber, laber. Finde ich jetzt irgendwie nicht so. Ich glaube, mir geht es nicht so schlecht, wenn ich es halt auch anders mache.”

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9. “Dass mich das zwischenzeitlich ganz schön NERVT, wenn ich dann so abhänge und tatsächlich jetzt nichts zu tun habe. Und/ oder es kommt auch nicht so selten vor, dass ich dann auf einmal natürlich drei Termine zum gleichen/ oder drei/ oder gleichzeitig zwei FreundInnen verprelle, weil ich drei Termine auf den gleichen Termin gelegt habe. Und das kommt auch schon mal vor. Also was weiß ich mit welcher Regelmäßigkeit. Aber so was passiert dann halt, wenn man kein Handy hat, wo man so was einspeichern kann oder was weiß ich, was diese neumodernen Erinnerungsvereinfachungen sind oder so.” 10. “Ach so. Ja. Hass. Großer Hass. Finde ich richtig beschissen. Erwische mich auch regelmäßig dabei, bei gewissen Leuten, weil ich weiß, wie sie ticken, dass sie/ wie SIE ticken, die ganz AKTIV darauf gucken, und ich sehe das natürlich auch, und sehe dann so ‚plom, plom,‘ zwei Häkchen, und dann sind sie auch noch blau, oh. Oh, wie ich es hasse! Also diese komische/ wenn es diese Regelung schon gibt, schön und gut, aber dass man dann nicht mal selbst entscheiden kann. Und das ist WIEDER so fremdbestimmte Scheiße.” 11. “Ich habe zwar ein Smartphone, das ist aber auch irgendwie neun Jahre alt schon und kann ungefähr nichts. Und hatte auch schon einen Vorbesitzer und habe auch keinen Vertrag, dementsprechend muss ich halt immer WLAN gucken, wo es funktioniert. Es funktioniert dann auch immer sehr schlecht. Aber, ja, das ist auch/das nervt mich ganz aktiv. Dass/ Also ich habe halt ein Smartphone und das macht so viel einfacher, wenn man denn das mobil benutzen könnte. Kann ich nur nicht, dementsprechend machen das andere. Und halt sehe, wie es für andere vereinfachend ist vielleicht, aber eben doch total nervig sein kann. Für mich und für die. Aber ich merke, wie ich da zum Beispiel auch ganz, ganz schnell sofort gucke…” 12. “… vor allem in diesen vier Monaten, wo ich keine Wohnung hatte, hatte ich auch kein Internet und konnte immer nur bei Freunden und Freundinnen und eben, da bin ich ganz, ganz aktiv auf den Neuen Markt gegangen und dort: “Okay, jetzt habe ich hier eine Stunde frei.” Der Neue Markt hat irgendwie so eine Stunde, und danach müsste man irgendwie was freischalten. … Dass ich wirklich die Hotspots kenne und dann wirklich AKTIV da immer hingegangen bin, um wenigstens am Tag ein bisschen zu gucken, was geht. Das habe ich mir auch immer vorgenommen.” 13. I am tempted to try out the term kaironormative in the next step, emphasising that rather than chronos, it is kairos nowadays that is beginning to be normatively regulated. Especially in the temporal structures of social media, we are increasingly encountering notions of the right moment and are asked to seize (but also represent) them. The quotidian chronos is pushed aside.

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References Arztmann, D. (2017). K_eine Zeit. Cripmagazine, 2, 12. http://cripmagazine. evaegermann.com/article/k_eine-zeit/. Accessed 15 Mar 2019. Boyd, D. (2012). Participating in the always-on lifestyle. In M. Mandiberg (Ed.), The social media reader (pp.  71–76). New  York/London: New  York University Press. Ernst, W. (2013). From media history to Zeitkritik. Theory, Culture & Society, 30(6), 132–146. Freeman, E. (2005). Time binds, or, erotohistoriography. Social Text, 84–85, 57–68. Freeman, E. (2010). Time binds: Queer temporalities, queer histories. Durham/ London: Duke University Press. Grabham, E. (2014). The strange temporalities of work-life balance law. feminists@law, 4(1). https://journals.kent.ac.uk/index.php/feministsatlaw/rt/ printerFriendly/101/262. Accessed 15 Mar 2019. Hartmann, M. (2016). Soziale Medien, Raum und Zeit. In M.  Taddicken & J. Schmidt (Eds.), Handbuch Soziale Medien (pp. 367–387). Wiesbaden: Springer. Hartmann, M. (2018). Mobilising the homeless? A proposal for the concept of banal mobilisation. In S.  Foellmer, M.  Lünenborg, & C.  Raetzsch (Eds.), Media practices, social movements, and performativity: Transdisciplinary approaches (pp. 59–80). London: Routledge. Hasse, M. (2014, April 22). Fast ständig online—Was macht das mit uns? Hamburger Abendblatt. https://www.abendblatt.de/ratgeber/wissen/article125101823/Fast-staendig-online-was-macht-das-mit-uns.html. Accessed 15 Mar 2019. Kaufmann, V. (2002). Re-thinking mobility. Aldershot: Ashgate. Kaufmann, V., Bergman, M. M., & Joye, D. (2004). Motility: Mobility as capital. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 28(4), 745–756. Massey, D. (1994). Space, place and gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Morley, D. (2009). For a materialist, non media-centric media studies. Television & New Media, 10(1), 114–116. Ohlheiser, A. (2018, August 22). Parents worry about their teens’ smartphone habits. But what about their own? Washington Post. https://www. washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2018/08/22/parentsworry-about-their-teens-smartphone-habits-but-what-about-their-own/?utm_ term=.6c5bd01fa1cd. Accessed 15 Mar 2019. Rosa, H. (2013). Social acceleration: A new theory of modernity. New  York: Columbia University Press. Rosa, H. (2017). De-synchronization, dynamic stabilization, dispositional squeeze: The problem of temporal mismatch. In J.  Wajcman & N.  Dodd (Eds.), The sociology of speed: Digital, organizational, and social temporalities (pp. 25–41). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Sharma, S. (2012). It changes space and time. Introducing power-chronography. In J.  Packer & S.  B. C.  Wiley (Eds.), Communication matters: Materialist approaches to media, mobility and networks (pp. 66–77). Abingdon: Routledge. Sharma, S. (2014). In the meantime. Temporality and cultural politics. Durham: Duke University Press. Sheller, M. (2018). Mobility justice. The politics of movement in an age of extremes. London: Verso. Sheller, M., & Urry, J. (2006). The new mobilities paradigm. Environment and Planning A, 38, 207–226. Spiegel Online. (2014). Immer erreichbar, immer erschöpft. http://www.spiegel. de/karriere/zwei-drittel-aller-angestellten-checkt-e-mails-nach-feierabend-a-1007983.html. Accessed 15 Mar 2019. Urry, J. (2007). Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity. Vorderer, P. (2015). Der mediatisierte Lebenswandel. Permanently online, permanently connected. Publizistik, 60(3), 259–276. Wajcman, J. (2016). Pressed for time: The acceleration of life in digital capitalism. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press. Weber, M. (2005 [1930]). The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. London/New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 4

Eigenzeit. Revisited Helga Nowotny

My book Eigenzeit was published in the memorable year 1989. It is a very personal book whose growth at the time followed the temporal rhythm of my life. In writing the book, I was aiming for a social-science-based diagnosis of current shifts in the meaning of the concept of time, of exposure to and experience of time. I wanted to report on the contemporary experience people had with time and to analyse the conflicts emerging from it. I observed how the boundaries between private and public time began to blur in everyday life and was fascinated by the gradual absorption of the category of a distant future by what I called the extended present. Everywhere I looked, I stumbled upon technologies that alter our perception of time in the most immediate and visible way: the new information and communication technologies. Eigenzeit set out to demonstrate the qualitative changes in the individual perception of time and the corresponding experience in their manifold connections to the structuration

This chapter originally appeared as part of the book An Orderly Mess. Budapest: CEU Press, 2017, by Helga Nowotny. We are grateful to CEU Press as well as the translator, Otmar Binder, for the permission to re-print the article. H. Nowotny (*) Science and Technology Studies, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 M. Hartmann et al. (eds.), Mediated Time, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24950-2_4

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society imposes on time. Technologies played an important role ­throughout, but the same was true for the globally disruptive, virulent economic and political processes that added a new dimension to the nexus between power and time. Why did I choose time as a topic? It all started early in 1973. At that time, my then considerably younger self underwent an abrupt transition into a new phase of life. From a hectic professional routine compounded by a turbulent private situation, I found myself transported to serenely idyllic Cambridge for a sabbatical. How come, I asked myself, some people have so much time and others so little? Why are some able to blissfully concentrate on doing one thing at a time, while others have to juggle a multitude of tasks, constantly on the verge of exhaustion? It is fairly obvious that what was on my mind was, above all, my own situation. Although it was not part of my original plan, I soon settled on seriously studying social time. The renowned anthropologist Edmund Leach was then provost of my host institution in Cambridge, King’s College. He was thoroughly familiar with a wide range of different conceptions of time embraced by indigenous people in the most remote parts of the world, who were thus bringing human existence into harmony with the universe, nature, and their specific social order. We talked about the meaning of cyclical time and about the transformation myths of tribes in New Guinea. We even moved into linguistic territory, discussing, for example, the way verbs were being displaced by nouns in Western societies. Leach generously invited me to use his own private library. Thus, I read anything I could lay my hands on that was related to time. Soon I learned of the existence of the International Society for the Study of Time (ISST). This society was to hold its next conference in Japan in July that year. Then, as now, its members came from a wide range of academic disciplines—physics, linguistics, musicology, sociology, sinology, you name it. The great—and indeed the only—topic they had in common is a time in all its fascinating interdisciplinary multitude. I decided to submit a paper and set off for Lake Yamanaka at the foot of Mt. Fuji. In keeping with my budget, I used the Trans-Siberian Railway and later an East German freighter that took passengers on board. I borrowed the captain’s typewriter for the final revisions of my paper, which deliberated on the relationship between different structurations of time and time measurement (Nowotny 1975, pp. 325–342). Time has stayed with me as a topic ever since. At the conference, I quickly learned more about the different disciplinary approaches to time

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and encountered interesting people. More conferences were to follow as the years went by, and at a later stage I was even elected president of the Society. I remained in touch with the founder of the ISST, J.T.  Fraser, until he passed away. In the meantime, my academic career had progressed. My little daughter took pleasure in her mother’s exotic interests. She asked me clever questions such as ‘What is time?’ and ‘Is time the same everywhere?’ And she was delighted when she discovered the ambiguity of the English phrase ‘What time is it?’ Two temporal islands, one month in 1987 and another in 1988, made it possible for me to write Eigenzeit. There was no hurry, no deadline to meet—indeed, there was not even a publisher. The book had all the time in the world to grow and to weave together scientific and personal threads of time. A retrospective distance of three decades creates sufficient space and time to ask new questions. What is left of the late-1980s conception of eigenzeit: a longing for the now and the desire to have more time available to oneself? What are the social and scientific-technological developments, with their host of expectations, anxieties, and projections of the future, that have moved to the foreground today? How has the relationship between life time1 and eigenzeit changed? Does a political dimension concerned with issues of time and temporalities, which seemed so pressing then, still exist today? How do power and time relate to each other at present? In retrospect, it is, above all, the continuities that stand out, perhaps because they seem to verify the anticipatory analysis. This includes the phenomenon of acceleration, which I had seen as closely linked to the dynamic of scientific-technological development and its economic impact. In this vein, I had written: ‘While in the phase of industrialisation it was above all the equation of time and money which resulted from the industrial capitalist logic of production and made time a scarce commodity, time is now being speeded up itself: it is becoming accelerated innovation’ (Nowotny 1994, p. 11). Today, innovation is omnipresent. It is the determined and robust anticipation of the future by the present, supported by the co-production agreement that science and technology have entered into with a society that has eagerly concluded a pact with the new. Innovation is anchored in political rhetoric. It has become a key term denoting a bet politicians are making on an increasingly fragile future, in the belief that they have discovered a fail proof mechanism that will enable us to weather any crisis.

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The acceleration of innovation has become a matter of ever-greater urgency. The problems created by the loss of jobs owing to the unstoppable advance of technological automation need to be solved—by more innovation. The solution seems to lie in incrementally greater doses of innovation, and it is indeed innovation that is being counted on to create new jobs and to open up new possibilities. The radical changes that computerization and digitalization have wrought over the last few decades in the economic, social, and political fields demand additional radical measures. In practice, however, it looks more like a stumble into a future in which promises of innovation are interwoven in very uneven ways. In the end, innovation must somehow combine the old with the new in unforeseeable ways. Innovation consists above all of recombination. Having said this, it cannot be denied that the phenomenon of acceleration is one of the most far-reaching consequences of the changes brought about by science and technology. Once again, time seems to be out of joint. What so many people find disturbing today is the speed at which modern life and their own lives are being played out. Most of us feel alarmed by the dizzying speed at which the world is hurtling forth, a speed that far outstrips our biological, cognitive, neural, and mental capacities. The result is a deep-seated sense of unease and massive stress. This can be countered either by timid defensiveness or by the compensatory opposite, the decision to go with the flow, where the evanescent now becomes the last straw to hold on to in a present that has lost orientation. What becomes visible here is one of the many lines of conflict resulting from the collision of different temporal regimes. Acceleration, however, is triggered not only by technology’s electronic speed. It radically surpasses all human capacities, so much so that attempts at adaptation are doomed to irrelevance. What is lacking is efficient time transformers, the institutional and social arrangements and rule systems that work towards the integration and assimilation of different temporal horizons, speeds, and regimes. It follows that it would be rash to simply equate the acceleration we experience with technological acceleration. Hartmut Rosa, in Beschleunigung und Entfremdung, quite rightly distinguishes between technological, social, and cultural acceleration. In part, these processes cause one another, in part they are mutually contradictory. Technological acceleration is visible and palpable for all; it can be measured and is easy to pin down. Social acceleration makes visible the changes that take place in

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a society. It is often twinned with a loss of stability of institutions, and building new ones takes time. The third characteristic is cultural acceleration, which is reflected in our awareness of the rapid pace at which we are living our lives (Rosa 2013). Yet another recent book deals with the paradox of how time pressure continues to build despite the use of time-saving technologies. Its topic is the interlinkage between technological, social, and cultural acceleration. Technologies are supposed to make life easier by streamlining processes and boosting efficiency. However, rather than becoming more plentiful, time is compressed and becomes ever scarcer. In Pressed for Time, Judy Wajcman identifies digital capitalism as the root cause of the increase in acceleration. She makes it quite clear that the process of technological innovation always offers a plurality of options. She adduces a wealth of examples to show the different uses people make of digital technologies. The processes by which we construct social reality with the help of digital technologies will not run their course for some time to come (Wajcman 2015). I fully agree with the diagnosis that the acceleration we experience is not the direct result of the technologies whose working speeds are so radically different from ours. But when I speak about the dynamic of accelerated innovation, it is not only these technologies I have in mind. That dynamic is generated through the multiplicity of social interactions that are built into, facilitated, and mediated by the technologically new production processes and products. Their effect is to be found in the networks that are both socially condensed and geographically expanded. They contribute to the interactive game by creating ever-changing social and economic expectations. This gives rise to the temporal complexity that overwhelms us (Nowotny 1998, pp. 91–146). The linear sequence of working steps and procedures has been replaced by the omnipresent expectation of the capability to master simultaneity. Prompt execution in real time is taken for granted. As an organizational principle, ‘just in time’ is being superseded by Industry 4.0, which is currently spreading to more and wider areas. Work and everyday life are being shaped by project-like demands. The organizational preconditions for this stem from the potential for recombination, which in turn builds on the fact that many more and more diverse interfaces are available. This is the environment that is indispensable for the temporal and spatial flexibility demanded by markets in the production of goods and services as well as in the workplace. Simultaneity seems to pervade everything.

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Seen from this perspective, the experience of acceleration results from the multiplication of expectations that we want to—and presumably have to—meet. It is therefore not the technologically enabled greater speed as such that troubles us. The acceleration we experience is a consequence of the complexity arising from the dense economic and social interconnections as parts of a system that is enabled, boosted, and expanded by technology. This also applies to the acceleration of natural growth processes that Bernd Scherer has highlighted. Biotechnological regimes are superior to traditional breeding methods to an extent that was unimaginable in the past. In increasingly sophisticated ways, nature is being duped into stepping up its pace. In a convergent development, new financial and business models are created to open up new markets for products maturing ever more quickly. Even the obsolescence traditionally built into industrial production is becoming outdated. It is automated (Scherer 2016). What these trends might mean in the future for that only true and rare resource, time has been outlined by Jacques Attali in a dystopian vision of the twenty-first century. As it takes less and less time to produce and to market goods, time use shifts from production to consumption. We become the time slaves of consumer goods and services. We have to allocate time to use what we are being offered—be it transport, communication, entertainment, or access to information, which needs to be downloaded and integrated. Does this sound familiar? Making a selection from this glut becomes more and more time consuming. Only slowly do people realize that they will never have enough time to learn all they need to know to remain ‘employable.’ The markets react to this situation by offering material and virtual goods whose use is ever more time-consuming. Part of the deal is the illusion that the time will come when these commodities will stand us in good stead—as if death could be postponed by activities that are as time-consuming as possible. In the end, everyone realizes that time is the only true and rare resource: no one can produce it, no one can sell it, and no one can store it. This ushers in the rule of the ‘hyper markets.’ States are replaced by markets and disappear completely. In a countermove to the rise in life expectancy, growth processes are shortened. Babies are born earlier; children learn to speak more than one language at an earlier stage and more quickly. All vital functions are speeded up and cut back—sleeping, making love, eating, learning, playing, making decisions. The great crisis, which in

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Attali’s view is already upon us, is about to kick in. And in the far distance beckons the utopia of a ‘hyper democracy’ (Attali 2006–2007). The experience of acceleration as a key component of modernity and its metamorphoses are going to be with us for a very long time. What is striking about this foray into the recent literature is that one phenomenon is consistently sidelined that I would highlight and prioritize in ‘Eigenzeit. Revisited’: the accelerating destruction of our natural environment. From the felling of tropical rain forests to the loss of biodiversity; from the increase in catastrophic droughts to extreme meteorological situations even in our own temperate zone; from increasingly scarce water resources and shortages of foodstuffs to the challenges posed by the rapid spread of megacities—all these phenomena adhere to a logic of acceleration that has set humanity on a seemingly irrevocable collision course with its inherited natural environment. While nature has been subjected to change by homo faber from the very beginning, only now has human intervention reached a scale where it jeopardizes the very survival of the human species. Time is running out. Will we be able to ward off imminent collapse? Open up sufficiently productive sources of renewable energy? Supply sufficient quantities of water and food for a world population growing faster than expected? And will it be possible for science and technology to speed up the pace of cultural evolution so that life on earth remains worth living—or will this lead to side effects resulting in even more destruction? Unlike nature’s biological evolution, which unfolds in a long-term perspective and has almost infinite timespans for trial and error, cultural evolution progresses at an accelerating pace. Above all, we are the ones that produce the required variation and act upon the selection. We are the ones that cause the cultural equivalent of biological mutations. These are largely not left to chance but are the direct effect of our interventions. But what do we know about the unintended consequences of human action? It is no longer only the familiar time scale of human history that will decide this race. We are up against time scales of radically different orders of magnitude. This is the first major revision that I would like to introduce to ‘Eigenzeit. Revisited.’ A second revision is at least as significant and momentous. It is the acceleration of the multiplication of available data and, even more importantly, the growth of the capacity to store data, to process them, and to make them available for multiple and different uses. Today’s world is shaped by big data.

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Digitalization and computerization have created global networks that are being used by states and their secret services, by the financial world, by criminals, by science, and industry—by all of us. What makes this possible is algorithms. These are mathematically formulated procedures for the solution of specific problems in the form of highly sophisticated computer programs. They are the dei in machina, invisible and therefore all the more efficient. Algorithms are the soft underbelly of complexity. The speed with which data are processed and recombined far exceeds the capacity of human perception. All we can do is register their effect. What bothers the average user is less the speed than the fact that all data, once they have been gathered, entered, and stored, can be called up at any time and put to new uses. Storage is almost for eternity—or for that portion of eternity that is left to us. Privacy increasingly turns out to be an illusion. And while legal battles are being fought over the ‘right to be forgotten’ on the internet, the feats that the latest information and communications technologies are capable of and what we allow them to do with us have a profound impact on our experience of time. This leads to the next question: how have our perception and our experience of time been altered? What has become of our longing for the now? Global simultaneity experienced in concrete terms, and its economic and technological impact, which I described in Eigenzeit, has expanded even further in the meantime. ‘Whoever governs simultaneity controls the temporal dependenc[i]es derivable from it. Yet despite the attainment of ever-higher speeds in the networking of information technology, despite the continuing expansion of the technological infrastructure which installs simultaneity, it remains an illusion’ (Nowotny 1994, p. 10). The illusion resides in the assumption that technological simultaneity will do away with global inequalities. Even though it has been possible to lift millions of people around the globe out of the worst poverty, there are still countries where the number of mobile phones exceeds that of toilets. The epidemic caused by the Ebola virus would have run its course with a far less dreadful toll in human lives if Africa’s health care system had had a sound infrastructure. And Europe is currently experiencing a confrontation with refugee flows that are no less than a desperate expression of the non-simultaneity of human existence. This is the great temporal contradiction we live in. Technologically induced simultaneity leads to a homogenization of the perception of time, while social asynchrony is growing in proportion to the gap created by inequality.

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Participation in global communication demands both a standardized and an individualized experience of time. This is a precondition for synchronization. Time is split into small, standardized units to be replicated and individually reassembled at will. The result is a short-term perspective that guarantees flexibility. It is key for the exchange of information as the primary mode of communication. But what information are we talking about? In the age of big data, the concept of information has been considerably broadened. Anything that can be processed as data becomes information. Big data pervades countless aspects of the workplace and of everyday life. It eliminates the boundaries between private and public, between what is classified and what is released for public consumption. It creates links between the most diverse areas where human activity and the events resulting from it leave traces. Data are indifferent. They are without intrinsic meaning. It makes no difference whether the content they refer to is trivial or of geopolitical urgency. This is because all traces that can be turned into data are apt to answer questions they were not intended nor imagined to be answered. Claude Shannon, to whom we owe the theory of the transmission of information, was the first to point out that the content of transmissions was irrelevant to the act of transmission. His definition of information counts only the number of bits required for the transmission of the system’s state. So what does big data do to time and our sense of time? It operates in the temporal regime of electronic data processing, which is not directly accessible to our temporal perception, biologically limited as it is. But being part of global electronic networks enables it to absorb all the traces we leave, provided they can be transformed into data. The traces are many. They include the minutest trivia of everyday life: the countless social interactions that connect us with our fellow human beings on a daily basis; the traces left by our reading and listening habits; our consumer behaviour; the number of steps we have taken and our changes of location, plus whatever means of transport we have used. And so on and so forth. What do we receive from big data in return? Targeted information, customized to our individual profile. What kind of information? Information about anything and nothing in particular. About things that are supposedly good for us and that we should therefore be doing. We even pay for this information while we supply the required data for free. What we receive in return is a multifaceted offer, a glut of options: ­purchase this book, that gadget, those designer shoes. This is where you want to go

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for your next holiday. Do this for the sake of your health, and if you engage in sports, do exactly that which will improve your performance. Big data records the past indiscriminately. The more traces, the more data, and therefore, the better. Content does not matter. Questions concerning the Why?, the motivation, are replaced by questions of What. Only What questions generate data that are fit to be used over and over again— for other purposes, other questions, in other contexts. This transforms meaningless data into something that has meaning and significance. Predictive analytics is all about enabling predictions of our behaviour in the present and in the immediate future based on our behaviour in the past—in other words, on the traces we have left. Big data homogenizes the past. Since all data are, in principle, fit to be used for purposes as yet unknown, the past is deprived of the depth of focus. It becomes an abstract segment of time, a t1, located on an equally abstract timeline. A discrete event becomes a data point, one among millions. Connections established by algorithms make visible the relationship between patterns of behaviour in the past and in the future. The information supplied to us by the commercial operators of the big-data networks contains a personalized promise for the future to be redeemed as soon as possible. Given this deluge of information, it is little wonder that news items, messages, instructions, and promises vie desperately for our attention all the time. Attention, as has often been noted, has become an economically scarce resource. The big internet corporations in charge of the data networks are ingenious in turning this scarce resource into as much profit as possible. As users, we find ourselves confronted with the question of whom or what we should lend—or sell—our attention to. This reawakens the longing for the now in a new, unexpected manner in the midst of everyday life saturated with information and communications technologies. For some, the solution lies in mindfulness, in focusing consciously on oneself, on breathing, on one’s thoughts—or the absence of thought. Mindfulness is consciousness that is purposefully directed at the present, at the here and now; at calling for a break in the routine of living; at interrupting the familiar way in which time passes; at immersing oneself for a short time as a different way of experiencing time. This is one more reason why music lets us enter into a different time frame. Music presupposes mindfulness. It is full of intervals and pauses. In some pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach, the interval is longer than the note that precedes it. Longing for the moment, however, is not to be satisfied

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only by engaging in mindfulness or listening to Bach sonatas. It is too deeply inscribed in our existence. Inexorably, the biological arrow of time points forward. Mindfulness would like to wrest moments from it that are not subservient to its time regime, notwithstanding the certainty that time’s arrow will ultimately overtake all moments. As so often in the history of humanity, technology intervenes. It alters our relationship not only with the environment and our fellow human beings but also with ourselves. It alters our experience of eigenzeit. The endless multiplication of the amount of electronic data and the increasing density of the networks create a new, technology-based set of options to satisfy the longing for the moment: medial eigenzeit. The technological building blocks reside in the countless apps programmed by the algorithms that underpin the connections from which medial eigenzeit flows. It is both standardized and personalized. The offers it makes are filtered and selected—customized—for you, your lifestyle, and your preferences. Medial eigenzeit is accessible from everywhere via an iPhone or smartphone. It is ubiquitous, and it manages both to be available individually to each of us and to connect us to others. This is what makes it so attractive. It seems that what I wrote in the last chapter of my book almost 30 years ago has come true in a completely unexpected manner. The longing for the moment, the longing to have time at one’s disposal to be used at one’s discretion, finds its technological fulfilment. Medial eigenzeit is available at any time. A digital switch, a key with an on/off option, is all that is needed. We are in full control of the moment, knowing that the next one can be switched on at any time. Immersing oneself in medial eigenzeit grants time to indulge in exchange with others. Rather than the conscious void that is being sought in the practice of mindfulness, time is full of information—about the world, about friends, even if these are ‘friends’ only in the social media sense; information about oneself and those parts of it that we want to share with others. It gives us a sense that we are incessantly engaged in communication with the entire world. Medial eigenzeit is time one has to oneself in order to spend it with those who are absent. It spells the end of boredom, that feeling that time is dragging on, that nothing of interest is even remotely in sight. For centuries, people have sought refuge from boredom in distraction. Now distraction, entertainment, and the conviction that all the latest developments

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are within easy reach are built into those small devices that channel medial eigenzeit into one’s fingertips. What does the disappearance of boredom mean for the development of children? Who does not remember from their childhood those episodes of indefinably empty stretches of time that seemed unending? They generated a restlessness that became the breeding ground for ideas and for determined efforts to engage with something new. Can one really grow up—in any meaningful sense of the phrase—without ever having experienced bouts of boredom? Sherry Turkle has conducted in-depth interviews with American youngsters and with managers of hi-tech companies. These interviews permit insights into a world where all that matters is instant communication on a broad front. The youngsters practise what Turkle has called ‘continuous partial attention.’ The capacity for conversation and the command of body language are being lost. This new generation has problems listening to others and developing empathy. Turkle, however, does not yet consider conversation a lost cause. We should treat communicative behaviour as we treat eating—to be conducted with a set of rules and in moderation (Turkle 2015). Rules have to be formulated by someone, and observing them requires self-discipline. Here, too, medial eigenzeit promises relief. It supplies us with direct information about our behaviour in ways not previously available. Countless apps now offer observation of the self in real time. Biomarkers—measurable indicators of vital signs and various bodily states—are compared with standard parameters and/or yesterday’s measurements. One can enter performance goals for the self that one would like to be tomorrow. Medial eigenzeit can be further expanded with the help of new wearable electronics, textile garments with integrated electronic devices. The aim is to monitor around the clock the functions of the entire body. Biomarkers are ‘selfies’ taken by our vital functions. They make the bio-­ temporal fluctuations of our inner rhythms visible. These data, too, are passed on continuously to be combined with other data for ever-new purposes. Each individual is both connected in collective real time to countless others and simultaneously set apart as a unique human being. Uniqueness only makes sense if there is a frame of reference composed of the uniqueness of the others. The self feeds its data into the collective in

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order to be confirmed as a self by the collective. This is yet another self-­ referential loop inherent to and enabled by medial eigenzeit. It is also one of the reasons why medial eigenzeit fits seamlessly into the ‘sharing economy’ and merges easily with what has been termed ‘open innovation.’ This creates an all-round win-win situation: the big internet corporations are tremendously profitable; small start-ups are encouraged to put their latest apps on the market and not to be deterred by the probability of failure. Even users stand to benefit. One of the benefits that should not be underestimated is the consolation medial eigenzeit extends to those in need. Whenever you are overcome by the anxiety of continued acceleration, of things spinning out of control, and by the realization that you may not be able to achieve the goals you have set for yourself, you can make use of the communicative gift of the moment: you are not alone in being plagued by these anxieties. But even though medial eigenzeit continues to proliferate in our lives in countless variations, it is limited in duration. Even if it devours the greater part of the day, there is more to everyday life than medial eigenzeit. Unexpected things happen. The vicissitudes of life are unconcerned with temporal arrangements. And time’s arrow points steadily forward, unmoved by anything else. The moments we spend with eigenzeit, whether in its virtual or its real variant, are part of life time. Eigenzeit and life time are bound together in a mutual entanglement, marked by a productive tension that defies resolution. Given the finitude of one’s life time with its unknown expiration date, the yearning for the present moment and the wish to have time for oneself expresses our deeply conflicted longing for the duration of human existence. This tension is the product of life time’s harsh and undeniable facts and the wish to preserve that which makes life worth living. Eigenzeit is set to mediate—between growth and decay, between disease and death on the one hand and joie de vivre on the other. It grants us temporary unity with the self while always remaining precarious. Such unity must always be wrested from life time and requires constant reintegration. Only at first sight does this seem not to apply to medial eigenzeit, given its tendency to shy away from tensed states with the help of ‘instant’ communication, often in vain. The self is constantly being reconstituted medially by social interaction. Its identity consists of a multiform, variable entity, but there is no escape from the limitation imposed by a finite life time. Yet the constantly recurring constitution of the medial self opens up

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a new level of self-reflection. The self is in a position to observe itself and to intervene. It can share with others how the interactions with them change the self’s embedding in its life time. An overdose of medial eigenzeit leads into the blind alley of egotism, where people can no longer reach out beyond themselves and lose the capacity for empathy. ‘Friendships’ that hardly scratch the surface cannot conceal the fact that the self may be hollowed out. Life time loses its resilience. Reflecting on the tension between medial eigenzeit and life time may, however, also lead to the emergence of new forms of solidarity. It can make people connect with others, provided their self is open to others and ready for forms of cooperation that cannot yet be envisaged. However imaginative and creative the individual strategies may be that link eigenzeit and life time, they prove insufficient when confronted by the time scale of institutions or societies. It suffices to point to the acceleration of the human destruction of the natural environment to realize how difficult it is to fit the human lifespan into larger time scales. How well equipped are current institutions to oppose the growing time pressure and the expectation of people’s constant accessibility? What is their contribution to making the tension between life time and eigenzeit productive? Institutions are time transformers. In principle, they command all the resources and the legitimacy required to coordinate, balance, and adapt the temporal horizons and regimes of all parties concerned. What is lacking today, however, is institutional spaces, free to experiment with new ideas. Institutions lack the courage to experiment with different temporalities. No time is set aside by institutions for reflection on these dilemmas or for institutional self-reflection. The institutions we have today were created as frameworks of reference and as means of regulation for the problems of the past. Their capacity for providing the kind of ‘temporal governance’ required today is woefully underdeveloped. First, the long-­ term perspective is missing. Second, they lack what it would take to counter the neoliberal pressure for improvements in efficiency. This applies to many of our contemporary problems, from climate change to the threat that automation poses to the labour market. In 1930, the renowned economist John Maynard Keynes gave a lecture at the students’ club of the University of Madrid in which he shared his thoughts on the economic future awaiting the generation of his grandchildren. Most of these predictions, made for a timespan of 100 years regarding economic growth and affluence, have since come true. One prediction,

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however, baffles us today: Keynes prognosticated that the average working day in 2030 would last only three hours. Meanwhile, automation is progressing rapidly. Machines are learning to do what human beings do and are getting better at it all the time. It hardly needs saying that they take infinitely less time and soon will be encroaching on middle-class jobs. It is not 2030 yet, but the urgent questions concerning the societal reallocation of work and the separation of work and income remain unresolved. In retrospect, it seems that the politics of time, understood here as the search for an alternative distribution of work and leisure, has lost its relevance. The considerations I put forward in Eigenzeit were based on a broad political articulation. It included the demands of workers for greater time sovereignty, socio-political arguments in favour of a work-life balance, and a more just distribution of paid and unpaid work between women and men. Today the demand for more jobs, regardless of their quality, dominates politics. Consumer leisure time is on the increase in proportion to the growing online availability of consumer goods and services. Working hours have become more variable and more flexible. Largely unpaid time in care work is increasingly exposed to pressure for rationalization, and relief is being promised by ever-newer time-saving technologies. Was the political debate of 30 years ago merely a u-chronia, a ‘no-time’? And what changes have reshaped the relationship between power and time? A subtle distinction enjoyed in the past by those in power was the license to keep others waiting. Today, power manifests itself in the license to make others work hard to survive in the highly competitive atmosphere of technological acceleration and in the creation of new markets. Power is in the hands of those who succeed in transforming their temporal-­ economic competitive advantage into protected monopolies and oligopolies. Power manifests itself by skillfully expanding successful products and designs to new areas. One example is Apple transforming the mobile phone into an all-purpose computer. The corporation succeeded in creating a completely new entertainment system and to invent a new kind of shopping mall. Even though we are continuously told that ‘disruptive’ technologies will wipe out all competitors, the tenacity of those in power to cling to it is remarkable. One of the central theses of Eigenzeit concerned the dissolution of the line between ‘present’ and ‘future’ as categories. A present predicated on—even obsessed by—innovation in science and technology and by

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innovation for its own sake appropriates the future. The present is turned into an arena for the deployment of knowledge, and a wide range of activities are put into place to filter and select the countless development options offered by the overwhelming potential of the technosciences. To safeguard evolutionary selection, a radical reduction must take place that pares down these options to a few. This also results in an alteration of the quality of time. The time paths of processes leading into the future thus become more stable and increase in density. Temporal dependencies are constituted. ‘The extended present has chosen the future and not vice versa’ (Nowotny 1994, p. 52). With the end of modernity’s belief in linear progress, the category of the ‘future’ as a clearly envisaged goal has lost much of its attraction. Today the future seems more fragile than ever before. The loss of the great historical horizon and the predominance of the West have fragmented it even more. The categories of past, present, and future do not have universal validity. Today they are undergoing another shift. The future is appropriated by the extended present. The intensity with which the future is evoked and the countless predictions that are being made are but steps in the process of its appropriation. William Gibson, a well-known sci-fi author, once noted laconically: ‘The future has arrived – it’s just not evenly distributed’ (Gibson 1999). The future does not disappear, but its status has changed. Moving it nearer to the present has made its inherent uncertainties more clearly visible. Temporal complexity is generated through the unpredictable combination of the different components of the system, the different time scales involved, and the different speeds at which they operate. Its dynamic is difficult to predict. Again, we are being made acutely aware of how limited our capacity is to foresee—let alone control—the unintended consequences of human action. An extended present has particular repercussions on the temporal experience of the past. Some of the resources provided by that experience are lost, while new ones are gained. The past shrinks—it is levelled and appended to the present, a process largely affected by science and technology. The digitalization of past events opens up spectacular didactic opportunities and a new approach to these events. Visitors of Pompeii, Stonehenge, Laas Geel, and other sites of antiquity can log in digitally at these sites, allowing them to follow the day-to-day lives of the sites’ f­ ormer

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inhabitants and to take part in their (reconstructed) rituals without ever actually setting foot there. The more the form of the representation and of its interpretation assimilates what is familiar and therefore contemporary, the more the distinctions vanish. The past stops being a ‘foreign country’ in which ‘they do things differently’ (as has famously been said), with alien structures and alien sensibilities. One of the most valuable resources of the past is in danger of being lost here: the knowledge that it could have been different. This is compensated by gains. The more our own past, shaped by human history, is made part of the present, the more the distant past is made visible with scientific precision. Not only can we look further back into the past, we also see more. The knowledge generated by paleogenomics and the methods at its disposal today are completely rewriting the evolutionary history of our species. New relationships between us and the Neanderthals and Denisovans have been discovered. We learn that today’s Amazon basin was probably first settled by populations that had made their way there from the Australian archipelago at a time when the distances were much shorter and the sea level much lower. We thus become aware of long periods of time, encompassing thousands of years, as though they were yesterday. To an even greater extent, this is true of space, which has also become part of the extended present. The impressive pictures of Pluto relayed back to earth in July 2015 familiarize us with a celestial body in the far reaches of the solar system as if it were as close to us as the moon. Space is increasingly emerging as the vanishing point where the past of the entire universe encounters the immediate future of humanity in an extended present. Behind us are the futuristic visions of the 1950s, the flying cars and other fanciful prognoses. Instead, we have driverless cars and drones, which will proliferate as soon as the markets are ready. Robotics has made huge advances. The progress of artificial intelligence has begun to cause concerns even for the pioneers intimately involved in its development. Some assume that these rapid scientific/technological developments will result in the total loss of the future. This is a view I definitely do not share. We live in an extended present that has appropriated many of the possibilities that we used to think of as located in the distant future. It brings us closer to the time scales of the universe and of evolution that exist independently of human activities but are made accessible through human activities. The epoch of the

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Anthropocene, marked by the undeniable impact of human intervention on the natural environment, forces us into a cognitive and emotional confrontation we can no longer escape. Arjun Appadurai has called the future a ‘cultural fact.’ He reminds us of the millions of people in India who, for the first time ever, are able to articulate their wishes and longings. Finally, they succeeded in having the ‘capacity to aspire’ (Appadurai 2004, pp. 59–84). Perhaps this applies to us in the saturated West as well. Our ideas of what a ‘good’ society might look like are in danger of becoming stunted by the deluge of new apps, gadgets, and toys that indulge our predilection for technology. Do we have consensus answers to the question raised in antiquity about eudaemonia, the good life we are striving to achieve not only for ourselves but for the societies we live in? Science and technology release their tremendous potential only in co-­ evolution with society. The technosphere, this assemblage of technologies and their economic, societal, and cultural preconditions and dispositions, unfolds a power that transforms reality. It reduces the distance between present and future in an unprecedented way. The reason we will not lose the future is simple: there is no predetermined future, only a future that is as radically open as it is inherently uncertain. I have reached the end of revisiting Eigenzeit. It leads me to a new encounter—with the Cunning of Uncertainty (Nowotny 2015). To be continued…

Note 1. ‘Life time’ refers to the whole of one’s temporal existence—how one lives one’s life.

References Appadurai, A. (2004). The capacity to aspire: Culture and the terms of recognition. In V. Rao & M. Walton (Eds.), Culture and public action (pp. 59–84). Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Attali, J. (2006–2007). Une brève histoire de l’avenir. Paris: Fayard. Gibson, W. (1999). NPR Talk of the Nation. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/ William_Gibson Nowotny, H. (1975). Time structuring and time measurement: On the interrelation between timekeepers and social time. In J. T. Fraser & N. Lawrence (Eds.), The study of time II (pp. 325–342). Berlin: Springer.

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Nowotny, H. (1994). Time: The modern and postmodern experience. Cambridge: Polity. Nowotny, H. (1998). Times of complexity. In J. T. Fraser, M. P. Soulsby, & A. J. Argyros (Eds.), Time, order, Chaos (the study of time IX) (pp. 91–146). Madison: International Universities Press. Nowotny, H. (2015). The cunning of uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity. Rosa, H. (2013). Beschleunigung und Entfremdung  – Entwurf einer kritischen Theorie spätmoderner Zeitlichkeit. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Scherer, B. (2016). Wider die Herrschaft des Augenblicks. In B. Scherer (Ed.), Die Zeit der Algorithmen (100 Jahre Gegenwart). Berlin: Matthes & Seitz. Turkle, S. (2015). Reclaiming conversation: The power to talk in the digital age. New York: Penguin Press. Wajcman, J. (2015). Pressed for time: The acceleration of life in digital capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 5

Exploring “Heterochronias” Karin Deckner

Introduction Which times in our everyday life are reported as different? How do we shape these times for ourselves? How and which media are integrated or excluded into these times? This contribution aims to explore such questions. The question of how to design individual times with or without media and how they are perceived is more interesting than ever in a phase where times are mediated in that extension. This was also one of the first assumptions on which the German Research Foundation (DFG)-funded research project “Mediated Time,” which provides the empirical background for this chapter, was based on. For questions about the current perception of time, the theory of social acceleration, as formulated above all by Rosa  in 2005 is currently still regarded as a predominant constitution, an assumption that will also be further discussed here, since it also neglects the complex individual The first footnote is thanks to the two tutors who accompanied the research project at the University of the Arts, Berlin. Many thanks to Maike Suhr and Anneli von Klitzing. K. Deckner (*) Berlin University of the Arts, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 M. Hartmann et al. (eds.), Mediated Time, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24950-2_5

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e­ xperiences of time. What is beyond question, however, is the reciprocal relationship between technology and the experience of time. Nowotny described these interactions between technologically induced social changes and the experience of time in her essay “Eigenzeit” in 1989. She notes there how, in this context, the need to shape one’s own time arises and grows. This interaction also forms the background for the exploration of heterochronias. The concept of heterochronias, the other times, here refers to the basic idea that Foucault (1967 [1984]) first presented in his contribution to the Heterotopias in 1966. In contrast to Foucault, however, here, it is not about the counter-spaces that appear in a society, but rather about the individually designed counter-times, to be referred to as heterochronias. By investigating these heterochronias, which can certainly be understood as an increased variant of the need for personal time, media use should also be taken into account. To investigate the idea of heterochronias, we start by looking at the concept of acceleration, the predominant time diagnosis of modernity. After this, Nowotny’s idea of eigenzeit (1989), supplemented by medial eigenzeit (2017), will be described. This is followed by a look at Foucault’s heterotopias, to explain the idea of heterochronias. This view is intended to describe the interview material with regard to heterochronous moments.

But When Times Are Different, What Might They Be Different From? Before we deal with the individual design of the time, with or without media, and the related relational personal references that will be mentioned here, the concept of acceleration will first be briefly introduced. The concept of social acceleration is essentially shaped by Rosa. He describes acceleration as a self-propelled process, which is initially based on new technologies and (often also organisational) practices that in fact aim to save time. Paradoxically, the opposite seems to happen. According to Rosa (2013), the acceleration process in modern society happens along three dimensions (p. 71). The first dimension features the technological advancement and thereby the acceleration of machine-based processes like telecommunication, industrial production, and transportation (Rosa 2013, p. 97). This is followed by the second dimension, the acceleration of social change—institutions or persons are acting now with an accelerated rate of practices. This also changes institutions, for example, family or working structures, and thus with an increase of contingency (Rosa 2013,

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p. 108). The results of those changes can be found in the third dimension, which he calls the acceleration of the pace of life. In this dimension, individuals face the scarcity of time resources and the pressure to adapt to accelerated conditions over time that are caused by the two factors named above. Rosa (2013) distinguishes here between objective and subjective parameters (pp. 122–145). In order to be able to keep up, he states, a high pressure to adapt arises for the individual to stay integrated within society. The motif of acceleration—as many shortenings as it may contain on the individual level of time experience—as the main idea of modern capitalist society is also illustrated by Wajcman. She begins her book Pressed for Time (2016 [2014]) with an observation on that topic that seems to run straight through all areas of life. She notes: Time, it seems, is at premium. There is a widespread perception that life these days is faster than it used to be. We hear constant laments that we live too fast, that time is scarce, that the pace of life is spiraling out of our control. (Wajcman 2016 [2014] p. 1)

This aptly formulated observation—which she herself is also critical of— should serve as a first template here. The question of the individual perception of time and, in particular, the question of the design of meaningfully experienced times is directly related to how time is connoted in modernity (Rosa 2013) or even more advanced: how time is connoted in digital capitalism (Wajcman 2016 [2014]). The demand to be fast, as well as time pressure it seems, is a prevailing maxim these days. However, it is also necessary to make distinctions here. On the one hand, there are the quantitative demands on time budgets and, on the other hand, current qualitative experience and design of the time. These are primarily the differences between subjective and objective ascriptions of time. In order to better understand these differences, Keightley (2012) names an important difference. Crucial here is another differentiation between the individual and the theoretical approach, to keep apart the times in modernity from the times of modernity, depending on one’s relative position in society. She points out that these two perspectives must be considered in interaction, as they constitute each other (Keightley 2012, p. 9). Rosa describes one of these interactions with the metaphor “slipping slope” (in contrast to “slippery slopes”). Since the ground underneath the

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social actors is changing continuously, the individual is forced to move on. If one does not keep moving, does not keep up, one slips. The inability to keep up with this pace is often accompanied by stigmatisations associated with terms like “inflexible, sluggish, comfortable” (Rosa 2013, p.  17). The incapability to keep pace is further often interpreted as an inability to conform. In their interrogation about the social dynamics of speed, Wajcman and Dodd (2017) also point out that one is not only confronted to keep pace, but even more with the imperative to act quickly. When it comes to these temporal requirements, it is once again clear that certain resources are needed to be able to act—timewise—appropriately. They introduce their contribution to the sociology of speed with: “The powerful are fast, the powerless are slow” (Wajcman and Dodd 2017, p. 1). Further, Hörning et al. (1990) identified time pioneers who, more than anyone else, are able to adapt to new technologies and use them to their advantage. When we talk about these resources, we also come back to the consideration of Keightley, that the “one’s relative position within modernity” is crucial for the experience of time. Also, in the interviews, we found examples that stated that one was (socially) excluded by non-existent (technological) possibilities to behave temporally as it would be desired, as for example by lacking data volume. Aspects like gender, age, and social background matter in these temporal demands, as well as in the creation of eigenzeit and later heterochronias, even if it is a matter here to detach oneself from these temporal requirements. Within these assumed normative demands, we also encounter essentially a model that Sharma (2014) has pointed out, called power-chronography. She also criticises the simplified discourse about acceleration, “e.g. everything gets faster and faster,” and tries to dissolve binary positions (e.g. fast vs. slow) in it, by bringing “awareness of power relations as they play out in time” (Sharma 2014, p. 4). In spite of the criticism of the narrow view that goes hand in hand with the equation of technologies and the feeling of lack of time (e.g. Wajcman and Dodd 2017; Sharma 2014; Keightley 2012; Pentzold 2018), the current discourse about technologies and time is still dominated by the basic idea of acceleration. In the interviews, too, statements can be found that correspond to this normative pressure or confirm it, what also appears frequently along those references are the personal temporal negotiations in which these assumptions are deliberately reflected and eliminated. These times which in the following are to be regarded as eigenzeit and heterochronias.

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Introducing: Eigenzeit Also, Nowotny’s (1989) term eigenzeit and her later phrase medial eigenzeit (see also chapter in this book: “Eigenzeit. Revisited”) refer to temporal expectations which are placed on the individual and the link to technologies. This concept will, therefore, be used to investigate the relationship between accelerated time structures in modernity and individual time structuring. What does the term eigenzeit actually stand for? Eigenzeit refers, on the one hand, to one’s own time, like the proper time you use for yourself. This could, for example, be leisure time instead of work or domestic time. Eigenzeit is thereby meaningful and in accordance with certain types of activities embedded in individual life situations (e.g. such as event time or the celebration of the uniqueness of the moment). It arises from the wish of the individual for greater autonomy over their time and describes relational shifts in the individual perception and personal creation of time in modernity. A further characteristic of eigenzeit is that it describes a time, and this will be crucial for the idea of heterochronia later, which is deliberately detached from other time structures we are usually confronted with or surrounded by. Historically, she has derived this primarily from the growing distinction between working time and leisure time: In this polarization there arose a specific I-time-perspective which knew how to distinguish between one’s own time (proper time) and that of others. (Nowotny 1989 [1996], p. 13)

The main point of Nowotny’s diagnosis may not only lie in her description of eigenzeit itself but also in her way of showcasing the interplay of different time structures and the effect to the individual in her analysis. Exactly this interplay between time structures that are associated with social acceleration should be used here and understood here as heterochronias. As early as 1989, Nowotny, in similar ways to the later work on the acceleration of Rosa (2005) or Wajcman (2016 [2014]), pointed out that the economic principle of acceleration, and thus also the logic of increase, is progressively reflected in individual temporal experiences. In an aggravated variant, namely that of accelerationism (Avanessian 2013), it is not only the capitalist order but the thought of a neo-liberal society that permeates every part of existence. The ever-increasing need for eigenzeit is interrelated with this development and is gradually intensifying, even

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more so as these technologies and practices connected to acceleration penetrate our everyday lives. Nowotny stresses that, while we have the possibilities of experiencing a global simultaneity that is almost given by modern technologies by now, also the urge for eigenzeit increases. She assumes that the more complex the entanglement in global contexts is, the higher is the need to detach from these entanglements and gain more sovereignty over our own time. The emergence of eigenzeit refers, hence, not only to a modified subjective and qualitative perception of time, but also to altered, that is, accelerated and mediated social time structures. This interplay offers a significant account for the understanding of individual time in modernity in general and for the analysis of individual time management, in particular. Nowotny describes in her essay the connection she still sees in this context, as she states in her newer approach. She reflects: In retrospect, it is, above all, the continuities that stand out, perhaps because they seem to verify the anticipatory analysis. This includes the phenomenon of acceleration, which I had seen as closely linked to the dynamic of scientific-­ technological development and its economic impact. (Nowotny 2017, p. 65)

Eigenzeit and Media As already stated above, although social acceleration functions as a temporally dominant mode on the macro level, the temporal experience on the micro level is more complex and multi-layered. Especially when it comes to aspects and motifs of individual time experience that are perceived as qualitatively valuable—whether with or without media—the question of individual contexts is crucial. This context is also shown in the concepts of Adam’s (1998) time-scapes, Sharma’s (2014) power-chronography, and Keightley’s (2012) zones of intermediacy. The terminology with the concept of eigenzeit and later the concept of heterochronia should bring a new twist into those investigations named above. Heterochronia—as an enhanced idea of eigenzeit—should be used here to describe those times that individuals design explicitly according to their needs, by actively reflecting temporal demands, in our case, especially those that are connected with the associated ideas of acceleration. However, before this, something else should be mentioned. Nowotny sees further difficulties with moments of (human) synchronisation of a technological time—which triggers the need to act against it—inscribed in the devices themselves.

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But the decisive step is taken by the analogy with the machine. It becomes the vehicle of natural time when the series of movements prescribed by physics are built into it. It thereby becomes the regulator of the social time system of human beings, who have to conform to it. The time-structure of the linear, homogenized, arbitrarily divisible continuum is transferred through the machine from the realm of nature to that of society. (Nowotny 1989 [1996], p. 83)

Wolfgang Ernst’s (2013a, b) approach takes this perspective even further. He points out that, even if the time inscribed in the media corresponds in the broadest sense to the human idea of time, it develops its own temporality in and through the devices. Here, too, he uses the term eigenzeit— here, however, it is the eigenzeit of the device. Interesting for the investigation of heterochronias is above all the fact that the processes that take place in the machines far exceed human capabilities of speed (Ernst 2013a, b). In the sense of a perspective that comes from the science and technology studies, it should be considered here that, even if the machines’ own temporalities continue inside, it should not be forgotten that “technologies only come to life and have meaning as people adopt and use them” (Wajcman 2016 [2014], p. 3). Nowotny (2017) also confirms that the acceleration with which we are confronted in everyday life is not a direct result of the technologies with which we operate: Seen from this perspective, the experience of acceleration results from the multiplication of expectations that we want to—and presumably have to— meet. It is therefore not the technologically enabled greater speed as such that troubles us. The acceleration we experience is a consequence of the complexity arising from the dense economic and social interconnections as parts of a system that is enabled, boosted, and expanded by technology. (p. 6)

Technologies shape and reflect our culture at the same time. With this, the heterochronias to be found here may reflect indirectly the times inherent in the devices but are expressed rather in the way they are handled.

Introducing the Idea of Heterochronia For further analysis, the term heterochronia will be used in the following. The concept of heterochronia results here from a combination of heterotopias as they were conceived by Foucault in 1967 (1967 [1984]) and the

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concept of eigenzeit as introduced above. With these two concepts, the individual design and experience of time in mediatised environments might be viewed with a new focus. The term heterochronia, which is here understood as a reinforced version of the need to create eigenzeit, should serve this purpose since he should name individual strategies in dealing with media and time pressure to create other times, by reflecting temporal demands of acceleration. The fundamental question here is: how do individuals actively design their own time that is described as different from other times, and how do they reflect their use of media in doing so? Foucault’s (1967 [1984]) turn to the heterotopias (from: hetero: different and topos: place), that is, the other places, begins with a critique of the obsession with time (by which he primarily means history) in the nineteenth century (p. 1). The neglect of the confrontation with space is his main concern, wherefore his contribution is also valued as an essential impulse for the topographical or spatial turn. Foucault’s draft of heterotopias was originally a radio report, broadcasted on 07 December 1966. Since then it has been strongly received and interpreted, especially in architecture and later in the sociology of space. He uses heterotopias to describe places that function according to their own laws. More precisely, Foucault uses the concept of heterotopias to make visible the normative structure in society from which they differ. He examines the places of deviation, those places where the prevailing structures become particularly visible by being neglected. Heterotopias reflect hegemonic conditions and are thereby real existing places, Further he states, that every culture produces their own heterotopias (Foucault 1967 [1984], p. 4). Heterotopias are in this respect in interrelation with society. Those places are connected with all their corresponding places in so far that those connections are making the place itself visible, whilst denying, suspending, mirroring or even reversing the prevalent structures. Some of those places are ephemeral, some have limited access or are shaped by certain rituals, power politics or they are structured by gender aspects, but all of those places refer to the remaining, the more common places by reflecting, negating, or compensating them, and some of them are associated with misconduct, such as prisons. Heterotopias in this sense are not static, but undergoing permanent transformations depending on their cultural circumstances. When this concept is transferred to time, the term heterochronia can be formed1; that is the other times, those times that do not correspond to normative expectations and temporally adapted behaviour. In this case,

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this behaviour refers primarily to the principle of adaptation as presented above by Rosa and further the idea to use time effectively and wisely. Another characteristic of Foucault’s (1967 [1984]) originally named hetorotopias is the fact that they are also often temporally disrupting their environments. He also uses himself the term heterochrony here (Foucault 1992, p. 43). As examples for these temporal breaks, he mentions libraries and festivals. A library is a place in which different times—represented here by the medium of a book—accumulate, since many possible times are presented in one place. (This can also be understood in analogy to the Internet—and thus to online being.) It is exactly the opposite at the festival. Here, we will find a temporal break—another type of heterochronia— to the times of the everyday life. Additionally, the time of the festival is limited. This chapter also deals with temporal breaks, which are seen in a specific way in connection with the prevailing and thus everyday temporal structures that are connected with the ideas of social acceleration. It is to be explored how these times are arranged. In general, it can be said that Foucault is concerned with tracking down the social counter-spaces, while the heterochronias envisaged here are more concerned with naming individual counter-times in the sense of one’s own times. What both ideas have in common is that these respective counter-strategies each exist parallel to social or everyday spaces and times. In some examples, these times are also produced at special places, but in contrast to Foucault’s concept, these places should be given less attention. While Foucault (1967 [1984], 1992) reads in the special rooms, in this chapter, it is about times which are described by the interview partners as different or special. For Foucault, heterotopias are realised utopias. He names them as counter-positions and abutments. As certain conditions are negated by the heterotopias, several rooms, several placements, and so on fall with them at a single location that is inherently irreconcilable. This will also be observed in the case of heterochronias, where different time conditions that are connected with different media are sometimes combined. The idea of this reading is that when certain temporalities are suppressed, they become more visible. One current example in this respect could be a silent monastery or digital detox retreats. Also, in everyday life, such situations can be found which lead to the fact that one finds oneself in other times. These can be self-chosen or due to missing infrastructural or economic reasons (more examples will be given in the following). This contribution will concentrate, in particular,

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on those times in which these other times are consciously brought about and how it is reflected upon. Here, the interplay of inner and outer experience is at stake. With Foucault, it is primarily the spatial experience that sets the two in correspondence; with phenomenological intent, the heterochronias are the interplay of inner and outer time experience.

Heterochronia: Just Being Offline? The strongest contrast with the effects of acceleration mentioned in daily life so far is certainly that of switching every now and then into an offline mode. In a world that presupposes being permanent online and connected as given, this certainly forms the most radical approach to elude. Yes, some of the interviewees explicitly name being offline as switching off from what can generally be understood as acceleration pressure. Within the following examples other time is clearly that which is designed without online-capable media, which in most cases concerns the smartphone. Car mechanic Lars, 22 years old, emphasises this very explicitly. Sometimes he switches to flight mode or intentionally drains the battery to avoid being reachable. Accessibility—and thus being online—is for him strongly connoted with the need to meet expectations and act quickly. On weekends, he and his girlfriend sometimes switch off the phone completely. He finds this particularly relaxing: I think that’s a good thing. So then I relax, too. Then I notice that I’m coming down and don’t have this urge to move, that I have to create something or earn money or something. That’s nice. (Lars, 22 years, Rostock, translated from German)2

In the interviews, the desire to establish offline times is repeatedly addressed. However, it is also—as described in the literature—reported that this condition cannot be a permanent solution. The feeling that everything “becomes more and more” is described by Sabrina: … but now it’s going to be quite a lot. So and there I ask myself stop where the border is sometime. So this bigger, faster, further. We can also go to any country and anywhere, and I wonder if at any time we reach a point where this whole net breaks down like that or the people or some generation come up again, they say so: No, we are now media vegans, so to speak. (Sabrina, 31 years, Rostock, translated from German)3

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Also, in specific contexts, such as the university, the need to act at an expected speed and the increase in the number of tasks to be completed in a given timeframe—here, the problem of temporal mismatch and de-­ synchronisation appears again—is addressed and described as burdensome. Eva describes the following: I can do it concretely perhaps with the example of the university. So in the university there is such a/So they set up a kind of system, where it simply/ then there are tasks until then and then. Then you have to somehow up there, and you have to read that and that. Then you have to read that and then… (Eva, 28 years, Berlin, translated from German)4

The question that arises here is how the personal temporal negotiations, the generation of other times with those circumstances takes place and whether the actors do not even find it satisfying and a disadvantage not to participate. So how do people deal with the named demands? How do they get out of those temporal expectations, and how do they generate individual solutions or time zones in which the mentioned problems are consciously dealt with? This will be regarded in the following.

Finding Your Pace: Making Your Own Temporal Decisions The naming of heterochronias should hereby not only serve to emphasise the dualisms of online–offline, fast–slow, digital–analogue, and so on, but rather how these states are embedded and commented by the actors in meaningfully experienced temporal contexts. Heterochronias deliberately refer to connections of these dualisms. They are produced concretely with the knowledge of the usual times and are often associated with certain sociomaterial aspects. As Foucault mentions for heterotopias, that they are sometimes juxtaposed, the same is true for heterochronias. Nowotny describes in her later essay that the earlier “longing for the moment” is now available at all times through personalised offers on our devices: The offers it makes are filtered and selected—customized—for you, your lifestyle, and your preferences. Medial eigenzeit is accessible from everywhere via an iPhone or smartphone. It is ubiquitous, and it manages both to be available individually to each of us and to connect us to others. This is what makes it so attractive. (Nowotny 2017, p. 79)

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Nowotny is quite critical of this development. In mediatised contexts, the need for eigenzeit now overlaps with the personalised opportunities offered by technology to realise it, called medial eigenzeit. However, if this perspective is extended to include the ideas that Foucault (1967 [1984]) offers with the concept of heterotopias for temporal analysis, namely that of reflection and juxtaposition, situations can be found in which even/also mediatised times of one’s own can be understood as meaningfully experienced eigenzeit. In one of the interviews, these connections and the negotiation between different temporal structures became particularly clear. Klaus works as a software developer. Furthermore, he is very interested in environmental protection and alternative lifestyles. He says it is important for him to spend his time wisely. For him, city life is too challenging and hectic. In the long run, he dreams of living in the countryside. However, he does not want to be a dropout, but to work from there as well. Thanks to mobile devices and as long as there is a functioning Internet connection, this is quite possible for him with his job. So his primary concern is not to strive for a life without technologies, but rather to realise his idea of different times with technologies. He integrates his devices very consciously in order to create his own times. The first example taken from his interview is about how he spends his lunch break with his colleagues. He describes how, after lunch, when the first need to speak to each other has been satisfied, time is usually spent with mobile devices. As soon as one person reaches for his/her device, the others also take out their smartphones. He describes the effect when he also decides to spend time on the smartphone as follows: You don’t want to sit there like that and be the excluded person, but I find that actually quite relaxing because the lunch break is also there to give me a little time to myself. So the iPhone is there, too. (Klaus, 48 years, Berlin, translated from German)5

He says very specifically that the iPhone is also there to “have some time for yourself.” As stated before, heterochronias can also be associated with spatial aspects. Klaus also describes the use of his smartphone with a spatial metaphor. He says it feels as if he is in a small cell of his own. He also notes that the term cell applies in several dimensions. On the one hand, it is (socio-spatially) isolated, but on the other hand also protected:

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Yeah, that’s it, so something, yes, also that you just don’t have to talk or listen. So that’s just the thing: when you’re there on your iPhone, nobody expects you to listen, or well, halfway through, but you have your little phone booth around you, yeah, and that’s (laughing) actually good. That’s the new phone booth. Yes, exactly, because cell has then also several meanings, and yes, it’s actually like a protective screen. If I take that now, yes, while I’m talking to you and looking at it, then of course there’s a glass wall around me, right, and sometimes that’s quite nice. (Klaus, 48 years, Berlin, translated from German)6

The design and juxtaposition of actually contrasting temporal inscriptions, however, become even clearer with another example that he names. He notices that he would like to decelerate more. He finds for himself that he prefers the natural rhythms of the countryside and that the tempo there is more suited to him. For some time now, he has also been working on an ecological village project that is being set up by people from the digital environment. They are planning a kind of Village 3.0, where they do not want to go without digital advantages either. The tasks that arise in this community are—as is often the case with start-ups—assigned with digital solutions, in this case an online ticket system, where upcoming tasks are digitally distributed via tickets and processed. This is intended to ensure that the tasks involved are completed as efficiently as possible. Klaus describes this as very useful. Here, it comes to overlaps of different temporalities. Natural and technological rhythms are, in his opinion, synchronised with and support each other. According to the interviewee, this integration of both technologies works, even though he was irritated at first: But it works very well, and it’s just not that somehow that everyone is running around like headless chickens or not busy and then the important things are not done, no. They can also prioritize. Of course, they have all these tasks. Somewhere a fence has to be built, so that sometime sheep can get in, and then somehow everyone is working on it, and then there is this festival now, and somehow benches have to be built for the festival. That means someone who does the project management can say, “I’m putting the priority down from the sheep fence and up from the benches for the festival now.” (Klaus, 48 years, Berlin, translated from German)7

He uses the recalibration that the countryside offers him, whilst not denying that digital technologies can help him to do so. The next examples will also deal with how certain temporalities are created with the choice of medium. However, here, these are analogue media that are used to generate heterochronias.

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Choosing Certain Media for Certain Times As mentioned at the beginning, we repeatedly encountered statements in the interviews that dealt with the genuine temporality that is inscribed in the media itself. Here, too, temporal breaks and the desire to design genuine temporal experiences become visible. One example of this is Oliver, who consciously creates certain temporalities using analogue media formats. He names analogue photography, for example, also the way he deals with sound storage media. In the case of photography, he particularly emphasises the aspect of the development of film and the time he spends with the material in the darkroom. For him, this time is qualitatively more precious because he can get more involved with it than with digital image processing. Even beyond the tactile, he describes that he is more focused there: … but that’s what I’m going to go back to today/where I’m going to go today, to deal with it because it gives me a different framework of time, namely, WHEN I do that, to be there more intensively, to really take all the steps…. (Oliver, 43 years, Berlin, translated from German)8

He also takes photos digitally again and again. That is okay with him, but he does not enjoy digital image editing either. One of the reasons is that he does not want to sit in front of the screen all the time: In the darkroom, of course, I still have an influence on when I do the analogue and of course can work with light and dark and so on. I can work with exposure times. That’s certainly also an influence, but I spend time there, and I spend all of it. I can touch it. I can look at the result. (Oliver, 43 years, Berlin, translated from German)9

Here, qualitative levels of time experience and time design are combined in the sense of heterochronias. The analogue development and processing of photographs are much more time consuming than in the digital version. Nevertheless, this variant is chosen in order to generate qualitatively valuable own time, which can also be distinguished from the time in front of the screen. This time action is also connected with a certain place (the darkroom) and with the ritualised handling of different materials (and thus also media). Here, we find a temporal demarcation to the faster variant, which would be the digital image processing, which for him is associated with a more intense and satisfying time experience. Nevertheless, he

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sometimes photographs digitally and uses Cloud services to store these photos. With a view to accelerate times, examples such as this—which does not save time, but is more effective in a rewarding way—can certainly be seen as impulses to generate heterochronias. The second analogue medium that is important for Oliver are records. Music has always had its own temporality and its own rhythm, but the format through which music is consumed also has a decisive influence on the design of this specific temporality. Digital streaming services—decoupled from analogue sound carriers—focus via algorithms on creating a profile of the user that is as accurate as possible in order to produce an adapted endless stream, a product that promises personalised medial eigenzeit, like mentioned above. Oliver avoids such services. He generally tries to avoid digital offers that he has not explicitly chosen in his everyday life. This also includes deleting pre-set apps on his smartphone. Oliver has not only consciously decided against listening to digital music, but is also actively committed to making records more attractive again. Together with friends, he founded an association that deals with analogue culture. With this association, he organises record fairs, and they want to set up an analogue music magazine. He says it is particularly important to him to stimulate dialogue about older media via this format: And I think it’s exciting when you bring people together who are historically different, like in the project we’re doing right now. They are different in terms of contemporary history, people who were more active in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Now they will do other things, but they did projects back then, culture, music, cultural projects, and in the context of this record exchange, you might get them together with people who are doing things NOW, and then you see that they were giving lectures. How was that back then? How was the development? What were the general conditions like? So to collect historical stories and to bring people together… and the medium in this case is the record. (Oliver, 43 years, Berlin, translated from German)10

Although Oliver is rather culturally pessimistic in his statements about digital technologies, he can certainly distinguish when he wants to use the time advantage of digital technologies for himself and when not. For the organisation of the record exchange, for example, he uses online printers to print the flyers for advertising the event. The temporal islands, the heterochronias, which he creates in his analogue media environment are the areas in which he can identify qualitative advantages of experiencing time for himself.

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Miriam, too, repeatedly opts for a slower communication channel that offers her a higher content-related examination of the contents and, thus, creates other times in the sense of eigenzeit. She consciously writes letters to her friends and is happy when she manages to take the time to do so: I just think it’s totally beautiful because I think there’s nothing better than finding a nice letter in your mailbox… So it is there are some things that I just like to keep and then do. (Miriam, 41 years, Berlin, translated from German)11

She feels the temporal esteem that is also shown to her in a letter. In spite of digital communication, she has maintained writing letters continuously: … written all the time. So as a child, I had VERY many penfriends and wrote a lot of letters, and later I always did that, too. I’ll keep it that way for a while. Of course, you don’t do it as often as you used to because it just IS faster, digital, no, but IF I consciously take my time for that, what you used to do unconsciously, whether one now more consciously just is in these things, that you take the time and sit down and then write. (Miriam, 41 years, Berlin, translated from German)12

The examples of Oliver and Miriam show that they reflect and create their own temporality in specific situations. Here, too, there are conscious temporal breaks that go hand in hand with a change of media, especially also in this case, with the non-digital. The heterochronous times are also felt to be more satisfying here—in comparison to the digital variant. Nevertheless, the decisions as to which type of temporal arrangement to choose are always adapted to the occasion.

From the Individual to Society As mentioned in the previous section, the material, that is, the apparatus itself, is also decisive for the time experience and time design of the users of the respective media formats. This aspect should also lead to the last example, that the heterochronias, which have so far been more ­individually designed, are now more strongly transferred back into the original concept of Foucault. In the case of Foucault, the deviating spaces are also often collectively designed spatial counter-designs—probably the most striking example here is the celebration. In the creation of heterochronias, the choice of apparatus also plays a role. The final section will deal with how the selection of new devices—mainly smartphones—takes place.

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In all the interviews in which market innovations in the area of smartphones become the topic of conversation, most of the interviewees tend towards the same conclusion. The speed at which new devices come onto the market is, although not always literally, consistently described as exaggerated. Many of the interviewees are increasingly losing interest in keeping up with these developments. One of the interviewees, Charlotte, also keeps her old devices, although they have not been in use for some time (might never be again). She states: Yeah, I really have my dear need to let go, especially from Apple devices. I don’t need to always have the latest. So never change a winning team, if the device is working and I’m being played in, the device and I…. (Charlotte, 40 years, Berlin, translated from German)13

Like Charlotte, for many interviewees, it is not only a matter of appreciating their existing equipment, but also much more a matter of not wanting to familiarise themselves with new equipment. Many also emphasise that they are sceptical about the promised advantages. They further say that they do not want any faster devices. Also, in the creation of heterochronias, it is often a matter of letting offers pass or not actively using them—like shown with the examples of Oliver und Charlotte above. For Andrea, active omission refers both to the use of specific online services and to the adaptation of new technological devices, as mentioned above. She says she has spent a lot of time with social media for a while, but then finds she is doing better without it: Yes, because I had such an overstraining situation, and I simply became aware of it, and then I looked. Where can I leave something out? And then I started there, and that was good. (Andrea, 40 years, Rostock, translated from German)14

Meanwhile, she only checks her emails once a week. She says that her first impulse not to use more apps actually came from having too little data volume, but then she realised that she does not even need these apps (she refers in the example mainly to navigation), and therefore also no more data volume. On the contrary, she describes it as more appropriate not to use any apps for this. When asked if she misses it, she answers:

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No. So there is no need. I also like to do this deliberately so that, when I go somewhere by car, for example, I look on the map to see where it is, and don’t somehow rely on the navigation system, so that I still keep the overview, so that I am not only digital in my head. (Andrea, 40 years, Rostock, translated from German)15

Even if this renunciation is (sometimes) only temporary, new patterns of use can emerge in the long term, like shown with the example of Andrea. It is therefore not a matter of completely eliminating the illusory from the discourse, but of making decisions that are coherent and reflected for the moment in order to remain capable of action in the long term. This applies to the individual as well as to society. This last example was meant to indicate that other times can also be expressed in consumer decisions about technological equipment.

Conclusion and Outlook One problem that the term heterochronia brings with it is certainly that it affirms the other time structures—those that are connoted with the effects of acceleration—since the heterochronious times are opposed to these. It is clear that, in highly complex contexts, such binary views are often not sufficient. As a working hypothesis, however, this contrast has proved to be quite helpful. What is an essential part of heterochronous moments is that they are described as very satisfying and qualitatively special, qualities that the individuals shape very concretely, as should be shown in the examples. It should be mentioned in particular that it is not always just a matter of “taking out” technological developments. The example of Klaus in particular should show that it can often be the integration of different temporalities that are perceived as satisfactory. It should be made clear that these times offer certain potential for the individuals. The redefinition of such times and thereby their potential should be also in a broader sense not underestimated. The last example of purchase decisions in particular should contribute to this thought. Here, the connection between the individual and society might become more visible. Nowotny also notes that, in times of so many opportunities and potential problems, it is important for individuals as well as for society as a whole to shape new temporal ideas and new definitions (Nowotny 1992, p. 444). These redefinitions can be also much more far reaching.

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For these new definitions, finally, a spatial analogy from Foucault’s attempt about the heterotopias shall be used again to formulate here still another outlook. Foucault not only uses heterotopias as a method to analyse space. He also encourages, even pleads for the creation or production of further other spaces—at least the ones that negate or reverse the corresponding structures because some of them offer the potential to escape from certain repressions. He states that heterotopias are realised utopias: First there are the utopias. Utopias are sites with no real place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces. There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places—places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society—which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. (Foucault 1967 [1984], p. 3)

As utopia describes a future that is not spatially realised, the uchrony describes a time that is not (yet) realised. In her earlier essay, Nowotny also describes it as an ancient chronicle. She states that these uchronias have their origins in daily life. If only enough people begin to change their lives—the great doctrines of humanity commenced in this manner. (Nowotny 1989 [1996], p. 141)

The examples from the interviews should also point out that these are everyday decisions and do not refer to offline times on vacation, for instance. Thus, the interviewees have established concrete moments of resistance against unsatisfactory temporalities in everyday life. These times also reflect desires for temporalities and thus maybe could refer to ­uchronias. These uchronias also refer to the potential of the resistance. Despite all the diversity of uchronias, Nowotny records about them: … they have one thing in common: time is mainly experienced as an externalized constraint, influencing people from outside, which it is necessary to counteract. (Nowotny 1989 [1996], p. 142)

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With the idea of identifying heterochronias as those times that individuals create to counter-act, it can be seen that the realisation of these alternatives is taking place in and through the individual—in everyday life. These times do not occur randomly, but are actively induced and are based on reflections that have already taken place. They contain clear and specific contextual decisions. Foucault describes that the spaces in which we reside are never homogeneous and empty, but rather permeated by many qualities. He also points out that the rooms also open up space for fantasies and our own content (Foucault 1967 [1984], p. 2). Also, the temporalities we experience are clearly not homogeneous and empty. On the contrary, they are multi-layered and can be experienced very differently. Especially the times which stand out the most from the usual ones because they are designed imaginatively and consciously and as qualitatively meaningful—that is what the heterochronias have in common—are worth looking at. On a broader level, reflecting on the destruction of natural resources and thereby shifted concepts of future, heterochronias could, for example, be seen or found in ecological movements that take active part in creating an alternative time lying in front of us. They may possibly contain the potential to realise future times—which are characterised by existing and future normative structures—individually and alternatively.

Notes 1. David Zintl pursues a different approach, who intends the concept of heterochronias as a draft for a theory of heterochronous cultural objects (Zintl 2008). 2. “Und das finde ich schon/finde ich schon gut. Also dann entspanne ich mich auch. Dann merke ich auch, dass ich runterkomme, dass ich nicht diesen Bewegungsdrang habe oder diesen ich muss irgendwas schaffen oder Geld verdienen oder sowas dann. Das ist schön.” 3. “… jetzt wird das aber auch ganz schön viel. So, und da frage ich mich halt, wo da irgendwann mal die Grenze ist. So dieses Größer, Schneller, Weiter. Wir können ja auch in jedes Land und überall hin, und ich frage mich, ob mal irgendwann wir so einen Punkt erreichen, wo dieses ganze Netz so zusammenbricht oder die Leute oder so eine Generation wieder aufkommt, die sagen so: Nein, wir sind jetzt quasi Medienveganer.” 4. “Also ich kann es jetzt konkret vielleicht am Beispiel von der Uni machen. Also in der Uni gibt es so eine/Also die ziehen so eine Art System auf, wo es halt einfach/dann gibt es Abgaben bis dann und dann, dann muss man

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sich irgendwie bis da und da eingetragen haben, dann muss man halt das und das lesen, dann muss man und dann/…” 5. “Man will ja nicht da irgendwie so sitzen und irgendwie (lacht) der Ausgeschlossene sein, ne? Aber ich finde das eigentlich auch ganz entspannend, weil, die Mittagspause ist ja auch dazu da, dass ich ein bisschen Zeit für mich habe, ja, und so. Genau. Also da ist das iPhone auch dabei.” 6. “Ja, genau. Also irgendwas, ja, auch dass man einfach mal nicht reden oder zuhören muss. Also das ist halt auch die Sache: Wenn du da an deinem iPhone bist, erwartet auch keiner, dass du zuhörst. Oder, na ja, so halb halt. Aber man hat da so seine kleine Telefonzelle dann irgendwie um sich rum, ja. Und das ist (lachend) eigentlich gut, das ist die neue Telefonzelle. Ja genau. Weil, Zelle hat ja dann auch so mehrere Bedeutungen. Und ja, das ist tatsächlich wie so ein Schutzschirm. Wenn ich das jetzt nehme, ja, während ich mit dir rede und da drauf kucke, dann ist natürlich hier so eine Glaswand um mich rum, ne? Und das ist ja manchmal auch ganz schön.” 7. “Aber es funktioniert sehr gut und es ist halt nicht so irgendwie, dass halt alle irgendwie rumlaufen wie kopflose Hühner oder nicht busy sind und dann wird nicht das Wichtige gemacht, ne. Die können halt auch priorisieren. Die haben dann natürlich diese ganzen Tasks, irgendwo muss ein Zaun gebaut werden, damit mal irgendwann Schafe reinkönnen. Und da arbeiten dann irgendwie alle dran. Und dann ist halt jetzt dieses Festival und es müssen irgendwie Bänke für das Festival gebaut werden. Das heißt, da kann irgendjemand, der das Project-Management macht, sagen, ‘ich setze jetzt die Priorität von dem Schafszaun runter und von den Bänken fürs Festival hoch.’” 8. “… aber das ist was, was mir heute/wo ich heute dazu komme, wieder da hinzugehen, mich damit zu beschäftigen, weil es mir einen anderen Rahmen an Zeit ermöglicht. Nämlich, WENN ich das mache, intensiver dabei zu sein. Alle Schritte wirklich zu machen.” 9. “In der Dunkelkammer habe ich natürlich trotzdem einen Einfluss darauf, wenn ich das analog mache, und kann natürlich mit hell und dunkel und so, kann ich mit Belichtungszeiten arbeiten. Das ist sicher auch ein Einfluss. Aber ich verbringe da Zeit und die verbringe ich ganz. Das ist/ich kann es anfassen. Ich kann mir das Ergebnis angucken.” 10. “Und ich finde das halt spannend, wenn man im Prinzip so, wie jetzt in dem Projekt, was wir gerade machen, so Leute zusammenbringt, die geschichtlich auseinander sind. Zeitgeschichtlich auseinander sind. Also Leute, die eher so in den 80er, 90er Jahren aktiv waren. Jetzt werden sie andere Sachen machen. Damals aber Projekte gemacht haben. Kultur, Musik, Kulturprojekte. Und im Rahmen dieser Schallplattenbörse man die vielleicht zusammenkriegt mit Leuten, die JETZT gerade Sachen machen und man dann mal guckt, dass sie sich Vorträge/wie war das damals? Wie

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war die Entwicklung? Wie waren eigentlich die Rahmenbedingungen? Also geschichtliche Geschichten zusammenzutragen und Leute zusammenzubringen… und das Medium in dem Fall ist die Schallplatte.” 11. “Das finde ich halt total schön. Weil ich meine, es gibt nichts Schöneres, als einen schönen Brief im Briefkasten zu finden, (…) So es gibt manche Sachen, die ich halt einfach gerne beibehalte und dann mache.” 12. “Fortwährend geschrieben. Also als Kind habe ich SEHR viele Brieffreundinnen gehabt und sehr viele Briefe geschrieben. Und habe das dann später auch immer mal so beibehalten. Na klar, man macht das dann nicht mehr so oft, wie früher. Weil es IST halt einfach schneller, digital, ne. Aber WENN, nehme ich mir bewusst die Zeit dafür. Was man früher halt unbewusst gemacht hat. Ob man jetzt bewusster gerade bei solchen Sachen ist. Dass man sich die Zeit nimmt und sich hinsetzt und dann schreibt.” 13. “Ja, ich habe echt meine liebe Not, loszulassen. Vor allem von Apple-­ Geräten. Habe nicht den Anspruch, immer das neueste zu haben. Also never change a winning team. Wenn das Gerät funktioniert und ich wir eingespielt sind, das Gerät und ich…” 14. “Ja, weil ich so eine Überforderungssituation hatte und mir das einfach bewusst geworden ist und ich dann geguckt habe, wo kann ich was weglassen. Und dann habe ich da angefangen. Und das war gut.” 15. “Nein. Also besteht nicht die Notwendigkeit. Ich mache das auch mit Absicht gerne, dass ich, wenn ich mit dem Auto irgendwo hinfahre, zum Beispiel auf der Karte gucke, wo es ist. Und mich nicht irgendwie auf das Navi verlasse nur. Also, dass ich immer noch den Überblick behalte. Also, dass ich nicht nur digital im Kopf bin.”

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Keightley, E. (2012). Time, media and modernity. New York: Palgrave. Nowotny, H. (1989 [1996]). Time: The modern and postmodern experience. Wiley, Kindle-Version. https://www.wiley.com/encg/Time%3A+The+Modern+ and+Postmodern+Experience-p-9780745618371 Nowotny, H. (1992). Time and social theory. Towards a social theory of time. Time & Society, 1(3), 421–454. Nowotny, H. (2017). Eigenzeit. Revisited. In H. Nowotny (Ed.), An orderly mess (pp. 61–93). Budapest/New York: CEU Press. Pentzold, C. (2018). Between moments and millennia: Temporalizing mediatisation. Media, Culture and Society, 40(6), 927–937. Rosa, H. (2005). Beschleunigung. Die Veränderung der Zeitstrukturen in der Moderne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Rosa, H. (2013). Social acceleration, a new theory of modernity. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter. Sharma, S. (2014). In the meantime. London: Duke University Press. Wajcman, J. (2016 [2014]). Pressed for time: The acceleration of life in digital capitalism. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press. Wajcman, J., & Dodd, N. (Eds.). (2017). The sociology of speed: Digital, organizational, and social temporalities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zintl, D. (2008). Andere Zeiten: Entwurf einer Theorie heterochroner Kultur-­ Objekte. Saarbrücken: VDM.

INTERLUDE I

Categories, Norms and More: The Philosophy of Time—An Interview

CHAPTER 6

It Began with an Interview…and Ended with a Text Kristóf Nyíri and Maren Hartmann

Kristóf Nyíri is a Hungarian philosopher. He has held professorships at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest, and at the Institute for Technical Education at Budapest University of Technology and Economics and is a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS). He has been a Leibniz Professor at the University of Leipzig and is also widely known as the director of the Hungarian “Communications in the 21st Century: The Mobile Information Society” programme, which ran from 2001 to 2010 and was funded by the Hungarian T-Mobile company. Nyíri has been awarded a range of prizes, amongst them the Széchenyi Prize in recognition of those who have made an outstanding contribution to academic life in Hungary. However, Kristóf Nyíri is also—as expressed in the 21st Century Communications directorship—a wonderful networker, in Europe and beyond. At the same time, he is one of the very few philosophers of mobile communication (see e.g. Nyíri 2008)—with a more recent interest in the philosophy of images and time. Another major research interest lies in the K. Nyíri Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary M. Hartmann (*) Berlin University of the Arts, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 M. Hartmann et al. (eds.), Mediated Time, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24950-2_6

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philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein (especially his later work) and the philosophy of communication more generally. Our interest in his work is double-fold: first of all, we are intrigued by his philosophical take on mobile communication, which is particularly important when mobile communication is bound more closely to the question of time. Second, we are indeed interested in his take on time more specifically. We had originally planned an interview with him conducted online. It was meant to consist of at least three parts, only the first of which actually took place (see further explanation below). In terms of a replacement for the other two parts, we provide a brief summary of three core texts of his in relation to the topic of the book.

Part 1: Interview Maren Hartmann: Our book is entitled Mediated Time. We would therefore like to begin with some questions related to this title: first of all, what do you understand mediation to mean? Kristóf Nyíri: Frankly, the first answer that occurred to me was that I cannot recall ever having used that very expression—mediation-, but then I found out that at least once I indeed did. In my talk “The Picture Theory of Reason” (2000), I wrote: “the rudimentary capacity of thinking through images, of thinking directly with images, without verbal mediation, seems to belong to our biological makeup”. What I here meant to say was that neither mental images nor physical pictures do primordially rely on words in order to make sense, but at an advanced level—past early childhood, later in human history—we regularly need verbal contexts which render unambiguous the images we mentally have or actually look at: we need words to interpret, to come between, images. The expression mediated, by contrast, I have of course often used. For instance, in the 2008 abstract of my talk “Towards a Philosophy of the Mobile Information Society”, where I claimed that

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“the mobile phone is obviously turning into the single unique instrument of mediated communication”, or in my 2016 paper “Emerging Media and the Philosophy of Time”, where I wrote about computer-­mediated communication, referring to the mobile phone, once more, as “a device for technologically mediated person-to-person communication”, here, mediating again meant “coming between”: people do not talk to each other face-to-­ face. They punch into the computer texts or speak into the phone words, which become coded and, at the receiving end, decoded. Maren Hartmann: Would you differentiate mediation from other processual terms related to media? Kristóf Nyíri: Basically, I would insist on the very close connection between the terms mediation and communication. Even primordial face-to-face gestural communication—the most fundamental type of communication—is mediated: you think what you gesture, but those who you address your gestures with have to mirror your gestures into thoughts. Once word language emerges, face-to-face communication is mediated in a more complex way: we think in a combination of images and words, express our thoughts in a combination of words and gestures, and this combination then becomes translated, at the other end of the conversation, into thoughts made up of words and images. Let me say that I am of course aware that there is an archaic sense of communication, meaning participation. This is the sense in which Dewey related “communication” to “community”, saying that communication presupposes a community held together by common aims and beliefs, and this is the sense in which Heidegger says that communication is not a conveying of wishes and opinions as it were from the interior of one subject into the interior of another, but the manifestation of a shared being, and this is the perspective taken up by Carey.

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However, from the perspective I am here entertaining, communication is, necessarily, mediated communication. Historically seen—let me refer back to what I said a minute ago—the earliest media of communication are gestures (and facial expressions, rooted in our animal past). Predating verbal language there is also pictorial communication—think of cave paintings—a dimension of communication that then through the stages of ancient pictographs, medieval and modern drawings, prints, photography, icons on the screen, and digital images has ever since been with us and is today radically gaining space. Then came word language—verbally mediated thoughts—and various forms of written language; that is spoken words mediated by written signs. The printed page will transform handwriting into a medium reaching thousands of readers, the telegraph enables almost-instant communication across continents—think here of the thousands of miles of cables mediating the message—while with the radio there comes wireless telegraphy. Movies and then television communicate through the medium of the moving image, and today, finally, we live in a world of computer-mediated communication. Maren Hartmann: How far is your concept of mediation applicable to time, i.e. what would you understand mediated time to be? Kristóf Nyíri: I take the flow of time to be an objective reality, which is made up of many different, historically ever more mediated realities. First, there is natural time, cycles we directly experience: the movement of the sun, the moon, the stars; the cycles of the seasons; lifecycles from birth through childhood, adulthood, old age to death. Mediated time enters with early time-keeping devices, the hourglass and then, in the 13th century, the mechanical clock, first without dial, a public automated bell so to speak, but in the course of the 15th century, there emerges the private

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time of the portable clock and then the watch. Keeping track of the 24 hours of the day still meant keeping track of cyclic time. However, from the very beginning, human communication offered rudimentary possibilities to experience linear time, too. In this connection again, I allot specific significance to the primordial language of gestures. I have touched on this in my 2005 talk “Time and Communication”, and offered a detailed discussion in my 2014 study “Time and Image in the Theory of Gestures” (Nyíri 2014). Gestures are, obviously, movements, and the meanings conveyed by them are created visibly in time. Gestures necessarily create the experience of before and after, as well as the experience of time consisting of extended intervals. Also, gestures involve miming; that is re-enacting events: this, too, must generate a rudimentary consciousness of the difference between the present and the past— between what is in fact lived through and what is only remembered. With the emergence of language spoken, the experience of time flowing away and not returning must become rather more vivid: of course, you can repeat what you said earlier, but the time when you first said it is gone forever. With the invention of writing, time in a sense seems to become frozen: the whole document lies there before you, spread out in space, but the appearance is illusive: once you begin reading the text—in the case of early handwritten documents, reading meant, almost without exception, reading out loud—you realise that reading happens in time, and indeed in linear time. With the printed text, silent reading became the rule, and it was precisely in the age of the printed book, with the eye easily following the flow of the printed lines, that the idea of a linear flow of time became dominant. By the end of the 19th century, with the emergence of the telegraph, we have become very conscious of there being, on our globe, different time

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zones, a consciousness further strengthened in the 20th century with long-distance telephony, and then with global television coverage. Global time flows in layers, and we gain a very dramatic new experience of the flow of time when joining the world of online social media. Just think of Facebook. Seeing your friends all over the world posting, liking and commenting, and seeing all this continuously fading away in real time, certainly gives one a strong impression of the flow of time, or think of Snapchat, with image messages as a rule destined to vanish after just a few seconds, making you painfully aware of how rapidly time can flow and how definitely what has become past will not become present again. As I said above, I believe that time is real and that the reality of time is made up of different, several, indeed innumerable, realities. Among these realities, there are subjective experiences—say life speeds up as you get older—and also experiences which would not be possible without the socially created world in which they arise. In my earlier writings, I came dangerously near to suggesting that time is, somehow, a theoretical construct or indeed a social construct. I very much wish to avoid any such suggestion here. We possess metaphors of time; we have mental images associated with our idea of time; science is attempting to clarify—to date not very successfully I am afraid—and tell us what time is, and clearly, we have bodily experiences of the passage of time. What our bodily experiences, our mental images, the metaphors we use, and the popular scientific texts we read ultimately add up to is our idea of time. It is an idea slightly or greatly varying from person to person and no doubt greatly varying from culture to culture, but in all its variations, it reflects what time really is.

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Part 2: A Text About Texts This next section was eventually produced when it became clear that time had become an even more important issue than planned in Kristóf Nyíri’s life. For very good reasons, he suffered under an acute lack of time to answer the questions we had developed—a lack of time in everyday life, but also maybe in terms of the things he wanted to tell the world—a kind of biographical time. When attempts to re-publish one of his formidable publications on the philosophy of time (Nyíri 2015) failed due to new re-­ publication regulations, we decided to instead compile a short text in which three of his core texts are briefly summarised in order to get a glimpse of what his work offers to the media and time/mediated time research field. The Mobile? Kristóf Nyíri has been a witness to the change of the mobile phone from an obscure “business” device, hardly socially acceptable, to the all-round device, owned by everyone and used for everything (I am exaggerating, obviously). His witnessing was also a shaping: in the already mentioned series of conferences and workshop, sponsored by the Hungarian T-Mobile,1 he was pioneering research (and I usually do not employ this term easily). He was first of all earlier than most not only in recognising the importance of mobile communication, but also in bringing in different perspectives to this new field; witnessing, but also analysing the transitory phase as it happens. The series of events started out with the question whether the mobile was capable of making the world a better place. Within this, he himself offered a philosophical take on the phenomenon—again a rare thing to do. He also offered a rather “optimistic” view on these developments. His main points are (a) the myth of the digital divide, (b) changing standards of politeness, (c) mobiles becoming the dominant medium, (d) childhood in a new key, and (e) the transformation of the social sciences. I will pick two exemplary points that help to locate Nyíri’s general take. One could first of all take the points about the dominant medium and the social sciences as framing arguments. Hence, Nyíri emphasises that the mobile is overtaking other media, primarily because it offers person-to-­person and interactive communication in one medium. At the same time, social scientists (and philosophers, one could add) contribute to this equation. Here, too, he

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sees the potential for the medium to not only become a focus (he lists several examples), but also a tool. Both developments taken together explain why Nyíri emphasises mobile communication as highly relevant. The other general point he makes (without stating it explicitly) is the huge chance that mobile media in his eyes imply (this would have been an interesting point to discuss in the interview). Hence, in this 2005 lecture, he calls the digital divide a myth and refers to early work on mobile phones in Africa to underline  his point. He proposed that the so-called Third World was catching up and that it was easier to close the digital than the economic or literacy gap. Depending on how wide one defines digital divide (i.e. whether it is primarily access to communication resources or also wider socio-economic consequences), this is a rather positive view, which would probably need some differentiation in debates today. The same applies to the question of childhood, where again Nyíri offers a provocative stance against any arguments of caution. He sees the new media as an organic learning environment which should be provided and used. Another point that seems “very 2005” in retrospect is the idea of “changing standards of politeness”. This was a hot topic at the time, since this implied a change in the social in reaction to the introduction of mobile media. Nyíri even mentions an early Hungarian name for the mobile, Bunkofon, which implied the “vulgarian phone”, which has since ceased to be used. Instead, in 2005, Nyíri wrote: Today, the supremely impolite individual is the one not accessible on the mobile: because he or she does not have one, or does not switch it on, or is careless in checking messages. An asocial creature, disturbing the normal flow of human communication. (Nyíri 2005)

However, in 2019, this has again changed. Today, switching off is seen as both luxury (who can afford to?) as well as a necessity (digital detox, etc.). This does not imply, however, that any individual unavailability is always understood and greeted warmly, but the point of politeness is in flux—as is the perception of the disruption of the social. Also in flux, albeit not quite as much, is our understanding of time, which he summarised in another text, written at about the same time.

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Time and Communication In his “Time and Communication” text, which was published in 2006, Nyíri underlines that “with the mobile phone, time has become personalized. It is not just our perception of time that has changed, nor indeed merely our way of talking about time. What has changed is, in fact, the nature of time” (p. 301). This somewhat radical claim is developed in the paper (which was originally a talk) in several ways. First of all, Nyíri begins with a discussion of several philosophical authors before he turns to the present. Here, he emphasises two main instances of change: (a) the communication of time (and about time) and (b) the impact of communication technologies on our notions of time. The philosophies he engages with are those of Wittgenstein and Einstein (who are read philosophically here), but also Durkheim and others. Wittgenstein (1979) serves as a starting point in his denial of the specificity of time: “We might say that it is the whole of philosophy to realize that there is no more difficulty about time than there is about this chair” (p. 119). While Nyíri works against that argument in what is to follow, he also shows that Wittgenstein himself was ambivalent at times and did actually provide some hints about the importance—and therefore maybe even the nature—of time. Nyíri uses the concept of the theoretical entity to move forward in his musings about time. This allows him to combine what he calls astronomical time with social time—“time lived by the group”, as Durkheim had underlined. This social time needs to be organised and upheld—something that is increasingly done with the help of technologies (sometimes more specifically with media). Hence, the social and technological with regard to time are inadvertently intertwined, as Sorokin and Merton (1937) also state: “With the spread of interaction between groups, a common or extended time system must be evolved to supersede or at least to augment the local time systems” (quoted in Nyíri, no page given). This time system must be developed, but also upheld— and sometimes it is used to underline or save power (as Rikitiankaia in her chapter in this book underlines). This move in time allows Nyíri to slowly enter the realm of (increasingly) mediated time. Picking up on the earlier argument about the social nature of time, he adds communication as a crucial component of time. He subsequently uses different approaches to underline (a) a ritual view of communication, which is concerned with “the maintenance of society in time”, (b) communication as transportation (a view that fits the mobilities discourse

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rather well), and (c) “communication in the sense of conveying information” (Nyíri 2006, p. 304). A combination of these provides the basis for his two points about the combination of communication and time: (a) communicating time and (b) the impact of communication technologies on our notions of time. For the former, he outlines different modes of communication (from gestures to computer mediated as a secondary literacy) and shows that they all communicate time rather differently. Hence, orality is characterised by repetition and therefore a cyclical idea of time: “To repeat is to re-live: time in the medium of primary orality is experienced as cyclic, rather than as linear” (Nyíri 2006, p. 306). The image, however, brings things to a halt and affords a different engagement of its viewer than does the linear mode of reading (Nyíri himself has increasingly begun to engage with the philosophy of images in recent years). Not surprisingly, he goes on to the printing press, which coincided (or was partly pushed by) a new idea of progress (a very linear notion), while also promoting a new kind of historical consciousness (history not so much re-lived through repetition, but adaptation). The film then—a fascinating medium to many people at the time of its emergence and beyond— contains a form of contradiction: it is materially past, present, and future (since image after image is put in order), while the viewer only ever gets to see the moment, that is, the present. All of these media communicate time, but also, according to Nyíri, tend to alter our sense of time. In terms of current developments, it is the collapse into immediacy, which he emphasises: “the here-and-now, with no difference whatsoever between original and copy. Clearly, this environment of timeless documents cannot remain without influence on our sense of time” (Nyíri 2006, p. 310). His last point then is that the mobile phone adds yet another, radically new layer to all of this: personalised time. This supposedly alleviates some of the problems that arose with timeless time. Nyíri’s take on this is not technological—instead, he emphasises that “frequent re-scheduling was there even before the mobile phone” (Nyíri 2006, p. 312). This leads him to state that the mobile phone is indeed as radical a shift as the portable book and the portable clock. He ends with the idea that “in the constitution of the theoretical entity time, the building-­block of Einstein’s situation-bound relative time there is now joined by the building block of personalized time” (Nyíri 2006, p. 312) without further exploring how far this radical claim can be upheld of the alleviation through the mobile phone of the disturbances that globalised

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media flows brought with them. It is a challenge worth pursuing though— and one that continued to haunt him ten years later.2 Philosophy of Time Kristóf Nyíri did not stop once he had written the above-explored text on time and communication. Indeed, one of the core texts on the topic appeared about ten years later. In 2015, he published a text entitled “Emerging Media and the Philosophy of Time”. This implies a broadening of the focus (from mobile communication to emerging media as well as from time to the philosophy of time). He does, however, build on his earlier arguments on communication and time. The core of this text lies in his initial question: “Is, then, philosophy capable of discussing emerging media at all? Can conceptual analysis be applied to discourse about phenomena which are but in the process of arising?” To this—self-imposed—provocation, he manages to answer: “As a matter of fact we find that philosophy from its very beginnings focusses precisely on emerging media” (Nyíri 2015, p. 1) and continues to refer to Plato and a whole range of philosophers (those mentioned above, but more on top). More importantly, Nyíri links them to the emerging media of their time. Locke, for example, experienced the printing press and let this feed into his formulation of the mind, which “is at first a ‘white paper, void of all characters,’ onto which experience will ‘imprint’ ideas, while the subsequent operations of the mind then consist in ‘viewing’ its own ideas, in ‘reflecting’ upon them” (Nyíri 2015, p. 1). As in the earlier text, Nyíri then explores transatlantic cables (and the clocks’ synchronisation), telegraphy (and the newness of the separation of time and place of communication) as well as telephony (and the question of real time). Again, cinematography is hailed as a more radical shift, since its emphasis is on images rather than words. In contrast to his earlier text, an emphasis on the body and its “movements” (e.g. muscular contractions) are added to the equation, again with reference to several authors. Nyíri’s point overall, it seems, is that “Time flows—and we have a bodily experience of this flow” (Nyíri 2015, p. 6). This is in contrast to and extension of earlier ideas around time and flow, where the flow was first denied (and space emphasised instead) before it became thinkable again, but while “with the mobile phone, windows of personalized time are kept open” (Nyíri 2015, p. 6), the new component in the years that passed since the earlier text are social media: “Indeed the

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sense of collaborative closeness, of seamless co-operation, of not being impeded by spending time on having to reach now for this, now for that device or piece of information, gives an impression one would today rarely experience in face-to-face circumstances: the impression of not being constantly distracted” (Nyíri 2015, p. 6). This does imply, according to Nyíri, primarily to Skype, however, and much less so to other applications. Hence, one application (as well as its particular appropriation) might imply that time (zones) become less important; another one creates the opposite effect: “If Facebook makes vivid the experience of the flow of time, Snapchat lets you starkly feel its pressure” (Nyíri 2015, p. 7). While Nyíri finishes his musings with the remark that “Getting a glimpse of a Snapchat image, and seeing the countdown on the display, is an impressive lesson in the philosophy of time” (Nyíri 2015, p. 7), I want to emphasise another point from his piece instead. At one point, he refers to Bergson and his writings on time, especially the idea of the durée “the innerly-lived flux of duration which cannot be divided into parts, but is as it were an unbroken whole of lived-through tension” (Nyíri 2015, p.  4). Tension overall is an important point in the idea of how time is experienced (and how communication and media interfere or build up this experience). If, however, the tension is unbroken, constantly there, but only experienced to different degrees at different times, this flux is indeed a challenge. If we add Braudel’s notion of the longue durée, the idea that historical developments have parts that develop at a different speed than others, and that are partly shaped by nature’s givens, therefore  not necessarily immediately visible as changes, we re-emphasize that there is both constant change as well as continuity.  A current concern then is how far this tension between change and continuity is enhanced or reduced with the help of the possibility of constant connectivity. Maybe instances such as Snapchat are useful in their ephemerality (see Hartmann 2014), showing that time can be interrupted, changed—and is not just something that happens to us. What is obvious, however, is that we need a nuanced philosophy of time and communication—in the sense that Kristóf Nyíri offers it.

Notes 1. The “Communications in the 21st Century” project was a joint interdisciplinary social science project, which was coordinated by T-Mobile Hungary—formerly Westel Mobile Telecommunications—and the Institute for Philosophical Research of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. It was first launched in January 2001. 2. My title for this project would be “The Mobile Phone as a Security Blanket”.

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References Hartmann, M. (2014). Soziale Medien, Raum und Zeit. In J.-H.  Schmidt & M.  Taddicken (Eds.), Handbuch Soziale Medien (pp.  367–387). Wiesbaden: Springer. Nyíri, K. (2000). The picture theory of reason. In A talk given at the 23rd International Wittgenstein Symposium. Kirchberg am Wechsel. http://www. hunfi.hu/nyiri/krb2000.htm. Accessed 18 Mar 2019. Nyíri, K. (2005). The mobile phone in 2005: Where are we now? Introducing the conference ‘seeing, understanding, learning in the mobile age’ (p. 2). Unpublished paper. Nyíri, K. (2006). Time and communication. In F. Stadler & M. Stöltzner (Eds.), Time and history—Zeit und Geschichte (pp. 301–316). Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag. Nyíri, K. (2008). Towards a philosophy of the mobile information society. http://wittgensteinrepository.org/agora-ontos/article/view/2094. Accessed 19 Mar 2019. Nyíri, K. (2014). Time and image in the theory of gestures. http://www.hunfi.hu/ nyiri/Nyiri_Gestures_expanded_Nov_2014.pdf. Accessed 19 Mar 2019. Nyíri, K. (2015). Emerging media and the philosophy of time. In J. Floyd & J. E. Katz (Eds.), Philosophy of emerging media: Understanding, appreciation, application (pp. 159–170). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sorokin, P. A., & Merton, R. K. (1937). Social time: A methodological and functional analysis. American Journal of Sociology, 42, 615–629. Wittgenstein, L. (1979). Wittgenstein’s lectures: Cambridge, 1932–1935. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

PART II

Materialities and Places of and in Intermediate Time

CHAPTER 7

Doing Time/Time Done: Exploring the Temporalities of Datafication in the Smart Prison Anne Kaun and Fredrik Stiernstedt

Introduction Doing time, the idiom for serving a prison sentence, suggests an individual activity: time is what you do as a prisoner. On the other hand, accounts from prisoners themselves as well as other descriptions of prisons, underline that time is also what is done to you: time is performed and situated not only by the individual prisoners, but the prison as such is a facility that does time. The expression underlines the point that time is an abstract category that needs enactment that is situated and actively performed (Pentzold 2018). Time, within the prison, is created through meticulous time-based routines and technologies, “endless repetition, constant vigilance, interdictions, and rigid schedules” (Meisenhelder 1985), that serve the purpose of barring and replacing the ordinary lifetime of the individual with the temporal regimes of punishment. Prisons then are social institutions that create and uphold temporal regimes that are produced by rules and regulation and are enacted with

A. Kaun (*) • F. Stiernstedt Studies in Media and Communication, Södertörn University, Huddinge, Sweden e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 M. Hartmann et al. (eds.), Mediated Time, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24950-2_7

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the help of (media) technologies. The temporal regimes have bearing both for the individual prisoner and guard. This is, however, not unique for the prison context. On the contrary, the prison is a site, or a microcosm, through which such processes—representing society at large—can be observed and analysed as Foucault (1975) has famously argued. Our starting point here is that the contemporary prison, as other social institutions, is deeply entangled with processes of datafication. The aim of this chapter is to study time and data through the empirical lens of the so-­ called smart prison. The smart prison enhances some of the longstanding aspects of datafication within the prison—think of the fact that prisoners are referred to and identified as a numerical code rather than by name— enhancing control and surveillance, but the adaption of digital technologies and new forms of datafication within the smart prison also contribute to an offsetting of temporality, towards prediction and pre-emption. There are a host of initiatives and commercial solutions for smart prisons. For example, in the Swedish context, the smart-building research platform Memoori has recently promoted the idea that “correctional facilities can be smart buildings too” (Memoori 2017). The article that mainly relies on examples of smart prison technologies developed by Johnson Controls discusses the advantages of smart technologies in the prison context, particularly for increasing and improving security and efficiency (Memoori 2017), but also how smart technologies could be implemented for rehabilitation purposes to prepare prisoners for a future outside of the prison. The notion of the smart prison is, hence, about the introduction of smart devices for administrative, surveillance and rehabilitative purposes. Smart devices refer to connected, digital technologies that to some extent operate interactively and autonomously. Internationally, companies such as AgilFence, Johnson Controls and Global Tel Link (GTL) offer smart prison systems to their clients in the corrections industry. These companies are US-based, but work globally, and the solutions and ideas promoted by them have impact in different parts of the world and in different prison systems. The use of smart technologies is also connected to the production, distribution and analysis of data. Hence, the process of datafication becomes closely intertwined with the so-called smartification of our societies. Drawing on content from such plans and solutions for smart prison systems, this chapter aims at discussing dominant temporalities that emerge in the context of datafication. Datafication concerns processes of quantification and the transformation of evermore objects into data, as

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well as the automation of processes of judgements, evaluations, and ­decision making (van Dijck 2014). Datafication is often described as a process that is invisible, abstract and hard to grasp. At the same time, developments linked to datafication, such as the use of artificial intelligence (AI), big data analysis and automation based on AI, have been identified as some of the biggest innovations that potentially revolutionise the way we organise our societies, changes that are already underway in areas such as education, labour and warfare, through for example new forms of automation and algorithmic governance (Eubanks 2017; Kennedy 2016; Mosco 2017; O’Neill 2016). While datafication is currently discussed from all kinds of perspectives including its materiality—for example by Reading and Notley (2015), who consider minerals necessary for the production of our devices or by Qiu (2016), who traces the labour exploitation necessary for producing digital data’s hardware—there is comparatively little attention devoted to the question of how datafication is changing our perception of time. Working from the assumption that datafication has become an all-encompassing process, this chapter hence begins to theorise the question whether digital data imply a certain temporality, and if digital media have an Eigenzeit1—to use Ernst’s (2013) expression—what are the societal and political consequences of emerging temporal regimes of datafication that include anticipation, prediction and pre-emption? These questions will be explored through the lens of the smart prison relating to and implementing datafication to efficiency and security, while keeping digital media practices of prisoners very limited. This chapter develops an overview of emerging temporalities of datafication and identifies different temporal layers that partly contradict each other. Bringing the temporal layers into conversation with each other, we identify a strong desynchronisation reinforcing inherent contradictions and ambivalence of the smart prison in particular and datafied society at large.

Exploring Prison Temporalities This chapter is based on exploratory work that is part of a larger project engaging with media technological innovation including processes of datafication through the lens of the prison. Prisons were chosen as an empirical focus both in their own right, as they sometimes work as testbeds for new technologies, but also due to the fact that datafication has a long and particular history within the prison, in which temporal regimes of prediction and pre-emption have been developing since the birth of the

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prison system in the nineteenth century. Furthermore, the prison, as a confined and secluded space, enables us to grasp more general social processes and media developments, also outside the prison walls, in a clearer way. The complex, large-scale and opaque relations that form in and through datafication, and the temporal regimes of this development, are concrete, visible and possible to be viewed in the social space of the prison in ways that are difficult in other social settings. Relations between the surveyed and the surveyors, between freedom and restriction, between past, present and future become more visible within the microcosm of the prison, as it is both radically different from and enacting norms and values of society in large. Prisons, we argue, hence crystallise social mechanisms and processes of change and make them visible and comprehensible. At the same time, the broader public has hardly any direct prison-related experiences and knows fairly little about the particularities of prison worlds.

Temporalities of Datafication Beyond Real-Time and Speed: Anticipation, Prediction and Pre-Emption Datafication can be—according to Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier (2013)—defined as the transformation of social action into quantified data, which allows for real-time tracking and predictive analysis. Digital media allow for the collection of data to a previously unseen scale ranging from emotions and sentiments expressed in social media to the character of relationships and purchasing behaviour (Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier 2013; van Dijck 2014). van Dijck (2014) draws the conclusion that datafication has become a general organising principle of society that builds on accessing, understanding and monitoring people’s behaviour. Looking more closely into these initial definitions of datafication makes clear that specific temporal imaginaries are fundamental to the process of datafication. Firstly, temporality is part of the definition of big data in terms of its real-timeness, namely the appeal to track practices, developments, environmental changes at high speed. Cheney-Lippold (2017), in his book We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves, underlines that velocity refers to the tracking rather than the analysis, as it takes time to compare the recorded data against previous datasets. Weltevrede et al. (2014) have shown that the velocity of real-timeness is not as straightforward as it seems. They emphasise that different platforms and applications produce different temporalities and rhythms of

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r­ eal-­timeness of devices and digital platforms. Hence, the notion of real-­ timeness of datafication is much more complex. Adding to these complications, we argue that the dominant temporal regimes linked to datafication are the seemingly future-oriented temporalities of anticipation, prediction and pre-emption that are a result of real-time tracking. Anticipation in the context of datafication refers to the act of looking forward to a later action by relying on data of past behaviour. According to Anderson (2010), anticipation is concretised through two anticipatory practices: prediction and pre-emption. Prediction refers to foretelling the future based on observations and experience, which is perfected in the context of datafication, since the likelihood with which a certain development will appear can be calculated on ever larger amounts of data. Pre-­ emption refers to practices and acts that prevent certain developments and behaviours from taking place. The aim is to forestall and preclude harmful threats. Based on predictive calculation, pre-emptive actions are also supposed to prevent concrete determinants from emerging in the first place. Following these definitions, the anticipatory practices of prediction are a presupposition for pre-emptive activities. Calculations based on big data that are at the heart of anticipatory practices seem to be addressing the future, but as Cheney-Lippold (2017) with reference to Gandy (2000) argues, prediction is inherently conservative and past oriented as it is based on historical data. Anticipatory practices such as prediction and pre-­ emption, rather than being future oriented, hence reproduce and reinforce assessments and decisions made in the past and contribute to a programmed vision of the future. Similarly, Coleman (2018) takes the seemingly future-oriented temporalities of datafication as a starting point, but instead of focusing on the future or the past, she argues that anticipation, prediction and pre-emption constitute a multiplication of the present. She explores how various digital media produce different forms of the present including liveness, immediacy, and also bring the future into the present through anticipation and prediction. The temporalities of datafication are in that sense not about projecting a visionary future that needs to be actively constructed, but instead reinforcing established models and analyses. Rather than being concerned with the future, temporalities of datafication seem to be trapped in the past and present.

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Prison Temporalities Similar to the dominant temporalities of datafication that are constructed around anticipation, prediction and pre-emption, the lived experience of time in the prison context seems to be trapped in a precarious form of the present. The experience of time and the loss of temporal autonomy is one of the major topics discussed in ethnographic accounts of life inside prison. In her seminal article, Medlicott (1999), for example, describes prison life as consisting of endless repetitions and the temporal ambivalence of the prisoner’s experience of, on the one hand, suspended normal lives, while, on the other hand, their bodies and identities age. Prisoners are losing their temporal autonomy as they are disciplined through time-based routines and completely exposed to external authority regulating their time use that is translated into excessive counting and observing of prisoners. Meisenhelder (1985) argues that the structure of time in prison differs considerably from that of everyday life and is characterised by a suspension of the life outside, endless repetitions and strict schedules imposed on the inmates. Foster (2016) explores the experience of waiting in a prison visitors’ centre and refers to Sykes (1958) seminal notion of “pains of imprisonment” to capture what the wait encompasses for both visitors and incarcerated and how the painful temporality of the prison is extended beyond the walls into the lives of family members and friends of the incarcerated. Similarly, Turnbull (2016) refers to the lived experience of waiting in the uncertain and unpredictable context of detention centres as embodied experiences of insecurity and loss of temporal autonomy. Kotova (2019) develops the notion of temporal pains of imprisonment to analyse the experiences by female partners of long-term prisoners in the UK. She argues that prison time extends beyond visitation time and that research also needs to consider the deprivation of mundane family experiences as a consequence of the prison sentence. Kotova furthermore explores processes of adaptation and change over time that often female partners go through in reaction to the prison sentence as a way to cope with experiences that have been described through temporal metaphors such as dead time, out of time, doing time representing the permanent state of waiting and suspension of life. It is hence not only prisoners who are deprived of temporal autonomy, but also their families. Armstrong (2015) argues that the penal power of the prison is exactly the disciplinary function of waiting, while the temporality of waiting is translated spatially into the prison cell. The prisoners are, however, not

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only punished by being put into the specific space of the prison (and the prison cell), but also in terms of compartmentalised temporality, that is, time is sliced up into spatio-temporal boxes that line up into a linear narrative of punishment, prison sentence and rehabilitation. However, according to Armstrong (2015), the key point of the prison and other disciplinary institutions is not to produce the ideal subject as an actually existing person, but rather to reproduce an idea of this subject that is impossible to be realised. Hence, this impossibility of achieving the ideal subject becomes the productive motor of repetitive and eternal processes of control. The future in the prison context is often only implicated in terms of rehabilitation. Carvalho et  al. (2015), for example, emphasise individuals’ future time perspective (FTP) as having positive effects on the rehabilitation process. In that sense, the temporalities of datafication and the prison world overlap in their focus on the present. At the same time, datafication complicates the present through providing different layers and regimes of the present within the prison context. This layering of the present of prison temporality through datafication will be explored in the following section through the notion of the smart prison.

Smart Prisons The initiative to discuss smart prisons, namely the wider introduction of smart or digital technologies in prisons and prison administration, is mainly driven by the prison industry and dominant actors in this field such as Johnson Controls, ST Engineering and GTL. The latter company is a US telecommunications company that was founded in 1980 to provide inmate calling services. Since then, their scope has widened to include a range of services for communication and control within the prison environment. Johnson Controls and ST Engineering are more diversified conglomerates with a global reach that not only provide smartness for prisons, but also develop solutions based on datafication and AI for different social areas such as public transportation, military and industrial facilities. ST Engineering specifically has also been developing solutions for so-called smart cities, such as for example autonomous mobility, cyber security and robotics. Smart cities are related to smart prisons insofar as they also represent an attempt to integrate digital networks and AI into physical space (of a city). As is the case in smart cities, the smart prison also rests upon restructuring the space—and its temporal regimes—through i­ ncorporating

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commercially developed technologies and to increase the corporate influence over the structuring of the prisons and the way that time is done within them. If the scholarly literature on smart prisons is almost non-­ existent (to our knowledge, there is no scholarly literature that addressees the smart prison and its political implications critically), there is however a growing body of work on the smart city (see, e.g. Halpern 2015). Kitchin (2014), for example, distinguishes between smart city conceptions that focus on (a) pervasive and ubiquitous computing to monitor and structure the city and (b) information communication and technology (ICT)-enabled smart planning processes of urban development that also include an emphasis on creation and knowledge. Both approaches build on the idea of implementing and integrating digital devices and infrastructures into the cityscape in order to produce large-scale data in real time. With the help of the harvested data, life in the city is supposed to be analysed in real time, allowing new forms of government that are more efficient, sustainable, competitive, productive, open and transparent (Kitchin 2014). While the first conception of the smart city is characterised by short-term forms of anticipating and working towards a programmed future as discussed previously, the second approach to the smart city is more open to future visions that are not predicted based on big data analysis gathered through smart devices, but emphasise the open-endedness of city development with the help of smart technologies. In the discourses about the coming of smart prisons, there is a similar division between enhanced possibilities for short-term forms of datafication emphasising a programmed future on the one hand and enhanced long-term models and programs for reform and normalisation for an open-ended future on the other. This follows from the two main and longstanding ideas of the prison as such: incapacitation and punishment on the one hand and normalisation, rehabilitation and readjustment on the other. Following this, and similar to Kitchin, we hence distinguish between a focus on (a) smart technologies that are based on ubiquitous computing with a focus on control, management and surveillance and (b) an approach to smart development in the prison context that also includes the introduction of technologies for prisoner’s rehabilitation.

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Smart Surveillance and Control: Programmed Vision of the Future Although the use of digital media technologies in the prison context is still limited, there exists an increasing number of areas where such technologies are employed. The most common ways that digital technologies make an entry into prisons are solutions offered by different companies that allow for ubiquitous computing to track, manage and control prison populations. Smart closed-circuit television (CCTV) systems that analyse behavioural patterns and that detect suspicious behaviour are one example thereof, while audio surveillance systems, which can analyse conversations within the prison and phone calls to the outside world, are another. Singapore has started to work towards a prison without guards, in which such technologies will be responsible for all the surveillance and control needed in the correctional facility.2 One example of smart digital technology in the prison context is Spartan by Guardian RFID.  The Android-­ based handheld device is equipped with radio frequency identification (RFID), Wi-Fi, push-to-talk as well as high-resolution imaging to be used to automate security rounds, for headcounts, inmate activity tracking and more. The Web site advertising the device suggests to “Centralize your inmate identification, security rounds, and activity logging into one powerful platform that integrates with your jail or offender management system. Maximize your defensibility, mitigate risk, and gain lightning-fast, real-time reporting with corrections most powerful Command & Control platform” (GUARDIAN RFID 2019). The Web site of Guardian RFID gathers not only various case trials and blog posts about the advantages of moving towards RFID logging and Cloud services, it also collects the voices of administrators, wardens and sheriff office officials. Most of the blog posts and user testimonies are concerned with the increased efficiency in controlling and surveilling inmates in real time and with less error, including the following: Real-time Insight: “GUARDIAN RFID helps us make data-driven assessments about inmate observation and classification levels. We’re measuring staff performance on our security rounds in real-time, which helps us manage compliance with jail standards.” Lt. Belinda Jackson Brazos Co. Sheriff’s OfficeBryan, Texas (GUARDIAN RFID 2019)

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Hence, it is not only the prison population that is controlled and supervised efficiently with the help of Guardian RFID, but also the guards and other members of staff. Besides selling specific devices, Guardian RFID also offers help with the complete outsourcing of server capacity, storage and processing of the data that are collected automatically.3 Common for attempts to use digital technologies to survey and control prison populations is then that the collection of a range of different kinds of data into common and remotely stored databases opens the possibility for analysing them in real time, with the goal to predict and pre-empt unwanted behaviour among the incarcerated individuals. The Offender Management System developed by GTL, for example, promises to collect and handle “information on all aspects of an inmate’s incarceration” (GTL 2019). For one thing, these technologies create an increasing desynchronisation of the different speeds of prison time that are expressed in how smart technology is imagined to change the prison culture. For the individual inmate, the experience of doing time often is one of slowness, routine, waiting and the general—and intentionally created—feel of time (one’s individual lifetime) as inhibited or put on hold. The smart system is imagined to increase, on the contrary, the pace of data collection and processing that is—and always has been—a part of how time is done to the inmates. When procedures of gathering and making sense of data are increasingly automated and integrated in smart systems, they can furthermore produce immediate results and actions. For example, a deviant pattern of movement within a smart CCTV system might lead to the automated response of doors locking. The fast pace of technological temporal regimes, then paradoxically, serves the purpose of increasing or at least maintaining the slowness, routine and inhibition of time that is the existential experience of the inmates, since the purpose of surveillance and control is to make sure that nothing (unexpected) happens. Unexpected means here that the prison institution is organised based on programmed future visions of correct behaviour of both inmates and guards that is enacted with the help of smart technologies. This programmed future vision of the prison relates to the dimension of smart surveillance and control and the increased importance of past actions for the patterning of the inmates’ existence and for future predictions. Since a multitude of different kinds of data is not only collected but also stored and continuously analysed, and since smart systems rely on machine learning from past patterns, this temporal dimension becomes increasingly important

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for the management of incarcerated individuals and the predictions of their future that is used in attempts to rehabilitate them and help them adjust to a future life outside of the prison. This is a point we will return to below.

Smart Normalisation: Open-Ended Future Visions In contrast to technologies for the improvement of surveillance and control, there have been fewer attempts that approach digitalisation of the prison from a perspective including smart technologies for rehabilitation and improvement of the everyday life of prisoners. The discourse on digital and smart technologies in the context of prisoners’ use is mainly dominated by ideas to increase efficiency and security. For example, it is argued that self-service stations to let prisoners order certain goods or appointments with doctors or lawyers, which have been introduced for example in prisons in the UK and Belgium, increase processing speed and hence efficiency. In Belgium, authorities have experimented with a service platform called PrisonCloud that should standardise and gather all kinds of digital services including access to different media, self-service stations and contact with family and friends (Knight and Van de Steen 2017). Often these initiatives are reproducing a short-term perspective of speed and efficiency in the everyday management of the prison and rarely include a long-term approach towards rehabilitation and normalisation that includes digitalisation and datafication to improve and enact an open-ended future vision for the prisoners (Knight 2018). The criminologist Knight (2018) is one of the few who suggests such an approach. She defines the smart prison in a way that is radically different from the discourse prevalent among the international corporations discussed above. The smart prison for her is an environment that is user focused, reduces limits to access digital technologies and instead provides a continuous flow of access-cell-workshops-education-leisure. The smart prison also uses the gathered data to inform management about the prison population for administrative and punitive purposes, but this is not the first and foremost priority (Knight 2018). She furthermore argues that digitalisation can enhance digital literacy of prisoners, improve contact with the family and in general contribute to the wellbeing of the incarcerated and, in that sense, reinstate temporal autonomy at least to a certain degree and open up for a future outside of the prison and criminality. For the administration, digital technologies improve information sharing

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opportunities, public confidence and cost benefits. On the policy level, datafication of the prison potentially contributes to evidence-based decision making (Knight 2018). In this interpretation, the smart prison is a facility that utilises digital technologies and the connected process of datafication in order to contribute to the normalisation approach that is a dominant prison regime in Norway, Sweden, Finland as well as Denmark and Iceland. The normalisation approach emphasises that life in prison should resemble as much as possible life outside of prison walls, including stable structures of everyday life such as work and leisure activities. The approach is furthermore expressed in collegial prisoner-guard relations and a commitment to providing reliable social services including education and job training to prisoners and staff (Reiter et  al. 2018). To some extent, the normalisation thesis is coexisting in the narratives of surveillance and control, while new smart products and solutions are often marketed as both giving new opportunities for rehabilitation and control alike. Rehabilitation, for example, could take place through extended possibilities for incarcerated individuals to communicate with friends and loved ones. At the same time, the possibilities for control are deepening, for example, through automated monitoring of calls or inmate messaging systems, which affords possibilities for offenders to keep in touch with people outside the prison through text messaging, while simultaneously intensifying the possibilities of surveillance. The idea of normalisation has always been strongly future oriented, but not in a sense of programmed future of preventing unwanted behaviour such as fights, but enabling the prisoners to develop alternative future visions that depart from the criminal past. The discussion above makes clear that there is a desynchronisation between the short-sighted focus on programmed future visions and open-­ ended futures that are emphasised to different degrees through the temporal layers of digital media technologies of the smart prison. While digital technologies are increasingly used to make control, surveillance and administrative processes within the prison more efficient, prisoners themselves are in general still excluded from the advantages of using digital media. More concretely, datafication processes are implemented almost exclusively to control and survey prisoners. Digital media are rarely employed for rehabilitation and preparation for life after the prison sentence, while research increasingly discusses the many ways of how the use of digital media could contribute to normalisation and reintegration (McDougall et  al. 2017; Scharff Smith 2012). This desynchronisation

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becomes particularly visible when comparing the advertisement for ­surveillance tools such as Guardian RFID, which focuses on technological innovation and the cutting-edge character, while the everyday of prisoners is characterised by the spatial environment deprived of digital media as pictured in Fig. 7.1. It is only very recently that Swedish detention centres have started to allow access to social media in common rooms as depicted in Fig. 7.2. Access is tested currently in one institution and is restricted to migrant detainees that have received the decision to be deported to their countries of origin. This desynchronisation between the potentials of datafication

Fig. 7.1  Average cell in one of the latest prison facilities built in Sweden (Saltvik), photograph published by the Swedish Prison and Probation Services on the Kriminalvården (2018) Web site

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Fig. 7.2  Omkrim Magazine 2018, “Connected and save in detention,” photograph published by the Swedish Prison and Probation Services on the Kriminalvården Web site

and digitisation for surveillance and control on the one hand and ­rehabilitation and normalisation on the other mirrors increasing divides in society in general. This increasing divide is not only situated on the level of access and literacy, but particularly on the level of control, agency and power over the data gathered. While users have access to a broad spectrum of digital applications and services, the consequences of datafication often remain opaque and hard to grasp in what Pasquale (2015) has termed the Black Box Society. In that context, critical scholars have pointed to the loss of control over our data in general, which is particularly palatable in the context of prisons. Prisoners are probably one of the best surveilled, datafied and documented populations in society without having the choice of opting out because of privacy concerns. Privacy of prisoners is severely limited for prisoners for security concerns and as part of their punishment, even though prisoners retain some constitutional rights. If these fundamental rights are, however, in conflict with the regulations of the prison administration, the prisoners have the burden to show why the regulation

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is unreasonable and the constitutional rights should outweigh the ­regulation of the prison (Akrap 2016). In that sense, the prison becomes a space where new surveillance technologies can be tested without privacy concerns that users sometimes raise outside the prison walls. Prisons make visible a dystopian version of the future of datafication when constitutional rights and privacy concerns are not expressed, and they become the obvious example of data injustice (Dencik et  al. 2016) that is not removed from society but that is its archetype.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have argued that prisons are vital to understanding datafied societies and in particular emerging temporalities of datafication, as they allow for the exploration of emerging temporal layers that are partly contradicting each other and are an expression of the ambivalent character of datafication. Datafication and digitalisation in the prison context emphasise speed and acceleration as well as anticipatory temporalities of prediction and pre-emption rather than a temporality of long-term future orientation including ideas of rehabilitation. These data temporalities of the smart prison often underline ideas about the future that are focused on short-term results: they are about the pre-emption of conflicts in the prison building, controlling hot spots and the prediction of behaviour of prisoners, based on data of past behaviour and statistical models. Datafication in the prison strongly emphasises the past that is folded into the present—what prisoners have done and are doing. This means that the use of digital technologies is focused on the control of unwanted behaviour by pre-empting it through predictive data analysis. This predictive data analysis based on past records and behaviour and hence bases the evaluation of the present on past actions and in that sense acts conservative rather than progressive. Rather than assisting prisoners with developing strategies for a future that is not decided upon yet, but that needs enactment and involvement, the focus is on preventing immediate harm. Based on this discussion, we argue for a number of broader questions that need further exploration. Firstly, one can ask if datafication represents a shift in the temporal regime of the prison, from being a prime example of a modernist and future-oriented temporal regime of control and inspection (such as in the Panopticon of Jeremy Bentham) to a more anti-­ modern temporality. If modernity and its institutions have emphasised ideas about the individual that are in constant need of undoing and rein-

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venting, datafication, which emphasises past behaviour, works towards the very opposite. Secondly, does datafication lead to a dehumanisation of the prison and society in general? If we are increasingly relying on statistical models and delegate decision making to algorithms, one could argue that not only the individual prisoner and his life history is disappearing, but that automation leads to a deprofessionalisation of the staff, that is, the guards and prison administration. This ultimately ends in a prison without guards, as anticipated in Singapore. Thirdly, we can ask if datafication allows for a form of deep pre-emption that is not only based on observable past behaviour but also includes the analysis of sentiments and affective and inner reactions from the incarcerated individuals. Through datafication, the surveillance and control of emotional and psychological aspects of prisoners’ lives could be enhanced in order to not only prevent physical escape attempts but also affective and imaginary ones. All of these emerging questions are related to a paradox of datafication in the prison context. In order to allow for anticipatory actions in the form of prediction and pre-emption, prisoners need to act on and with digital media in order to produce data. Without any digital engagements, no data from which statistical models can be calculated is produced. Hence, with the need for data, there might come more communicative freedom. This engagement paradox of datafication holds also true for the world outside of the prison. As Dencik (2018) has argued, we are living in times of surveillance realism, where it is hard to imagine an existence without digital media that allow for datafication implementing different forms of corporate and state control. The convenience and promise of enhanced experiences holds users within the digital realm, accepting the reality of datafication and surveillance, the data prison that we choose ourselves.

Notes 1. Eigenzeit is here understood as a temporality that is inherent to the specific machine or media in contrast to what Nowotny (1994) has described in her notion of Eigenzeit that refers to a form of time proper encompassing a certain combination of beliefs in relation to the future, past and present—a kind of structure of feeling in terms of temporality. 2. https://www.prison-insider.com. Accessed 13 April 2017. 3. https://guardianrfid.com/blog/why-jails-should-switch-to-mobileinmate-tracking

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van Dijck, J. (2014). Datafication, dataism and dataveillance: Big data between scientific paradigm and ideology. Surveillance and Society, 12(2), 197–208. Weltevrede, E., Helmond, A., & Gerlitz, C. (2014). The politics of real-time: A device perspective on social media platforms and search engines. Theory, Culture and Society, 31(6), 125–150.

CHAPTER 8

Media Futurism: Time Warps of Future Media Homes in Speculative Films and Corporate Videos Deborah Chambers

Introduction Homes of the future, known as smart homes, present dazzling digital settings for new sensory inputs into the domestic experience, shaped by new media and communication gadgets and automated systems. This chapter deals with a specific kind of mediated time: imaginings of media futures. Whilst research on media time attends to the temporal routines and memories associated with media schedules and content, mediated time also concerns how media futures and pasts are imagined and realised. Media time is approached in this chapter as a technological and discursive periodisation of the past, present and future. Taking a diachronic rather than chronological approach, the chapter explores the temporal dimensions of media change by studying utopian visions of the media future. A case study of corporate visions of the future home is undertaken to understand the discursive narratives and new media rhetoric comprising the mediation of future time. The focus is on anticipated media and

D. Chambers (*) School of Arts and Cultures, Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 M. Hartmann et al. (eds.), Mediated Time, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24950-2_8

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communication technologies conceived and popularised by corporate ­speculative films and videos of the future home and centred on two periods: the 1960s and the present (from 2010 onwards). This imagined future home has been referred to at various junctures as homes of tomorrow, homes of the future, smart homes and connected homes (see Aldrich 2003; Chambers 2016; Morley 2007; Spigel 2005, 2010). Little academic attention has been paid to the role played by these corporate visions in conceptions of media time, yet these texts offer a lens through which to explore how media futures are conceived through and driven by the promotion of not-­yet-­realised or about-to-be launched technologies. A critical study of corporate speculative and concept films1 of the future home made in the analogue past, computer past and digital present is undertaken to trace the temporal imagery associated with what I call media futurism. The titles selected for analysis are The Home of the Future: Year 1999 A.D, The Monsanto House of the Future and A Day Made of Glass. These filmic images of the future comprise companies’ initial visualisations of their media technology innovations. Involving media products at their conceptual or launch stage and often set many decades into the future, they form corporate attempts to fix positive meanings to emergent technologies. They entail discursive fantasies of impending futures expressed in documentary or fictional forms, usually revolving around family life in a smart home world. Speculative films are often the public’s first encounter with a new media technology. Today, they reach wide audiences across public, business and technological sectors via corporate investor days and trade fairs, Android forums, and tech Web sites such as Engadget, Wired and Gizmodo. The associated roles of futurist agents and facilitators involved in the design, promotion, marketing and framing of media-oriented aspirations for future everyday life are also considered. Companies specialising in consumer electronics, computer and Internet-related products and services include giant tech companies such as Apple, Samsung and Microsoft, who position themselves as drivers and symbols of media futures. The following analysis uncovers the enactment of a double mediation of future time: first, via speculative films and videos as a distinctive futuristic media genre; and second, via materialisations of the media in certain futures. I argue that, through this double mediation, media futurism operates to frame and circumscribe the meanings of the changing home. Discourses of media futurism present future media homes as a series of time warps involving a set of temporal scenarios abstracted from

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the muddle of daily life and conveying a technologized time to come that foregrounds personal agency, immediate connectivity and a dilation of a personalised time and family time.

Approaching Media Futurism Analyses of imagined alternative futures now play a major role in assessments of policy advisers’ accounts involving future change. How future challenges are addressed can define whole research agendas and policy solutions to create preferable futures (Bina et al. 2016; Keenan et al. 2012; Urry 2013, 2016). Recognition that speculations can facilitate explorations of the future is exemplified by the grand challenges of the twenty-first century identified by programmes of the European Research Area and Horizon 2020. They steer European science policy to shape a future for dealing with global issues such as pollution and climate change (Bina et al. 2016). In the case of digital media and big data, such programmes are now viewed as essential for studying the digital futures that might materialise (Galloway 2013, p. 60). As Coleman and Tutton (2017, p. 444) warn, such processes of fixing the future “often assume that time is a neutral container that moves inevitably, automatically and progressively, from past to present to future” (my emphasis). Moreover, Adam and Groves (2007) argue that certain speculations about the future can narrow down options about the kinds of processes, products and practices to be invested in and enabled. For instance, in their consideration of the speculative logic of big data algorithms, Clough et al. (2015, p. 159) highlight the constrained marketised agenda of much future planning, arguing that: “A house is no longer a home, but rather a forecast of possible futures whether for commercial gain, knowledge of behaviour, or other reasons”. Likewise, Grossberg (2010) cautions that the future is often managed as a pliable political, cultural or economic resource by governments and corporate agents that exploit the future to serve the immediate needs of the present. However, studies of futuristic discourses entail a tension about how to understand the intersection between the imagination and materiality involved. This tension is particularly germane to the study of the role of speculative films in mediated time. These films comprise imaginative fictions of future times to validate preferred media systems. To understand how future time is mediated, the question is how to explain the way futures are signified and enacted within purposeful practices (Tutton 2017).

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Two approaches are pertinent here: textual analyses of media representations and science and technology studies (STS). Textual approaches examine the way representations of media influence the way technologies of the future are imagined. Such analyses enable an understanding of how collective narratives about the meaning of technologies are cultivated and, importantly, how they influence technological development. For example, Harmon and Mazmanian (2013) study the creation of sociotechnical narratives about smartphones and smartphone users in advertisements and news articles to consider how emerging discourses frame and circumscribe debates about the meanings, identities and moral values associated with smartphone use. Dourish and Bell (2014) argue that shared narratives of a proximate future associated with ubiquitous computing originate not only from the activities and articulations of researchers and practitioners but also from science fiction. Research also confirms the use of science fiction imagery in factual narratives such as documentaries and popular science publications to promote an emerging technology as a cultural force driving the technoscientific agenda (Milburn 2002; Haran et  al. 2007; Mellor 2007). These kinds of imaginary forecasts are enabling technologies of the future by propelling design thinking about the present (Galloway 2013; Reeves 2012). Correspondingly, Jasanoff and Kim (2009) indicate that science fiction narratives about technology influence science and technology policy decisions. Such studies suggest, then, that corporate speculative films of future technology need to be taken seriously as imaginative yet potent fictions of future time and considered in relation to broader sociocultural values and ideals (also see Jameson 1982). An alternative approach, STS, addresses temporality and the future by drawing on social theories of time. This focus involves the study of early negotiating phases in a technology’s research and development to understand the role of hopes and expectations within new science and technology developments underpinning materialisations (Borup et  al. 2006; Galloway 2013). For example, Brown (2005) explains that various technoscientific contributors strive to invent certain kinds of futures at the expense of other conceivable futures. He argues that rather than forming a set of first causes, futures are built up from pre-figurings. These pre-­ figurings denote present vested interests involving chains of complicated assumptions, expectations, systems, tasks, interpretations and agreements over time that serve as proposals for the future. Pre-figurings are conditional, changeable and interconnected with the complex material and representational stages involved in the development of new technoscience

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(Berkhout 2006; Galloway 2013). Given this combination of representational and material dimensions of development, Adam and Groves (2007, p. 17) advocate a materialist account of the future involving futures-in-the-­ making or latent futures. Futures-in-the-making are processes of technological materialisation, often involving environmental matters such as global warming or nuclear radiation (see Urry 2011, 2016). Questioning the opposition between ideas and materiality as causal agencies, philosopher Charles Taylor uses a language of expectations to explain that a notion of the imaginary propels the collective practices performed as part of social life (Taylor 2003). He describes an imaginary that not only involves the present but also the future as a central feature of society. Extending beyond a representational approach, Marvin (1988) builds on Taylor’s concept of imaginary, calling for the incorporation of the imaginary into the history of media in the 1980s. She explains the significance of visions and fantasies in the history of electric media technologies. Marvin argues that the adoption of electric media technologies in the late nineteenth century depended on the ability of electrical engineers within their emerging professional status to convince the public of the usefulness of the invention and their own expertise. Following Marvin, media fantasies and mythologies are now recognised within media history as significant features of the early phases of technological innovation (Natale and Balbi 2014). Tutton (2017) also draws on Taylor within a sociology of expectations to understand the future. He engages with the question of “whether the future should be understood as imaginary, in terms of being ‘of the mind’, or as ‘real’, as having material form in the present” (Tutton 2017, p. 480). Bringing together science and technology studies and the concept of imaginary, Tutton (2017, p. 482) offers a material-discursive approach to consider the future as enacted in practice rather than solely representational or solely material terms. By approaching the future as performed through material-discursive practices, he states that “Discursive constructions of the future are not simply imaginative in the traditional sense but are thoroughly social practices. These practices are in turn implicated in forming certain materialities and with letting loose both intended and unintended consequences” (Tutton 2017, p.  488). Tutton argues that imaginations of the future are material as well as imaginary: real as well as residing in the mind. He employs the concept of a performativity of expectations to argue for a combination of textual and materialist analysis that

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overcomes the division between the real and the imaginary which characterises studies of the future. Drawing on Tutton’s approach, I employ the notion of performativity to understand how the future is mediated and enacted as a temporal dynamic. A material-discursive analysis recognises imaginaries as performative in the sense that they can generate material objects enacted in practices. This emphasis on the performative quality of speculations about the future offers a way to understand the intertwined imaginings and practices involved in present mediation of future time. Indications that speculative visions of the future are performative are exemplified by research on emerging technologies. For instance, the concept of relevant social groups developed by social construction of technology theory identifies certain groups and factions as actors who attribute meaning to technology (Bijker 2009). As Pinch and Bijker (1987, p. 30) state, these relevant social actors can be described as an “organized or unorganized [group] of individuals [who] share the same set of meanings”. Their ideas about the temporal organisation of media futures form an interpretive flexibility involving multiple possibilities (Bijker 2009; Liao 2018, p.  798). As technologies evolve, relevant social groups—such as tech companies—generate an institutional impetus to normalise or stabilise the technology’s meanings by reaching a wider consensus about the technology’s function, role, value and meanings (Bijker 2009; Borup et al. 2006; Liao 2018). Bringing together a sociology of expectations and a socialised conception of the imaginary, the concept of media imaginary is utilised here as an analytical tool to understand how the temporal dynamics of the futuristic media home are shaped by speculative films as performances (Chambers 2016). Rather than approaching time as a neutral container moving disinterestedly and progressively to the future, the notion of media imaginary enables us to uncover the temporal dimensions of fantasy media projections.

Early Media Time Warps: Homes of the Future Remarkably, the electronic smart home agenda predates the 1950s television (TV) home by three decades. Media futurism, as a performative fantasy, was already enacted by the 1950s via a smart home imaginary, first conceived in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s as homes of tomorrow. As architectural and technological imaginings of future domestic life, smart homes formed part of early twentieth century modernity. These

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functionalist designs were inspired by modernist art and architecture known as the International Style, based on a rejection of traditional neoclassical styles involving new technologies of construction such as steel, concrete, plastic and glass. Encompassing new or futuristic entertainment and automation technologies, homes of tomorrow were designed for public exhibitions to showcase the potential incorporation of electronics into domestic life. They were sponsored by large electrical, home appliance and communications corporations such as General Electric (GE), Kelvinator and institutes such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Horrigan 1986). Futuristic homes were inspired by science fiction, with many staying at the planning or exhibition phase (Spigel 2001a). Although several architectural plans and images of early twentieth century smart homes have survived, few speculative films remain.2 Among those remaining is Monsanto’s House of The Future. This prototype house was built by Monsanto Company’s Plastics Division in 1957 as a showcase for experimental plastics technology in the home. The film, Monsanto’s House of the Future was set 29 years into the future to imagine a 1986 home, featuring household appliances including a microwave oven and dishwasher. The prototype performed as a major attraction at Disneyland in California in 1957 as part of Disney’s Tomorrowland themed land park. It drew over 435,000 visitors in the first 6 weeks of opening and over 20 million sightseers before it was dismantled in 1967 (Keegan 2017). The film is introduced by an authoritative male voiceover: “In fabulous Disneyland Park at Anaheim, California where, in Tomorrowland, the future becomes the present, Monsanto Chemical Company Plastics Division presents the Monsanto House of the Future”3 (my emphasis). The film’s documentary style chronicles the growth of plastics in modern buildings from electrical appliances to floor coverings and insulation. A new documentary film produced in 2015 as part of Disneyland’s Diamond celebration titled Disneyland: 60 Years of Imaginearing (sic) Monsanto’s House of the Future4 shows features of the original 1957 film to reveal the home’s domestic interior. Through the eyes of a white nuclear family shown around the exhibit, we see the living room dominated by a futuristic TV set: a giant screen framed in white plastic standing on a cabinet with inlaid seating around it. Smaller, portable futurist TV sets are positioned in light, airy rooms with curving surfaces and built-in furniture including the bedroom and an open-plan dining room. Styled in space-age designs to convey modernity as progress, these were spaces that TV sets of the period had not yet fully colonised. The Monsanto house exemplifies

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the emergence of a genre of corporate speculative films that project a technologized future. Through the complex intersections between science, fiction, spatiality, design, speculation and mediated temporality, these analogue imaginaries were influential in steering public ideas about anticipated architectural futures (Spigel 2001a, 2005; also see for example, Hirshberg and Schoen 1974, p. 461). This distortion of the temporal boundaries of the home through the construction of the future home is an early example of a media time warp: a mediated warping of space in relation to an imagined time that moves people and objects from one period into another. This time warp forms part of the circulation of an excess or overabundance of signs and images generated by the new mass-communication technologies that gave rise to a Disneyland culture, characterised as a simulational culture (Baudrillard 1980, 1983). The futuristic home heralded a new domestic modernity as part of a consumer society (Jameson 1982). As a Disneyland exhibit, the Monsanto House was a “stylish promiscuity” (Featherstone 2007) of plastic and with the benefit of hindsight, a monster of pollution. The Monsanto House promised a future that never was: a technoscientific future home out of time, out of place, constructing a myth of the future as progress, yet a home never inhabited (Tutton 2017). Nevertheless, with these homes of tomorrow resting on a carefully developed vision of modern domesticity (Nixon 2017), new lifestyles were inspired by this trend. Expressed as a spectacle of science, technology and progress, early twentieth century modernity was not only conveyed by the automobile and space-age images. It was conveyed through new ideas about the domestic interior and the adoption of media technologies such as radio, the telephone, TV and gramophone players (Spigel 1992, 2001b; Chambers 2016). Within this set of social and cultural forces, the fantasy home of the future played a towering role from the early twentieth century onwards. Engineers, architects, designers and artists were enlisted as a group of cultural intermediaries (Bourdieu 1984, p.  326) to stage exhibitions for transforming the home into a site of domestic modernity. Modern homes were showcased at exhibitions such as Britain’s annual Ideal Home Exhibition, and ambitious international expos such as the New York World Fair (1939; 1964). These events provided the stage for a distinct modernist discourse of the material and visual features of the future home as a dwelling saturated with emergent media equipment and domestic appliances for home consumption. Within this modernist aesthetic, then, industrial designers and architects worked as media tastemakers, or what

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we can call future-makers to venerate scientific advances in technology and canonise not-yet-legitimate media gadgets for the home. Even though the World Fair’s visions of future were mostly unfulfilled, these fantasies gained traction from the late 1960s (Tutton 2017). In the 1960s, a genre of promotional films depicting the future home were produced by companies such as Ford and GE to project a new age of consumerism. One such film, produced in 1967 is titled The Home of the Future: Year 1999 A.D.5 Discovered in 2017 among materials in the Prelinger Archive,6 Year 1999 A.D. was sponsored by appliance and radio manufacturer Philco-Ford Corporation to celebrate their 75th anniversary. This film is a fictional, yet uncanny foretelling of the future home from a 1960s time point. A utopian future is staged through a prophetic discourse to reflect developments in computer science whilst avoiding logistical details. The story follows the life of a young white nuclear family who, on the eve of the twenty-first century, dwell in a house run entirely by a central computer. The 24-minute film is fascinating now, since the year 1999 has come and gone, yet for a film produced over 50 years ago, it is surprisingly accurate in its vision of the communication-oriented home of the future. Remarkably, Year 1999 A.D. predicts the Internet, online shopping, online weather checks, computer-aided education and wall-sized media screens. However, the narrative also assumes that a central house computer would drive these computerised tasks rather than the personal computers and handheld devices of today. Computerised power from a self-contained fuel cell supports environmental controls, an automatic cooking system, office, gym and “education room”, yet separate computer screens are used for separate activities. The set designs forming the aesthetic backdrop to this futuristic home convey a Star Trek flair combined with mid-century modernist styled furniture. The film begins on the beach where an eight-year-old boy, Jamie, is building a sandcastle in a hexagonal shape resembling a Monsanto house, to depict a flexible smart home dwelling. Jamie asks what year it is, pondering whether his family’s home computer knows everything about them. We meet father Michael, an astrophysicist working on a project on the colonisation of the planet Mars. This space-age trope propels the film’s futuristic theme to generate a space-age time. While Michael settles at a computer workbench in the digital home, the narrator refers to the “central home computer” as “one of the many 21st century devices that are

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part of the everyday life of the family”. The computer is described by the film’s narrator as: a secretary, librarian, banker, teacher, medical technician, bridge partner, and all-around servant in this house of tomorrow. All pertinent information about this family—its records, its tastes and reference material—are stored in these memory banks, available instantly to every member of the family.

A machine with rows of flashing lights is then shown, followed by a dashboard flaunting switches, buttons and an electronic display of hours, minutes and seconds. The scene shifts to son Jamie watching a wall-sized screen in the home’s “education center”. The space-age trope persists as Jamie is seen learning about the history of astronomy and space travel. On his wall-sized screen is a close-up of the surface of a planet with craters, followed by an image of a space vehicle and astronaut. “And so”, says the voiceover, “an era that began 500 years earlier, with Copernicus and Galileo ends as the first astronaut takes his first haunting steps on to the shores of the moon”. Accordingly, the narrator associates this future home with space technology, stating: “Yes, life will be richer… as space-age dreams come true”. Introduced as “wife, mother, part-time homemaker”, Karen is seen in the laboratory-style kitchen, representing conventional femininity. She responds to requests for lunch conveyed by father and son via computer screens by selecting a menu from the computer, which identifies the caloric value of the meal. Defrosted food in plastic containers emerge on a conveyor belt from a microwave oven. The narrator explains proudly, “split-­ second lunches, colour-key disposable dishes: all part of the instant society of tomorrow, a society rich in leisure and taken-for-granted comforts”. Later, we see Karen shopping online, referred to as “fingertip shopping” from home. The narrator explains: “This video console will be channelled into the store of her choice. There, a camera will scan a display of wares which she will select by push-button”. Michael is seen in his office shaking his head in response to a spendthrift wife. His office features an “electronic correspondence machine” described as a “home post office” for instant communication “anywhere in the world”. Michael’s printer delivers her receipts promptly. This “instant society” foresees a future home as a throwaway society based on planned obsolescence, creating a technologized time based on values of immediacy, speed and disposability. Yet here, future imaginings of home are also framed by past domestic and gendered

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traditions to herald a futuristic family time, yet this family time privileges masculinity. Corporate speculative films convey a privileging and normalisation of a masculine technoscientific future (Bina et  al. 2016; Hurley 2008; Gunnarsson-Östling 2011). Karen is a “stay-at-home mom” who has relinquished her teaching career for family life. She cooks and shops online, yet the narrator tells us that “the household demands on her time have been greatly diminished”. Importantly, these unyielding gender roles domesticate this bold prophecy of a technoscientific future, functioning to dispel audiences’ potential anxieties about this future imaginary. Accordingly, the traditional family trope functions to naturalise the future home. The values of speed, immediacy and technology-driven life generate a masculinized time accompanied by traditional moral virtues and ideals. These imaginaries confirm the intersection of domesticity, gender, science and temporal dynamics within media imaginaries of the future (see, e.g., Barad 2003; Kemper and Zylinska 2012; Opitz et  al. 2016). The home enters a future space-time, a media time warp that relies on the cultural and social potential of computers and a space-age imaginary. The values cherished in this domestic media time warp involve the assimilation of a particular kind of home, leisure and work that requires global reach and time-space distanciation (Giddens 1990), speed and immediacy (Tomlinson 2007) mediated by ICTs. Significantly, the film’s sponsor, the Philco-Ford Corporation, is a subsidiary of Ford Motor Company. In the 1960s, this corporation was designing and producing not only radios, phonographs, TV receivers and automobiles, but also missiles. This technological range produced by a single corporation reveals a seamless criss-crossing among science fiction, domesticity and the launch of the space age as technological and cultural forces. Representing the pinnacle of progress, the space-age motif underlying domestic computer advancement in 1999 A.D., corresponds with the aerospace and defence interests of Ford Motor Co., Ford Aerospace (1956–1990). Ford acquired Philco Corporation in 1961 and merged the two companies into Philco Aeronutronic in 1963 (Young 2003, p. 1). It became the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s primary communications equipment provider during the 1960s, and built the consoles in the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. By drawing on Hollywood-styled popular films, these imaginary technologies convey the benevolence and viability of a military technology-driven future (see Kirby 2010, p. 46).

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Related speculative films in the 1960s include At Home 2001, produced in 1967 and also conceived by Philco-Ford.7 In this film, American broadcast journalist Walter Cronkite, famous anchor man for CBS Evening News between 1962 and 1981, prophesies the nuclear family home of 2001. The film maintains the space-age trope to invoke space-age time. Cronkite tells us that “This home is as self-sufficient as a space capsule”, by drawing electricity from its own fuel cells. Again, the film endorses the trend of working from home, by dividing the dwelling into zones for work and zones for leisure. Consisting of a cluster of pre-fabricated modules, the living room of this mock-up home of the future comprises built-in and inflatable plastic furniture, a wall of luminescent panels of glass and a wall-­ sized colour, three-dimensional (3D) TV screen. Cronkite shows a wide computer console stretched across the end of the living room to control “a full array of equipment to inform, instruct and entertain the family of the future”. This includes options for the evening’s programmes such as a colour movie for the large 3D screen. Intriguingly, with late eighteenth century classical music playing in the background, Cronkite states, “all with the push of a button, we could momentarily escape from our 21st century lives and fill the room with stereophonic music from another age”. Thus, the benevolence of this computer-enabled home as a prerequisite of the digital age was set by the analogue-based computer past time warps of 1960s speculative films. Among the comments on the At Home 2001 YouTube site, one recent viewer responds prophetically: “Ah, the old days. When we used to have a future!”

Digitally Mediated Time Warps: Speed, Immediacy and Connectivity By the twenty-first century, governments had joined giant tech companies to actively push the smart home agenda. For instance, the UK government assigned £40 million for research on the Internet of Things in 2017, to enhance interconnectivity of systems such as household appliances as well as medical devices and urban transport.8 An example of a speculative film set in the digital present is A Day Made of Glass (2012), which produces a vision of near-future networked screen technologies. The film was produced for Corning Inc., an American multinational technology company dedicated to manufacturing glass for organic light-emitting diode (OLED) and liquid crystal display (LCD). Inviting us to “watch your day

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in 2020”,9 the film follows the daily temporal routines of members of a white heteronormative nuclear family around the home. The narrative showcases the possibilities for OLEDs to create digital displays in domesticated media and communication devices. The film displays a home in which the characters interact with glass-based technologies including wall-­ mounted TV, video screens, wall displays, desktops, countertop screens, handheld electronics and mirror screens. Originally created for Corning’s Investor Day in New York City in February 2011, A Day Made of Glass was discussed by the monthly online magazines that focus on emerging technologies such as Wired and Gizmodo. Within a month, it was the number one video on Unruly Media’s “Viral Videos Chart”. Despite lasting no more than five minutes with no dialogue, this fictional video attracted nearly eight million views on YouTube (Baar 2011). The narrative shares certain features with Year 1999 A.D., made over four decades earlier. It endorses temporal features of speed, immediacy, connectivity and technology-driven solutions as the highpoints of a technologized time to come. By mediating a new kind of technologized time, the film portrays a dilated time to deliver a type of time characterised as both personalised time and shared time. This technologized time is mediated by embedding smart technologies within a series of scenes of domestic and out-of-home temporal sequences that ease connectivity to open up intimate time and family time. The video begins with the caption: “7:00am In The Near Future”, set in a bedroom with floor-to-ceiling windows. We enter a time warp: a deviation from and distortion of the present, a twist into a future home set in 2020. A widescreen wall-mounted TV made of LCD TV glass—large format, ultra-thin frameless design—is shown as an alarm clock then activated by touch by the father to project the morning TV news programme. Then, in the bathroom, a mirror made of architectural display glass transforms into a computer screen at a touch so that the mother can update her electronic diary. Via a flat keyboard projected on the architectural display glass, she administers her emails while brushing her teeth. In the kitchen, father makes breakfast while watching a morning news programme projected onto the glass countertop. Children manipulate digitally animated family photo-videos projected onto a veneer-glassed fridge door by switching them around, enlarging them and drawing on the photographed faces. Via “handheld display glass”, father Skypes the grandmother. Again, associating femininity with consumerism, we see the mother driving a car, first to work and then to buy clothes in shops that

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offer an array of gadgets and glass screens to enhance the shopping experience. In the evening, the family gather together on a long settee in the living room, reminiscent of the 1950s TV family circle (Spigel 1992). They watch a movie on a 3D TV display glass screen that extends across the whole wall in front of them, evocative of the TV screen in the 1967 At Home 2001 film. A hologram-like image of planets in outer space jumps into the living room to project a close-up 3D image formed by the inference of light beams in front of the family. At bedtime, in this time warp, father lies in bed reading H.G. Wells’ Time Machine on portable display glass. This is a glimpse of a mediated time in 2020, made possible by multinational corporations. The technologized quality of this future digital time enables household agency expressed as efficient connectivity between home and public arena and a dilation of family time.

Future-Makers of a Technologized Time to Come Current and future smart homes are promoted and displayed at international trade fairs such as the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. This event showcases the latest consumer technology breakthroughs in smart home technology with more than 3800 exhibition companies involved, including manufacturers, developers and suppliers of consumer technology hardware, content and technology delivery systems. Companies such as Samsung, LG, Sony, Fitbit and Netflix hold press conferences at the show to announce their key products and services for the next year. The public are then offered access to the convention centres to view the latest gadgets, tech systems and staged corporate development conferences—also known as show-and-tell press conferences—which have become the staple of the tech world. Stakeholders representing factions and groups involved in emergent media and communication technologies congregate at these industry conferences that form part of a range of marketing strategies to forge future visions. Superstar status CEOs such as Apple’s Tim Cook and Google’s Sundar Pichai present themselves as cultural trailblazers by unveiling the capabilities of dazzling new products at staged events to the applause of admiring audiences. These cultural agents are today’s future-makers. Their conference spectacles are not only supplemented by a raft of marketing strategies such as advertisements and promotional videos. They are also boosted by copious consumer news reviews and reports on blogs and in

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online magazines about their consumer electronic products—from virtual reality to smartphones, tablets, cameras, smart TVs and the range of gadgetry that supports today’s digitalised home. Design and technology multi-author blogs and online news sites include Apple’s Macworld, All Home Robotics, TechAdvisor, Techradar (sponsored by international media group Futureplc), Gizmodo, Engadget, Slashgear.com and LiveSmart, to name a few. Most reviews adopt an informal, humorous, “matey” tone, tailored to their largely male readership. Such sites are central to the smart home industry. Performing as future-makers, they create a buzz about new innovations, providing informative, but also entertaining, quirky and geeky accounts. Their performances are complemented by multiple related blogs and online news sites such as Wall Street Daily that provides coverage of market-related issues.10 Through these collective representations and practices, the future is performed, endorsed and proclaimed within a complex range of social, political, legal, technological, commercial and everyday practices (Adam 2011; Berkhout 2006). Future-makers share visions and values about emerging technologies and the commercial imperatives set out by corporate schemes. Importantly, cultural codes and discourses frame the media future as a temporal as well as spatial ordering of life (Liao 2018). As the emergent media technologies develop, from augmented reality to TV screens, this broader group of cultural intermediaries engage actively in a process of normalising and stabilising the technology’s meanings at the vital imaginary stage, underpinning and forming part of media domestication. This is achieved not only by resolving design problems, but also by reaching wider agreement about the technology’s role, value and connotations (Liao 2018; Du Gay et al. 1997). A persistent privileging and promotion of middle-class masculine values corresponds with a geek culture (Mendick and Francis 2012; also see Wajcman 2004; Pechtelidis et  al. 2015). An overemphasis on the relevance of this broad group of male future-makers ensures that the social consensus achieved frames a masculinised media futurism. Future-makers project a distinctive type of time: a technologized time to come signified as personal agency characterised by instant connectivity between private and public realm.

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Conclusion Although it is tempting to dismiss these visual accounts of media futures as neutral, mythical and conjectural fantasies, corporate speculative films of the future allow us to consider the enactments of dominant agents who shape future time. Guided by the concept of media imaginaries and a material-discursive approach, this chapter has identified media futurism as a set of representations and performances that influence ideas and values about media technologies for future times. Created, staged and implemented by powerful corporate actors and endorsed by cultural intermediaries as a group of future-makers, speculative films generate media futures. These films act as resources and performances to popularise notions of a utopian technologized future as progress, combined with related promotional activities such as exhibitions, conferences and corporate press releases. Four key points relating to mediated time emerge from this study. First, media futurism is enacted through projections that entail a double mediation of a technologized time to come. These futuristic projections are facilitated, first, by a particular media genre and, second, by representations of media technologies of a specified future. Through this folding of futuristic genre and material form, distinctive media futures are performed and circumscribed. Second, these speculative narratives of homes of the future indicate that corporate visions of future media are essential to tech companies’ accounts of social change. As corporate speculative films and videos do not dwell on the technical details of the technology, we can infer that they have another purpose: that of inscribing recognisable values into the imaginaries to render the technology socially relevant, natural and intuitive. Thus, while contingent, corporate media imaginaries are not neutral forecasts. Corporate interests set discursive limits on media futures, thereby obstructing or weakening alternative collective imaginaries. By forging alliances and defining roles and agendas, companies’ speculative films exploit the future as a docile, political, cultural and economic resource to reproduce the status quo. In turn, these narratives set up audience expectations about future time and space by promoting whole lifestyles around new media technology as part of a consumer society. These discourses inevitably influence collective temporal imaginaries: projected as consumer habits and household dynamics including peoples’ relationships to temporal values and public and private space-time. Such temporal media forces are therefore central to a broader history of media and communication technologies.

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Third, media futurism is characterised by media time warps. The notion of time warps highlights speculative films’ distortions of the present through the discursive reordering of time, space and events to promote reliance on technology-driven solutions. These media time warps generate temporal sequences characterised by a technologized time: distinctive temporal rhythms and routines that domesticate future technology. In the analogue-based imaginary of Year 1999 A.D., technologized time is expressed as a space-age time: a time to come marked by speed and household agency, yet a time resolutely domesticated as a family time, yet family time is configured as a masculinised time signified by control of feminised consumption via the computerised home office. By contrast, in the digital depictions of A Day Made of Glass, this temporal reordering of time signifies personal time by promoting ideas of personal control and a dilation of personalised, intimate and shared time. Here, personal agency is expressed as a sophisticated enfolding of home into a place of work through efficient connectivity, time-space distanciation and a fetishization of immediacy and connectivity. Corporate visions of the future home celebrate a porous time that breaks down spatial boundaries between work and leisure through home-­ based computer-operated work stations, instant networked access to an outside world and the projection of outdoors into the home via large screens and windows. Yet paradoxically, this future time is also signified as a sealed non-place, a capsule removed from communities and nature, located in a space that excludes certain social groups and identities. Time warps are temporal abstractions: removed from awkward, contentious and competing social forces associated with social change. They lift home out of the present into a hermetically sealed future to foster a powerful vision of future smart homes as inevitably consumer-oriented time-spaces providing technology-driven solutions. Time warps also involve planned obsolescence characterized by either a favouring of disposable over recyclable media gadgets or an endless upgrading of materials such as glass screens. By fixing the meaning of the past and future media home, these time warps close down alternative versions of future media in the home. Finally, the idea of time warps draws attention to the entanglement of science fiction fantasies, technical design logic and prevailing social and cultural values within filmic imaginaries of smart home futures (see Dourish and Bell 2014; Jasanoff and Kim 2009), yet much science fiction veers towards a conservative approach to communication technologies, often displaying cultural institutions and roles that privilege white,

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­ rofessional middle-class masculinities at the expense of women, the workp ing class and black and minority ethnic groups (Attebery 2002; Pluretti et  al. 2016). Since speculative narratives are inspired by (non-feminist) science fiction discourses, it is unsurprising that they summon and embody masculine discourses. Speculative films and videos reflect the social actors creating this future: the future-makers. Researchers with computational skills continue to be male, and women in the UK make up only 11% of the engineering workforce (Peers 2018). The future-makers asking the questions about our future determine which questions should be asked, thereby influencing how the future will be shaped, resourced and enabled (Harding 2010; Forsythe 2001). Paraphrasing Webster (2013), the future is first imagined and then designed in the interests of certain dominant groups, and against the interests of others. To summarise, speculative films and videos are not only platforms for future media visions in their reordering of media time. They also promote media imaginaries about technology that rely on specific and powerful social and cultural values of the past and present. As corporate media futures have the potential to justify policy actions and shape cultural practices in the present, media futurism comprises an ethical issue within scholarship on mediated time. In this respect, it forms a central part of a politics of the present.

Notes 1. Corporate films and videos are referred to collectively as “films” hereafter. 2. For example, Prelinger Archives in the United States preserves corporate speculative films among its collection of “ephemeral films”, available at https://publicdomainreview.org/prelinger-archives/. Accessed 22 June 2018. 3. The Monsanto House of the Future by Monsanto Company’s Plastics Division at Disneyland, Bay State Film Productions, Inc., available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoCCO3GKqWY. Accessed 28 May 2018. 4. Disneyland: 60 Years of Imaginearing Monsanto’s House of the Future by Rick Conant, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UTueKrIuvw. Accessed 28 May 2018. 5. The Home of the Future: Year 1999 A.D., Tom Thomas Organization. Presented by Philco-Ford Corporation, available at https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=TAELQX7EvPo. Accessed 24 March 2018. 6. Prelinger Archives, op.cit.

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7. At Home 2001, Homes of the Future, Cronkite 1967, available at https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEtIfoS-toU. Accessed 17 June 2018. 8. See, for example, https://www.opengovasia.com/articles/6582-uk-government-launches-iot-programme-as-part-of-40m-investment; and the government review, Made Smarter: Review 2017, available at https://assets. publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/655570/20 171027_MadeSmarter_FINAL_DIGITAL.pdf. Both accessed 17 June 2018. 9. A Day Made of Glass, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= OptqxagZDfM. Accessed 24 June 2016. 10. Wall Street Daily, available at http://www.wallstreetdaily.com/ 2016/06/22/invest-smart-home-technology/. Accessed 24 July 2016.

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Hurley, K. (2008). Is that a future we want? An ecofeminist exploration of images of the future in contemporary film. Futures, 40(4), 346–359. Jameson, F. (1982). Progress versus utopia; or, can we imagine the future? Science Fiction Studies, 9(2), 147–158. Jasanoff, S., & Kim, S.-H. (2009). Containing the atom: Sociotechnical imaginaries and nuclear power in the United States and South Korea. Minerva, 47(2), 119–146. Keegan, N. (2017). Fascinating photos show the plastic 1960s house of the future. https://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/world-economy/fascinatingphotos-show-the-plastic-house-of-the-future-that-20-million-disneyland-visitorsflocked-to-in-the-1960s/news   story/1fbff5f11caeabc8f681cd9d9cf42e41. Accessed 19 June 2018. Keenan, M., Cutler, P., Marks, J., Meylan, R., Smith, C., & Koivisto, E. (2012). Orienting international science cooperation to meet global ‘grand challenges’. Science and Public Policy, 39, 166–177. Kemper, S., & Zylinska, J. (2012). Life after new media: Mediation as a vital process. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kirby, D. (2010). The future is now: Diegetic prototypes and the role of popular films in generating real-world technological development. Social Studies of Science, 40(1), 41–70. Liao, T. (2018). Mobile versus headworn augmented reality: How visions of the future shape, contest, and stabilize an emerging technology. New Media & Society, 20(2), 796–814. Marvin, C. (1988). When old technologies were new: Thinking about electrical communication in the late nineteenth century. New York: Oxford University Press. Mellor, F. (2007). Colliding worlds: Asteroid research and the legitimization of war in space. Social Studies of Science, 37(4), 499–531. Mendick, H., & Francis, B. (2012). Boffin and geek identities: Abject or privileged? Gender and Education, 24, 15–24. Milburn, C. (2002). Nanotechnology in the age of posthuman engineering: Science fiction as science. Configurations, 10, 261–295. Morley, D. (2007). Media, modernity, and technology: The geography of the new. London: Routledge. Natale, S., & Balbi, G. (2014). Media and the imaginary in history. Media History, 20(2), 203–218. Nixon, S. (2017). Life in the kitchen: Television advertising, the housewife and domestic modernity in Britain, 1955–1969. Contemporary British History, 31(1), 69–90. Opitz, D. L., Bergwik, S., & Van Tiggelen, B. (Eds.). (2016). Domesticity in the making of modern science. London: Palgrave.

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Pechtelidis, Y., Kosma, Y., & Chronaki, A. (2015). Between a rock and a hard place: Women and computer technology. Gender and Education, 27(2), 164–182. Peers, S. (2018). Statistics on women in engineering. Women’s Engineering Society. https://www.wes.org.uk/sites/default/files/2018-01/Women%20in%20 Engineering%20Statistics%20-%20January%202018%20-%20created%20by%20 Sarah%20Peers_0.pdf. Accessed 20 June 2018. Pinch, T., & Bijker, W. (1987). The social construction of facts and artifacts. In W.  Hughes & T.  Pinch (Eds.), The social construction of technological systems (pp. 17–50). Cambridge: MIT Press. Pluretti, R., Lingel, J., & Sinnreich, A. (2016). Toward an “other” dimension: An essay on transcendence of gender and sexuality. International Journal of Communication, 10, 5732–5739. Reeves, S. (2012). Envisioning ubiquitous computing. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Austin, TX, pp. 1573–1582. Spigel, L. (1992). Make room for TV: Television and the family ideal in postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Spigel, L. (2001a). Media homes, then and now. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 4(4), 385–411. Spigel, L. (2001b). Welcome to the dreamhouse: Popular media and postwar suburbia. Durham: Duke University Press. Spigel, L. (2005). Designing the smart house: Posthuman domesticity and conspicuous production. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 8(4), 403–426. Spigel, L. (2010). Designing the smart house: Posthuman domesticity and conspicuous production. In C. Berry, S. Kim, & L. Spigel (Eds.), Electronic elsewheres: Media technology and the experience of social space (pp.  55–95). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Taylor, C. (2003). Modern social imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press. Tomlinson, J. (2007). The culture of speed. London: Sage. Tutton, R. (2017). Wicked futures: Meaning, matter and the sociology of the future. The Sociological Review, 65(3), 478–492. Urry, J. (2011). Climate change and society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Urry, J. (2013). Societies beyond oil: Oil dregs and social futures. London: Zed Books. Urry, J. (2016). What is the future? Cambridge: Polity Press. Wajcman, J. (2004). Technofeminism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Webster, J. (2013). Shaping women’s work: Gender, employment and information technology. London: Routledge. Young, G.  R. (2003). Mergers and acquisitions: Planning and action. London: Routledge (first published 1965, reprinted 2003).

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Films CBS (Producer) Walter Cronkite (Director). (1967). At home 2001, homes of the future, series: The 21st century [documentary]. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7TUZ_x57d8. Accessed 24 Mar 2018. Monsanto Chemical Company (Producer). (1957). The Monsanto house of the future [documentary film]. United States: Disneyland, Bay State Film Productions, Inc. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoCCO3GKqWY. Accessed 28 May 2018. Philco-Ford Corporation (Producer), Tom Thomas organisation (Director). (1967). The home of the future: Year 1999 A.D. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAELQX7EvPo. Accessed 24 Mar 2018. Rough House/Corning (Producers) Dave Mackie (Director). (2010). A day made of glass. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OptqxagZDfM. Accessed 7 Apr 2019. Walt Disney Company (Producer), Conant, R. (Director). (2016). 60 years of imaginearing: Monsanto’s house of the future [documentary: Disneyland Diamond Celebration]. United States: Walt Disney. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=2UTueKrIuvw&list=LL83lMqq8D3DzL1YAPgDrVXA&in dex=6. Accessed 7 Apr 2019.

CHAPTER 9

Emplacing (Inter) Mediate Time: Power Chronography, Zones of Intermediacy and the Category of Space Emily Keightley

Over the last decade there has been an increasing dissatisfaction with accounts of mediated time which pay singular or overriding attention to the temporal dynamics of acceleration and simultaneity and emphasise the defining role that technological speed plays in everyday temporal experience.1 In response, there has emerged a body of research that has sought to redress the varying degrees of technologically deterministic tendencies in work on what has come to be known as the high-speed society. In line with the work of Nowotny (1994), Adam (1995, 1998, 2004), Sharma (2014) and Wajcman (2015), I have sought to provide a more socially situated understanding of the nature of temporal experience and, more specifically, the role of media texts and technologies in its production. In doing so, I have argued that, in contemporary social life, our experience of time is one which is produced not simply in our uses and interactions with media, but also in our traversal of their multiple temporal affordances in situ. This results in an intermediate time (Keightley 2012) in which the various temporalities of media do not determine our temporal experience but are fundamental

E. Keightley (*) School of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 M. Hartmann et al. (eds.), Mediated Time, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24950-2_9

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elements of its composition. In this sense, mediated time is not simply technological, characterised by the rate at which data are transmitted from one point to another, but is also social and cultural. The practices of media use, which are part of continuous histories of communication, enfold temporal rhythms and expectations into our mediated experience. At the same time, the social, relational nature of the communication and representational practices, which are undertaken via mediated technologies, contribute further layers to our temporal experience. As Wajcman notes, while “technologies play a central role in the constitution of time regimes”, it remains the case that “technologies only come to life and have meaning as people adopt and use them” (2015, p. 3). It is therefore in the active navigation of these mediated times through which temporal experience comes into being, producing diverse and plural temporalities. This shift towards recognising and exploring the plural and multifaceted nature of contemporary temporal experience has, in no small part, required a reassessment of media and cultural studies’ tendency to spatialise time. This spatial bias in accounts of mediated time is discussed by Sharma (2014). She draws on Harold Innis’s theory of time-space bias to suggest that “concern with speedup today reflects not a culture invested in the temporal but a culture that operates with a spatial sense of time and as a result popular discourse as well as critical-theoretical accounts lack recognition of the cultural politics of time” (Sharma 2014, p. 12). From the temporal implications of theories of globalisation to the theorisations of diaspora, space has been conceived as the primary definer of social relations2 and temporality as a by-product of these socio-spatial relations. In response, Sharma developed the concept of power chronography, a temporal recasting of Massey’s power-geometry, in which she makes primary the temporal “as a structuring relation of power” rather than space and place (Sharma 2017, p.  134; Massey 1994). For Sharma and also for Wajcman, politicising time is not simply a case of identifying the temporal have and have-nots by a measure of quantified time, but rather a case of seeing temporal experience as marked by the conditions which one inhabits and that the social and understanding cultural temporal structures which shape and limit our experience can alleviate, reproduce or render invisible inequalities of various kinds. It is this expanded, experiential but deeply politicised notion of temporality that serves as the point of departure for this chapter. Correctives to technologically determinist tendencies of media studies’ accounts of time and a refocusing on time over space are necessary and very welcome

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­ evelopments in our understanding of the kinds of social and cultural lives d and systems that media are involved in. However, these accounts raise the question of how we reconcile refocusing of our attention onto temporality in our understanding of the experience and politics of everyday social life without losing a sense of the importance of the spatial in these self-same processes. This reconciliation needs to be achieved without falling into an inversion of the spatial subordination of the temporal through which the spatial experience becomes an effect of the temporal. It is precisely this ambition that Sharma articulates: “power chronography… is finally a means to balance space-time – to realize Massey’s invoking of space-time” (2014, p. 155n24). While Sharma’s work is primarily concerned with cultural politics, the practices and processes of mediation are not her central focus, so the question remains how this rebalancing can be achieved in specifically mediated experiences of time. In this chapter, I will take up Sharma’s call for a balancing of space and time as analytical lenses for understanding specifically mediated, or rather intermediate, modes of time. In order to do so, I will seek to reconceptualise zones of intermediacy (Keightley 2012, 2013) in order to reinsert a spatial sensitivity into this analytical framework. The conceptual framework of zones of intermediacy already implicates space, time and media. The primary function of the concept was to account for the ways in which the experience of time is produced through our negotiation of multiple temporalities, which include those which are produced in our interactions with and through media texts and technologies, in a given social context. The production of temporal experience is one that is enacted between the different temporal modalities of media and social life, animated by our own agency as experiencing subjects but always tempered, shaped and structured by the temporal regimes which characterise social and cultural life. The notion of a zone already encourages us to think about this time produced between media, between its temporal layers and between the social practices and processes in which it is embedded, as spatially mappable. Temporal zones are the experiential arenas in which multiple temporalities intersect and are navigated by experiencing subjects. However, the spatial dimension of the concept or in its applications has not yet been explored. In this context, the current limitations of the concept are twofold. Mediated temporal experience is not only socially situated, it is also embedded in place. To date, explorations of intermediate time have not considered the specific contribution of space and place as constituent elements of temporal experience. Secondly, while zones of

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intermediacy have been conceived as temporally mobile in the sense that they are emergent and mutable over time, they could be currently construed as spatially static. Given that mobilities (and immobilities) in space as well as time are so fundamental to late-modern experience, the ways in which various kinds of spatial mobility are implicated in (rather than being determinants of) temporal experience have to be accounted for in our understanding of zones of intermediacy and their operation. Not doing so undermines an increasing recognition of lived temporal experience as spatially mobile, produced in a state of movement between places. In what follows, I will consider how zones of intermediacy are shaped and performed within specific spaces and how this again shapes the nature of temporal experiences that are produced within them. I then go on to consider how zones of intermediacy are produced in these interstitial spaces of transitional experience, which could be as mundane as everyday micro-movements in the space between home and work, for example, to macro-level movements in space such as mass migration. Integral to this is attending to the specific ways in which media and communications texts and technologies are implicated in our movements in space and time. I will then use an extended case study example drawn from a body of over 100 qualitative interviews gathered as part of the Media of Remembering project, which explored everyday remembering and vernacular media,3 in order to demonstrate how accounting for space in the application of the conceptual framework of zones of intermediacy can develop a more sensitive understanding of the situated and mobile ways in which mediated temporal experience is produced in and between the everyday places of lived experience.

Reconciling Time and Space In rethinking the role of space in mediated experiences of time, it is productive to return to one of the most influential concepts which has reconciled or held in productive tension time and space as categorical interacting modes through which meaning is produced: the chronotope (Bakhtin 1981). In “Forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel”, Bakhtin conceives of the “chronotope (literally ‘time space’)” as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature… it expresses the inseparability of space and time, (time as the fourth dimension of space)” (1981, p. 84). While this appears to position time as an effect of space, for Bakhtin, “time is the dominant

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principle in the chronotope” (Bakhtin 1981, p. 86). Bakhtin’s chronotope is specifically developed as a feature of literary novels, each genre possessing its own specific chronotope. For example, he identifies three types of novels in the classical period, each with their own “corresponding methods for artistically fixing time and space” (Bakhtin 1981, p.  86). The “adventure novel of ordeal” features a distinct chronotope of adventure time, which is characterised by temporalities, such as chance rupture, simultaneity and random disjunctions, which are intertwined with spatial features. So being in the same place (at the same time) or not affords such narrative possibilities as meeting and parting, separation and uniting, escape (Bakhtin 1981, pp.  97–98). The second type is the “adventure novel of everyday life” characterised by “a special sort of everyday time”, which emphasises processes of metamorphosis, which again focuses on exceptional moments of crisis in a life in order to show “how an individual becomes other than what he was” (Bakhtin 1981, pp. 111, 115). Finally, Bakhtin identifies the biographical novel characterised by biographical time in which the idea of the human subject is one which “passes through the course of a whole life” (Bakhtin 1981, p. 130). For each genre or type, the chronotope acts as an organising centre “for the fundamental narrative events of the novel” (Bakhtin 1981, p. 250). At the same time, chronotopes are not mutually exclusive structural features; they are multiple across and between genres. In this sense, “chronotopes are mutually inclusive, they coexist, they may be interwoven with, replace or oppose one another, contradict one another or find themselves in ever more complex interrelationships” (Bakhtin 1981, p. 252). There are immediately obvious ways in which zones of intermediacy can be understood as chronotopic: that temporal meaning (narrative in the case of chronotopes and experiential in the case of zones of intermediacy) is produced through a number of coexistent and mutually constitutive times. In both cases, temporal and spatial constituent features interact to produce stories, either literary or as they are lived. What is elaborated in Bakhtin’s chronotope, but remains unelaborated in zones of intermediacy, are the ways in which these temporal meanings are also produced through the interaction of specifically spatial constituents which are inextricable from the temporal. In this rendering, we might conceive of a hypothetical zone of intermediacy as comprised of the multiple times: the dailiness of the news cycle, the immediacy of access to information on a smartphone, the syncopated rhythm of reading news online, the historical time of a memorial news item, our socially experienced time of a waiting room,

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overlaid by the weary time of the new parent. It is only when we add the spatial constituents of the zone—the doctor’s waiting room in which the news is being read, the Europe implied in commemorative images used on Holocaust memorial day or the car in which a piece of music is listened to—that the character of the temporal experience in the zone between media times is fully available to us. Taking the doctor’s waiting room as an example, it is being in this place at this time that produces the anxiety and anticipation of the doctor’s appointment which results in the nervous flicking between news items in combination with the paradoxical experience of temporal isolation and being-in-time together produced by the presence of strangers in the waiting room and in the news material we might flick through in that place which can draw into view spatially and temporally distant places. Seeing zones of intermediacy as chronotopic is at once a recognition of the plurality of times and spaces in representational forms that coexist and mutually constitute other (plural) temporalities which are at the centre of meaning-making without reducing the experiences that they produce as either effects of time or space, but precisely of their interaction and co-dependence. One of the risks of using Bakhtin’s discussion of chronotopes as a resource for rethinking the role of space in zones of intermediacy is the specifically representational and, even more specifically, narrative context in which he develops and applies the concept. One of the major differences between chronotopes and zones of intermediacy is that the latter focusses on lived time-space, while the former attends to literary or artistic time-space. A major motivation for developing zones of intermediacy as a concept is to redress a singular focus on technological, textual or other modes of time which have come to dominate contemporary discourse about the kinds of temporality produced and sustained by late-modern media and communications. In contrast, Bakhtin deliberately attended to one communicative mode: the novel. However, as Peeren has demonstrated, it is possible to rethink the chronotope, not simply as a textual feature, but as a socio-cultural practice of time-space construction, constituted and maintained through intersubjective interaction and cultural memory (2006, pp. 50–52). In this way, both literary chronotopes and those which exist in everyday lived experience are of “fundamental equivalence” in terms of function (Peeren 2006, p. 51). While Bakhtin may have seen literary chronotopes as reflections of chronotopes found in the social world (1981, p.  84), he does not position the production of temporal

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meaning through the novel as somehow determining other modes of lived time: [I]n the completely real-life time-space where the work resonates, where we find the inscription or the book, we find as well a real person—one who originates spoken speech as well as the inscription and the book—and real people who are hearing and reading the text. Of course these real people, the authors and the listeners or readers, may be (and often are) located in differing time spaces, sometimes separated from each other by centuries and by great spatial distances, but nevertheless they are all located in a real, unitary and as yet incomplete historical world set off by a sharp and categorical boundary from the represented world in the text. (Bakhtin 1981, p. 253)

Despite his reference to a sharp categorical boundary between experience and text, Bakhtin recognises that chronotopes as the space-time of the novel are situated within a broader system of temporal meaning-making that extends in both time and space and are animated by the experiencing subject. He hints at the possibility of seeing chronotopes as a micro-­ universe of time-space relations internal to texts (which we can apply to other forms of representational media alongside the novel), which exist and are interpreted in the various time-spaces of the temporally constituted subject. While recognising the delineation between textual time and social time, from the perspective of thinking through the operation of zones of intermediacy as they exist in social life, the task is to soften the boundary in order to understand the ways in which temporal experience is produced in and between the time-spaces of representational forms, technological modes of communication, cultural and social practices of use and the social contexts in which they operate in (and implicate) a given moment. It is this mutual interpellation of times and spaces in the production of meaning and, more specifically, of temporal experience that we find in the work of Adam and her concept of timescapes (2004). Beyond choosing the spatial concept of scapes, she addresses the intersection of time and space in the production of the very meaning of the lived environment, particularly those environmental hazards which characterise contemporary social life. She accounts for environmental space-times as produced through a range of interacting social, political, industrial natural and mediated times, but at the same time recognises these as produced in particular spatial contexts. In relation to the bovine spongiform encephalopathy

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c­ risis, these were temporalities primarily tied to national and supranational political spaces of the UK and Europe. What is significant about this recoupling of time and space is that it produces what we might think of as materialised temporalities—those that are tangible, meaningful and available to our apprehension in everyday discourse. As I have noted elsewhere, zones of intermediacy are closely aligned with Adam’s timescapes (Keightley 2013, pp. 207–208). Even taking into account the emphasis in zones of intermediacy on the role of media in the production of lived time, it is possible for them to account for the role of space and place in a manner broadly similar to that of timescapes by considering the ways in which particular spatial features of the zone/timescape contribute to and shape the temporalities produced within them. However, the zone of intermediacy was designed to extend the concept of timescapes to develop a better sense of precisely how we move between and synthesise the various times (of media and social life) which we encounter or, in other words, how the production of temporal experience is produced on the fly in a continually moving and shifting coagulation of times by those who navigate them. However, zones of intermediacy do not explicitly account for concomitant and mutually constitutive movements in space and place. It is necessary to incorporate a consideration of mobility in spatial terms as temporal meaning is produced via processes which are not only temporally mobile, changing in and through time and always implicating other times, but are also spatially mobile, always drawing in and moving between the spaces and places that inform them. How then can we account for this kind of spatio-temporal mobility in order to conceive of mediated temporal experience as produced on the move? It is necessary to go beyond a straightforward analysis of constituent time and spaces in zones of intermediacy and their relative contributions to the production of temporal experience. While, on the one hand, identifying the distinct temporal and spatial features of intermediate time is useful insofar as it highlights their distinctive roles in the composition of zones, on the other hand, it does nothing to aid an understanding of the mutual operation of these elements or how they are continually synthesised into experiences which exceed the sum of their temporal and spatial parts. In zones of intermediacy, unlike Bakhtinian literary chronotopes, these experiences are always emergent in relation to the continually moving experiencing subject. Analysing this movement requires grasping a sense of trajectory in the operation of zones of intermediacy which is produced through the interaction of movement in time and space and “involve

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a variety of interpenetrating media and modalities of communication” (Keightley and Reading 2014, p. 298). By attending to trajectories, it is possible to explore the interpenetration of time and space in a media-­ saturated culture without adopting a position which places time-space relations as one of inevitable compression or collapse.4 Attending to trajectories in zones of intermediacy “implies attending to both cause and process in order to think about mobility” in mediated movements between times and between spaces, “not simply in terms of free movement, but in terms of intentionality and unevenness in communicative relationships” (Keightley and Reading 2014, p. 297). This returns us to Sharma’s work on power chronographies in which she recognises that “time sensibilities… are always political, produced at the intersection of social differences and institutions”, and also to the work of Massey on power-geometry, from which she draws inspiration. By attending to trajectory (or rather trajectories) produced in zones of intermediacy as the experiential synthesis of movement in time and space, we are able to account for both the chronographic and the geometric elements of the production of mediated temporal experience and its political dimensions.

Diasporic Zones of Intermediacy In order to explore the ways in which trajectories are produced in a zone of intermediacy through the interoperation of their temporal and spatial features, it is most productive to adopt a case study approach. I have chosen to explore a zone of intermediacy as it was described in a qualitative interview drawn from a large qualitative research project Media of Remembering funded by the Leverhulme Trust (see footnote 3). This case study provides a specifically diasporic perspective on the production of temporal experience and the role of media in the emergence of that experience. As the selected case will illustrate, diasporic experience throws into sharp relief the complex temporal-spatial trajectories that can be in play in zones of intermediacy. As Peeren suggests, “diaspora identities [are] predicated on a removal not only from a particular location in space and moment in time, but also from the particular social practice of space-time through which a community conceptualizes its surroundings and is own place in them. Diaspora then emerges as a particular form of doubled chronotopical interpellation, as a dwelling-in-dischronotopicality” (2006, p. 49). In this way diasporic experience is shot through with the movements between there-thens and here-nows and is therefore characterised by

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an especially complex set of relations to being in time and space. I hope this example will illustrate the value of analysing zones of intermediacy in order to explore the intertwined social, cultural and political dynamics which interpolate the spatialised temporalities of postcolonial experience. It is the refraction of power imbalances intrinsic to postcolonial diasporic experience through the politics of the nuclear family which recalls us to Sharma’s concept of power chronography in the sense that power relations are both structured by, and in turn produce, particular situated forms of time-space relations and spatio-temporal experiences. The case study I present here is based on an interview with a young woman who we are calling Kia. At the time of the interview (excerpts from which are cited below), she was in her early 30s living at home with her parents in a midlands city in the UK. Her parents are first-generation migrants to the UK from India, and she herself was born in India but raised in the UK, and she identifies as a second-generation migrant. I have chosen Kia as a case study for the reason that she discusses at length and in great detail her struggles with transitions across and between the UK and India, but also in relation to her cross-generational interactions as a second-generation migrant, reflecting closely the dischronotopical challenges Pereen (2006) has described. These challenges were certainly visible in varying degrees across the interviews that were collected, but not often in such extensive, reflexive and detailed ways. The interview centres on Kia’s use of a particular media of remembering: photography. Photography is not a media technology that is included in the category of time-based media, which is reserved for those media with temporal duration. However, through the exploration of Kia’s uses of photography, this exclusion seems somewhat arbitrary. It is precisely through the taking, viewing and curation of photographic images that Kia negotiates a sense of being in and being through time which are comprised of often competing temporalities. Photographs and photographic practice are central to producing what I have called elsewhere generous forms of time associated with zones of intermediacy (Keightley 2012, p. 19). At the time of the interview, Kia was restless living at home and had a somewhat tense relationship with her parents. At the same time, she was exploring her emerging identity as a professional photographer: The reason I got into photography is because there were lots of questions about who I am and where I’m going and why. Things are the way that they are with my life and the cultural conflict between myself and my parents. I

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realised there was a real gap in communication between my generation, which is second-generation Indian, and with my parents’ generation, which is first-generation Indian.

In the interview with Kia, we explored a range of her inherited family photographs as well as images that she had taken herself. The unpacking of a particular box of images and looking through them revealed a particular zone of intermediacy which congeals in and around her own photographs and photographic practice, extending backwards into the time-spaces of her parents’ early life and her own childhood and forwards into her own anticipated future. It also has considerable geographical extensity, extending from intimate domestic spaces to quite different national contexts. The media in play are not simply photographs and their textual content but the social and cultural conventions relating to photography and her own personal practices of use. Alongside this, other communication media such as the television interpolate the zone, introducing complex, hybrid time-space elements into the zone. In the first instance, Kia describes photographs of her family from her early childhood in more detail and, in doing so, explores the multifaceted generational rupture between herself and her parents: I want to build up this historical story for my children. I want to kind of alleviate that emotional baggage that I’ve always had through not being able to figure things out. It’s basically to do with the cultural divide and the expectations that are placed on me particularly because I still live at home. There’s an enormous sense of guilt there because my parents have given so much up to be here, especially when you look at the old pictures and you think, “God, I’d be bloody miserable”. And they gave up a lot to come to England in search of a better life. My dad’s going to be 70 this year, and my mum, she’s 11 years off retirement, but she’s ready to retire. She’s absolutely exhausted, but they just carry on working. There’s this enormous sense of guilt because you feel that you have to give them as much as they’ve given you. I have this obligation to stay at home because my sister has moved away. My parents will say, “We would like to go back to India, but we can’t until you’re married.” That’s a big one. There’s this moral obligation to do the right thing. It’s not like they’ve just given a few years of holidays up for us. They gave up years and years. For the first 15 or 20 years of them being married, they never went to India. They couldn’t even phone home for a long time.

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But then there’s also this anger there as well because of the dark period, the period where I was really trying to find my own voice as a young woman. Prior to that and during that, it was a very kind of violent. It was just an awful time where… I think the experiences that my parents had were… Disciplining a child was really through beating and stuff like that. It was really bad at one point. There was a real anger around that, and the fact that they didn’t understand what we were going through in a Western environment. They expected the same things from us as they went through. They just accepted that they weren’t going to go out, they weren’t going to have boys who were friends. I suppose I was good, but then I just got to a point where I thought, “Sod it. I’m just going to go out and do it anyway.” For them, it was more than they could deal with.

In thinking about the emerging intermediate zone that Kia is bringing into being in the act of viewing her childhood photographs, it’s possible to identify a range of spaces and times that are in play. These include the times of the life course and vectors of aging; work time; representational time of the photograph and communicative time of the telephone and (in later extracts) the times of television consumption; generational time; childhood and adolescence; and historical time. Alongside these are key spatial reference points: England, India and the West; domestic spaces; shared public spaces; and implied work spaces. However, it is when we consider the mediated time of the photograph that we can begin to see the ways in which these space-times are synthesised into directional trajectories. In her initial talk around a particular photograph of her parents at home in the 1970s, she describes a somewhat undesirable image of her parents’ domestic life on their arrival in the UK. The temporal features of the photograph, which arrest a moment in time from an experiential flow, allow it to be brought into the present, objectified and disconnected from its original occurrence. Kia is able then to resituate this moment in relation to her own contemporary experience, expectations and subject position. She describes her parents’ 1970s home as one she would find “bloody miserable” and which she details elsewhere as characterised by old curtains and mismatched and second-hand furniture, woodchip wallpaper and recycled plastic containers, the traces of which she notes are very much in evidence in their home today. The time of the photographic image is not the only media temporality in play. Her parents’ basic standard of living and suffering that it represents is located firmly in the UK, with the telephone and its potential to provide spatio-temporal proximity and

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i­mmediacy working as a marker for their social and cultural disconnection. Their experience of making do, going without and exhausting blue-collar work is at odds with her own expectations of life for herself in the West. The moral undertaking of seeking a better life is one that she will not have to endure because of their sacrifice. She also locates her parents in an anticipated future in India, permitted only once she has enabled them to do so by fulfilling her obligation to marry. The fixed time-space of the 1970s image and past and present hardships it represents provides a starting point for creating a narrative trajectory for her parents which we might characterise as a return to a former home. The completed spatio-temporal narrative arc of her parents’ lives, the vindication of their efforts and hardship is located in this return. This account implies a particular power chronography in the sense that the intermediate time that Kia brings into being is shot through with postcolonial politics—the intersectional experiences of the deprivations of working-class life and the temporal and spatial dislocations of migratory experience after empire become both the chronographic and topographic lens through which her own autobiographical experience is rendered meaningful, drenched with competing senses of aspiration and duty, obligation and revulsion. Power chronographies are being articulated in and through the directional performance of intermediate time. Alongside the experiential trajectory she constructs for her parents, Kia formulates a second intersecting trajectory from the times and spaces on offer in the zone of intermediacy. This is constructed in contradistinction with that of her parents and is not one of return but of a more complex struggle to establish meaningful second-generation future in the West which recognises its roots in her parents’ time-spaces but that has competing and contradictory features. The most stable spatio-temporal reference point in Kia’s construction of her own experiential trajectory is her anticipated future: the historical account she wishes to construct for her own children signals a future vantage point which she will occupy in the UK and provides a motivation or organising principle for her account. Kia’s account is one characterised by a sense of becoming. She describes trying to “find her voice as a young woman” despite her parents’ cultural expectations of filial piety and the repayment of sacrifice through marriage. She locates her own trajectory as originating in the context of her parents’ 1970s home of the photograph. While she hypothetically places herself in their position in that moment, her own experience of childhood also occurs in this same time-space, and she continues (under obligation) to

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inhabit this space. It provides a somewhat suffocating continuity over time, as it is the site of conflict in which the tensions between her expectations which she locates as Western rub up against those expectations of her parents, sometimes violently. Despite this spatial continuity, she clearly demarcates diverging of her experience from their expectation, going from being “good” to doing “it anyway”. While on the one hand, this provides a sense of her desired independence and realisation of her desired trajectory, the mutually incompatible nature of her parents’ desired trajectory and her own remains the source of pain and frustration. From this initial extract from Kia’s interview, it appears that there are two interconnected time-space trajectories which are being actively constructed within a zone of intermediacy which is brought into being through the practice of viewing her photographs. In the following extracts from the same interview, Kia discusses further photographs which also form part of her personal collection that she has taken herself precisely for the purpose of trying to explore and reconcile the two competing trajectories of her own and her parents’ migratory experience: This was a picture taken [by Kia] in India. I was in India, and I went to spend some time with my family. The reason I wanted to was because here [England], everybody is just rush, rush, rush. As you can see, it’s like 6.30 p.m., and everyone’s gone. I really wanted to go with them to get that real quality time which we just don’t get here. I got there and I realised, “Oh God, this is frustrating”, because I hadn’t been to India since I was 18. So there’d been a six- or seven-year gap. All of sudden, everyone’s got TVs, and that’s all that everybody was doing: watching television. I thought, “This doesn’t really feel much different to being in England where everybody’s just focused on the television”… There were just afternoons where you’d get all the jobs done in the house, and then everybody would just sit down and then watch TV. Then you’d think, “Okay, I don’t quite know what to do with myself because it just doesn’t feel like I’m on holiday or it doesn’t…” I didn’t really know what to expect, but that wasn’t it. I guess my way of dealing with it was to go around taking pictures and just observing what was going on.

Kia describes a photograph that she took on a recent visit to India, and in the moment of viewing, it opens up the opportunity to draw in a number of other (intermediated) times which are activated by, if not directly represented, in the image itself. These times revolve around her desire to bring into relation the space-times of India and the UK, not simply in

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terms of India as the original and desired location of her parents and the UK as the site of her parents’ present suffering and her own continued habitation, but also as places which feature in an ongoing way in her own continued experience via repeated visits and familial connections. Kia’s reflection involves a synthesis of the space-times of there-then and here-­ now as part of her own trajectory of becoming. She actively seeks in India the quality time that she finds absent at home. Interestingly, while she tries to articulate and reify this elusive mode time visually in the photograph, in the viewing and recollection that it stimulates, the very idea of the time of there-then of India and the here-now of the UK starts to unravel. Instead of finding a radical difference in temporalities between India and the UK, she finds a clear equivalence. The perception of difference, as she retrospectively realises, was one created by her own absence from India for a number of years during which social and cultural life in India had changed. The time which she sought was no longer in evidence. It is the time of television viewing which symbolises this temporal equivalence. The zone of intermediacy opened up by the socio-cultural act of viewing her photographs introduces a generous and dilated sense of time in which multiple rhythms are implicated, associated and located in different time-spaces. Further than this, the zone of intermediacy by virtue of involving a creative navigation of these multiple time-spaces suggests the possibility for creative rethinking of temporal experience. In this example, a coming-to-terms with the co-evalness (Fabian 2002) of Indian and UK space-time allows Kia to rethink her own experiential trajectory as one that exceeds a simple move from an originally Indian there-then to a modern UK here-now. Instead, these space-times are moving features of her present to which she has a continually emergent relationship. The sense of temporal lack in the UK drove her to seek compensation for it in India, but the temporal equivalence she discovered was also in part alienating, inciting her to confront her own outsider status in the very place she sought quality family time. The act of viewing television together, the specific form of duration that it entails, was at once deeply familiar, but in India, she could not share in this most mundane activity, and the belonging together in time that familial viewing entails remained out of reach. She was neither holiday maker nor fully resident; instead, she adopted the status of observer-recorder, documenting her time in India in anticipation of making sense of her experience in the later act of viewing. While the social space-times of India and the UK were foregrounded in much of Kia’s talk, the times of the media which interpolated and a­ ctivated

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these space-times were far from secondary. Nor did these times float free from the spaces in which they were articulated. In talking about a photo that she took in India which focused on an empty chair, Kia illustrates the ways in which she shuttles back and forth between India and the UK, both imaginatively and physically, in order to ascribe meaning to her experience produced between the two places. This was the first photo. I knew there was a real sort of special kind of feeling in that house, and it was the light. There was a real warm kind of atmosphere. I think this was taken at 4.00 in the afternoon or something. It’s the golden hour in photography. The light was really beautiful and special. There’s something quite special to me about this picture, but when I showed it to people, they didn’t quite understand why I was so connected to it. Then, when I came back to England, I put it on a forum, and then people started telling me how they felt about it and the symbolism behind the empty chair. Breaking down my [photographic] work into first-, second- and third-­ generation, I know the intimacy project5 has always been there, but I didn’t quite know how to articulate what it was about. I can articulate what I need to, partly through being able to express it through my pictures. I know now what was missing. It was the physical kind of closeness and the intimacy that you would normally get through time.

Kia uses the language of photographic practice and the diurnal temporalities that permeate it to express the significance of what may seem to be a mundane scene. The idea of the golden hour is melded with a sense of atmosphere which is used to justify her personal sense of connection to the image. The sense of the special light and the experiential connection are woven together. Clearly, the spatial elements of the image—the empty chair in the domestic setting—relate to Kia’s sense of lack in a number of regards: parental intimacy, a sense of belonging in India or to her parents’ own sense of place. As she notes in a later reference to this photograph: “I’m really trying to figure out those emotions and why that intimacy wasn’t there. I’m trying to fill in the blanks”. While the image linked to her inherited past, and the working through of this past over time and between spaces, had to be taken in India, its value in this regard was only fully realised and validated for Kia in the UK in the context of an online photographic community. The significance of the image was only fully materialised in its transportation out of the space-time of its production, not unlike Kia’s own sense of herself.

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Through an imaginative oscillation between the space-time of India and the UK, Kia seeks to locate and trace the production of intimacy that she has found lacking in her childhood in the UK. On the one hand, she finds social life in India to be characterised by intimacy as way of being in physical and social proximity, but one that is not consciously reflected on. It is an unconscious property of the reciprocal relations between space and social relations: I realised in India that the intimacy, even though they don’t psychoanalyse like we do... the intimacy is there without ever needing to express it. The reason they’re so intimate with each other is because of the close proximity that they live in. This is just the ladies’ compartment, and you can see how many people are all packed in there. I’ve witnessed with my own eyes where you get into a—you come into a station, and you’ve got a perfect stranger who’ll just come and sit on somebody else’s knee. They’d start playing with each other’s kids, passing children around.

In locating or emplacing intimacy in distinctively Indian forms of interaction, Kia provides a way of understanding her parents’ own inability to articulate intimacy and to perform it successfully through her childhood in their changed spatial conditions of the UK. In this sense, the disjuncture between Kia and her parents which she experiences is not simply a product of temporal difference in the sense of a generational tension in which closeness is differently articulated by her parents; she locates it in the combination of this temporal difference with her parents’ spatial dislocation from India. Kia’s initial search for quality time (extract 3) in India as a precondition for intimacy was in vain, as in the act of viewing her photographs, she recognises that it is in the physical proximity of people that these modes of being together in time are produced. Quality time is therefore indivisible from spatial forms of togetherness. It is not simply the contrast between the national spaces of the UK and India that inform the zone of intermediacy, but the different organisation of public and private space. In the viewing of her photographs of her own childhood and the images from India, she explores the difference between the boundaries drawn between the public and private, such as the women’s carriages on trains and the closeness of strangers in transit which produce intimacy as a public mode of being in contrast with the awkward stagings of domestic life inside the home in her own family photographs, which combine social aspiration and the pretence of intimacy.6 The

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t­emporal logic of the photograph allows the simultaneous bringing-intothe-­present of two diverging time-spaces and, in doing so, allows Kia to navigate her sense of belonging (and not belonging) by traversing between them. In this way, it also brings into productive tension two distinct trajectories of chronographical power: her own ability to be mobile across space and time as a second-generation migrant lifted out of the relative poverty experienced by her parents in the sense that, in moving back and forth between the UK and India, she has more control over her own spatio-­temporal mobility than her parents have experienced, and the second chronographical mode of power which is that of the familial control over her life course, specifically in relation to marriage and an appropriate juncture. Viewing her photographs opens up a dilated time-space which incorporates a sense of her parents’ spatial and temporal otherness and their possession of a quite different form of chronographical power in relation to her own which underpins her sense of a cultural conflict and divide between them. While this is a recognition of difference and dislocation, it also provides her with an understanding of her parents’ spatio-temporal experience and a starting point for reconciling or at least bringing into view their hitherto disparate trajectories as first- and second-generation migrants. Instead of constructing the tension between them as a product of individual differences, she locates them in their fundamentally different spatio-temporal experiences, enabling her to recognise the validity of their previous experience of intimacy in India and understand their inability to articulate this within the socio-cultural conventions in the UK. While this does not ameliorate her sense of lack, it allows her to recognise it and reconcile it with a recognition of her parents’ sacrifices, behaviours and expectations, retaining the possibility of a reciprocal relationship between them.

Conclusion As I hope to have demonstrated over the course of this chapter, it is essential to conceive of zones of intermediacy as having the qualities of both spatial and temporal extensity. In these zones, the temporal affordances of media operate as vehicles for moving between time-spaces, making sense of temporal and spatial differences and allowing us to shuttle between them in productive ways. Media texts and technologies, such as photographs, which arrest and decontextualise time’s lived flow, the telephone’s

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communicative immediacy and the television’s rhythms of use, contribute particular temporal logics to the ways in which there-thens and here-nows are constituted in relation to one another in this process. However, it is not simply that the zones in which we produce mediated temporal experience feature multiple times and spaces but that these are mutually constitutive, and in their active synthesis, we produce experiential trajectories replete with spatio-temporal meaning. Multiple times, spaces and media texts and technologies are navigated by the experiencing subject and synthesised into the form of experiential trajectories. This is not to imply a subject has completely free play in the production of trajectories. These are, of course, always shaped and limited by wider structures of power. For Kia in particular, we can think of these trajectories as implying and employing particular power chronographies specific to her second-generation migrant experience, historical processes of decolonisation, the gendering of spaces and times and specific cultural conventions interpolating and structuring her experience. At the same time, her own photographic practice provides her a generous imaginative zone in which to trace her own moves between the UK and India and her generational positioning within these historical narratives of migration, between public and private space-­ times and in relation to the gendered expectations placed upon her within them. She actively negotiates the kinds of chronographical power that she lacks—a sense of belonging to socio-temporal cultures of either the UK or India, or autonomy over the construction of her own life narrative with reference to her decision to marry—by exerting the forms of chronographical power that she does possess—an ability to move across and between India and the UK at times of her choosing, enabled by her economic independence and her cultural competence in photographic practice (expressly not possessed by her parents) as time-based media which allow her to open up zones of intermediacy in which the tensions in her spatio-temporal experience can be addressed. Zones of intermediacy are therefore generous in the sense that they allow the drawing in of other time-spaces (historically or physically distant times and spaces) and bring them into the present, generating a sense of trajectory by bringing other times and places into relation with our lived present. They also allow the bringing into relation of the times and spaces of others with our own, opening up the possibility of understanding how our movements in time and space relate to the movements of others, and to recognise and understand the differences in meaning and experience that these alternative trajectories produce. Kia’s reckoning with her

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­ arents’ alternative positioning in histories of decolonisation is performed p in a zone of intermediacy in precisely this way. An approach to zones of intermediacy which attends to the ways in which space contributes to the production of temporalized meaning allows us to account not only for the ways in which the production of temporal experience is spatially mobile, but also to understand the ways in which the meanings of mobility in time and space are themselves actively produced in these intermediate zones.

Notes 1. See, for example, work by Virilio (2000/2005, 1986 [1977]) and Castells (1996). More recent work has recognised the logic of acceleration but has developed more nuanced accounts which allow space for a consideration of the role of the human subject in accelerated social life. See, for example, Hassan (2007), Tomlinson (2007) and, for a more pessimistic account, Rosa (2010). See Sharma 2017 for a helpful and more comprehensive overview of the literature on what she terms speed up. 2. See, for example, Peeren (2006, pp. 49–50) for a discussion of the routine conceptualisation of diaspora experience in spatial terms. 3. The Media of Remembering project was funded by the Leverhulme Trust 2010–2013 (grant number F/00 261/AC). The fieldwork in this project was wide ranging, incorporating over 100 interviews of various kinds, including conventional in-depth interviews, focus groups, self-interviews (Keightley et al. 2012) and a mass observation call. For a detailed discussion of the project and its methodology, see Pickering and Keightley (2015). 4. See, for example, Virilio’s writing on Dromology (1990), Harvey’s writing on time-space compression (1990). 5. This is a reference to her own tracing of intimacy and its absence within her own immediate family through her photographic work. 6. As Kia narrates one particular picture of her early childhood, she notes, “in this picture here, there’s some sort of makeshift kind of platform thing, and they’re trying to make it look very, you know, posh or something. But really, it’s not. Look, you’ve got woodchip wallpaper, and there’s just some tatty old piece of cloth”. Elsewhere, she notes that her mother made her sister put her arm around her for a snapshot: “my mum would’ve forced her to have done that, and she would’ve begrudgingly done it”.

References Adam, B. (1995). Timewatch: The social analysis of time. Cambridge: Polity Press. Adam, B. (1998). Timescapes of modernity: The environment and invisible hazards. London: Routledge. Adam, B. (2004). Time. Cambridge: Polity.

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Bahktin, M. M. (1981). Forms of time and chronotope in the novel. In M. Holquist (Ed.), The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Austin: University of Texas Press. Castells, M. (1996). The rise of the network society. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Castells, M. (2000). Materials for an exploratory theory of the network society. British Journal of Sociology, 51(1), 5–24. Fabian, J. (2002). The time of the other. New York: Columbia University Press. Harvey, D. (1990). The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Hassan, R. (2007). Network time. In R. Hassan & R. E. Purser (Eds.), 24/7: Time and temporality in the network society. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Keightley, E. (2012). Making time—The social temporalities of mediated experience. In E.  Keightley (Ed.), Time, media and modernity (pp.  201–223). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Keightley, E. (2013). From immediacy to intermediacy: The mediation of lived time. Time and Society, 22(1), 55–75. Keightley, E., & Reading, A. (2014). Mediated mobilities. Media Culture & Society, 36(3), 285–301. Keightley, E., Pickering, M., & Allett, N. (2012). The self-interview: A new method in social science research. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 15(6), 507–521. Massey, D. (1994). Space, place and gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nowotny, H. (1994). Time: The modern and postmodern experience. Cambridge: Polity. Peeren, E. (2006). Through the lens of the chronotope: Suggestions for a spatio-­ temporal perspective on diaspora. In M.  A. Baronian & S.  Besser (Eds.), Diaspora and memory: Figures of displacement in contemporary literature, arts and politics (pp. 67–77). Amsterdam: Rodopi. Pickering, M., & Keightley, E. (2015). Photography, music and memory: Pieces of the past in everyday life. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rosa, H. (2010). Alienation and acceleration: Towards a critical theory of late-­ modern temporality. Malmo: NSU Press. Sharma, S. (2014). In the meantime: Temporality and cultural politics. Durham: Duke University Press. Sharma, S. (2017). The speed trap: Of taxis, truck stops and taskrabbits. In J.  Wajcman & N.  Dodd (Eds.), The sociology of speed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tomlinson, J. (2007). The culture of speed: The coming of immediacy. London: Sage. Virilio, P. (1986 [1977]). Speed and politics: An essay on dromology. New  York: Semiotext(e). Virilio, P. (2000/2005). The information bomb. London: Verso. Wajcman, J. (2015). Pressed for time: The acceleration of life in digital capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

INTERLUDE II

Power and Datafication of Time: A Dialogue

CHAPTER 10

“I’m Not Looking for a Singular Conception of Time”: An Interview with Sarah Sharma Sarah Sharma

The interview took place on 21.04.2018 at the Hotel Albion Spreebogen Waterside, Berlin, Germany. The interviewers were Karin Deckner and Maren Hartmann.

Time Is Everywhere Maren Hartmann: It seems to me, as if for some time the temporal was “not there”. We had an interdisciplinary focus on time-space compression and similar discussions, and now suddenly, at least in media and communication, it seems as if time is everywhere. Do you agree that there is a return of the temporal, and if yes, why do you think that’s taking place? Sarah Sharma: It would also seem that almost every investigation of a new technology or complex of media has to take on the issue of temporality. It is also how most technologies are marketed, that is, as time-­changing

S. Sharma (*) University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 M. Hartmann et al. (eds.), Mediated Time, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24950-2_10

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devices, and we might say that the cultural focus on speed-up and acceleration is the dominant way of thinking about technological time. Speed feels like an imposition for many, and thus there seems to be an equal range of academic concern with speed and time as there is a popular concern, whether this be a rise in life coaches concerned with time and self-­ care or new technologies for the new management of new time sensibilities, but what gives me hope is there is more political work being done on the temporal, beyond the popular discourse of marketing narratives delivered by tech companies and lifestyle magazines. Maren Hartmann: In your book In the Meantime (Sharma 2014a) you still seem to say that we are continuously caught up in a space bias, which we need to get away from. Could you describe this in more detail? Sarah Sharma: I think a spatial focus dominates the way technology and time are popularly conceived, but also academically, in our shared field of media studies. I am indebted to the work of Harold Adams Innis and his theory of space-time biases. In my book, I extended his theory to account for differential populations and relations of power that are tied to dominant media or communication technologies. A spatial sensibility lingers to the detriment of thinking politically about time. I think this is something easily lost in the mix—the difference between spatial time and temporal time, but let me see if I can elaborate again here. Spatial conceptions of time are quantifiable units, perhaps linear time, or a type of temporal mode particular to space. Spatial conceptions of time are still bound to an individual, bound to a particular space, bound to a particular activity. For example, the very fact that shared space, social space or the public sphere is the privileged ground of political life is symptomatic of the negation of the temporal, and with this spatial sense of political life, time is treated as a mode, a way of being communicative or present.

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Certain temporal modes are valorized as appropriate to political space. For example, the slow inter-subjective time of a contemplative and deliberative public sphere is the assumed form of a properly civic and politicized public. Spatial time has limited political possibility compared to temporal time, which recognizes that all time is relational and collective regardless of choice. As you mentioned in “The Biopolitical Economy of Time” (Sharma 2011), time-clocks have not completely disappeared, but instead new types of chronometers have appeared that control us. Can you say something more about this, especially in relation to new digital chronometers? I like this idea of thinking beyond the clock to be able to actually understand the politics of time and power, how time relates to power, and this is not a new relation but rather an expansive notion of the chronometer to be able to account for the biopolitics of time. To me, this is about the investment or also people’s recalibration to these chronometers. I don’t think you can always know what a chronometer is until you enter into a relationship with it and then it becomes one of either an investment into your life or draining of capacity. I think the classic clock and the new digital forms of marking time maybe share more in common than a power relation within an institution, like a patriarchal figure in the home or a cultural demand that sets one’s time. They’re more present in people’s mind, or people actually have a recognition of “Oh, this is a clock, or these are things/devices that are keeping my time”, but I think if you look deeper, you see that the chronometers are in other sort of media and power relations than media time and demand recalibration. If you imagine the time-power of ­patriarchy, it appears in particular ways and in very particular things. There’s a lot of talk about social freezing right now, the procedure to preserve oocytes of women for a

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later date. Many companies—especially from the technology sector—offer their employees to cover the costs for this procedure so that the women can concentrate on their careers for the time being. Could you address the question of social freezing and its relationship between time, bodies and the sector specificity, because it’s mainly this new economy’s linear rather than cyclical understanding of time that is inherent in these practices? It’s difficult to see beyond its link to this particular technological institution, which links with capital in a very specific way (and is already known to be sort of a bro culture), and it is an investment in women’s work and in women’s bodies and women’s time in a very normative way, too, but it’s also already entering into a social field, within which you could reimagine to make room for women’s bodies to begin with, or even children or kin or different structures of home and work, that would make this unnecessary. There’s lots to say about this, but what I find interesting about your example is that this is a type of temporal investment in the worker that comes at a particular point in their life trajectory which is at odds with company time. So this is a lot about keeping women on company time rather than rethinking the underlying structure that could actually shift this in more profound social ways. So because this isn’t really an option, it’s presented as a one-time choice over another that would help you recalibrate the woman’s body to the entire structure of these tech companies.

Technologies Versus the Technological Karin Deckner: In In the Meantime (2014a), you described the inequality in infrastructure and of treatment that different bodies, even if they’re both tired and overworked, experience in relation to recovery.

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The white-collar workers arriving at the airport, for example, have to recalibrate, while the taxi drivers largely have to take care of their own recreational infrastructures. Do you think there could be digital help for these kinds of workers, or do you consider any application in this context as a problem, since it does not address the basic inequality? Sarah Sharma: I’m always suspect of a technological solution without addressing the structure because I think—even as theorists—to think about these things is really important, to keep pushing a structural sense of technology, not just as device, because these devices are tied to structures. That’s why I started calling a lot of technologies lately machines and devices rather than by their names. I also have this phrase lately of “being left to your own devices” because it’s like you use the devices to get back in time. So I’m not saying I don’t believe that the technological can provoke new political possibilities, but I don’t believe in technological solutions for a structural problem. It’s also funny because, anytime people ask me, I always say, “I don’t want to talk about this or that technology”. If you want to talk to me about the technological, then it’s a different thing. Maren Hartmann: This leads nicely to another complex of questions concerning the particular political framing in academia, the idea of what field are you in, etc. In the media and communications field, we seem to have had a large debate whether a materialist non-­ media-­centric media studies approach, as Morley (2009) suggested it, is actually fitting. Some claim that the field would lose its edge or specificity since our thinking would no longer start with media and communications. It is partly a political question about the narrow delineations of research fields (as applied in research applications). You often then have to not only name the field, but name the spe-

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cific technology or application you are researching—it needs to be a clearly bounded object. Sarah Sharma: That question is the reason that this field exists though. That critique is exactly why we think of media and communication as a field because, to me, it didn’t start off as a field that was about a particular technology or tool; it was about mediation. There is a broader sensibility within media theory about how cultural patterns and processes are tied to specific technologies, but really it is about the technological, but anyway, I’m not going to give you a map of the field. There are many ways to do media studies, of course, but I think even someone who wants to look at a particular object, they should make what might appear at first sight as a detour and leave the object—trace the patterns, pace and scale that are bound up and shift with the medium in question. I’m channelling McLuhan now, or rather, how I have found McLuhan (1964) helpful in this regard. Maren Hartmann: No, but I quite like that because it’s rather important. In the text where you first introduced power chronography (in a chapter in the book Communication Matters—Sharma 2012), you provide a kind of mapping of your background. I think it’s more a political statement to return to this and state your understanding of media—or mediation. We have also quite consciously chosen the title Mediated Time for this book rather than mediatised time, which would be a much more media-centric approach (see Introduction). What was quite intriguing to me was your reference to the Toronto School, i.e. to the idea that media is everywhere, that you can’t distinguish media, that it is actually all around and that somehow mediation is already taking place through it just being there. In a way, this also implied that it can be this, but it can also be something else.

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Yes, I think it’s a type of question you would ask of the objects or devices or tools or whatever you want to call them, so to me that’s what media studies is: a specific question about the rhythm of relations that particular technologies instigate or set off. I like thinking of it this way because this would allow me to talk about something like labour, or you could talk about gender, you could talk about race. The point is you can understand that multiple forms of social difference are tied to the technological parameters of possibility—forms of long enduring structural difference are exacerbated, but also new political possibilities also emerge. It’s this thing in a structure, but there is a sort of technological determinism that kind of spills out that is political and should be accounted for, reckoned with, and I’ve been thinking about this recently in my new work. I want to hold on and sort of politicise technological determinism. I think it’s a strange thing to do when you’re interested in things like race and gender and technology. I want to hold on to the fact that there is something that spills over because there is a potential for a determining spillover. That’s the power of the technology. That’s also why structures have to change because of the actual way the logics of devices can turn and shift things.

Methods Maren Hartmann: When you talk about the rhythm of relations, etc.— can you very briefly say something about the “how” of your research, i.e. your methods? Sarah Sharma: For example, too often, I think people think of individual technologies as time-shaping and space-­ altering entities on their own. You often hear a research question that goes something like this: “How does this media or technology change space

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and time?” I think this is a problematic question— not only does it depend upon a universalizing understanding of the social experience of space and time, but it also imagines that technologies have universal determinations and generalized effects. I would ask: “How would you even measure this?” So one thing I did for the book was, or rather what I didn’t do, I didn’t really ask them a lot about time or speed. I didn’t say to taxi drivers, “Do you think the world is speeding up?” but largely I asked them about their lives or how their days unfold, and then from there, the temporal emerged.

(Counter-)Strategies Karin Deckner:

Sarah Sharma:

Karin Deckner:

I’m particularly interested in a concept I call hetero-­ chronia, i.e. counter-temporal strategies, and I was working as a waitress for a long time, so I really like your work on “[Because] the Night Belongs to Lovers: Occupying the Time of Precarity” (Sharma 2014b). Ha, yeah, me, too. I was a waitress from the time I was 16 until I had my first academic position. It is a different sort of tiredness—waiting on tables—then the type of occupational tiredness of professor life and a completely different relationship to public life, the city and other night labour, and most often, the sociality that comes with wait-staff fatigue is far more rewarding than the extra-institutional discussions that take place over professor busy-ness and the need for a slow/er academia, but I digress. … like the creatures of the night, this other side of life or the night especially. In your article about the Occupy movement, you highlight the potential of anti-cyclical protests (Sharma 2014b). The ideas of decalibration and desynchronisation that lead to time delays seem to be key to this argument. What kind of scenarios did you have in mind? The first

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idea that popped up in my mind was the idea of delivery drivers, now an intrinsic part of the infrastructure, who could collectively sit out algorithms or orders, which could lead to collapsing lunchbreaks in the offices or something. That is an idea I really like, a kind of Deliveroo riot. What other kinds of temporal insurgencies do you think are possible, or could you tell us more about this potential? These were playful examples (like the little decaffeination movement in Washington) in order to shift the entry point into the problematic of time as a site of resistance or a site to orient resistance. I put them out there as a way of being able to ask what it would mean to think of time as both a strategy and a target. For example, in this piece, it was a call for more attention in political organising related to occupying space to be aware of temporal struggle, but in general, it was a fight for recognition of the uneven temporalities that might compose your struggles, and by this, I don’t mean the different individuals and their various needs, but something more complex, like temporal privilege as it intersects with gender and race, for example, how there are in fact differential relationships to the night. Who gets to determine within an activist community what the protocols of safety and care are? To think about time politically means to acknowledge the temporal order. If you’re not disrupting the temporal order, then something hasn’t happened yet. It has to be both, right? You don’t just go into a space and be disruptive, jam it or screw with it. Even the way protests work, it’s one type of resistance. It’s like showing up together en masse, but temporal resistances don’t have this show of force. What would it mean to actually be oriented towards that? It may be more insidious but no less political or significant. It can also be hopeful.

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One of my PhD students Rianka Singh is critiquing platform feminism as a dominating logic of contemporary popular feminism. She talks about an uneven relationship to the platform. She looks at, for example, #blacklivesmatter in Toronto (BLM-­TO). Most of their resistance has actually been care-based resistance, but it appears in the public realm as protest, but BLM-TO is also disrupting the temporal order of things and using time as a strategy and target while highlighting the vulnerability and violence black people in the city endure, including political resistance. For example, Singh is accounting for moments when the local police kept coming to the site of their protest to intimidate or shut them down. They decided to just go to the police and sit outside the police station and have their protest there— making it a little easier on the police to not have to travel the distance! On one level they did it because it was funny to say, “Fine, you keep coming to us. Why don’t we just come to you?” but it was also pointing out that they were safer outside the police station—also under the glare of the public and media. To me, this was a spatial tactic with a temporal strategy because it was also about making sure that BLM-TO would not be drained of capacity. Rianka and I wrote a short piece on this (Singh and Sharma 2019). How can you, as a movement, show up en masse, but then also take care while revealing how the state and police do not take care of you? But in her own dissertation, Rianka’s work is pointing out the brilliance and political potential of this type of strategy across several sites and with a lot more focus on the conditions for stepping up onto platforms and the invisible politics of care that underlie feminist organizing and strategy. Maren Hartmann: I have just been starting to look at similar issues, the concept of chrononormativity, and I’m trying

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to link it back to this whole question of power (see Hartmann chapter in the book). I’ve been trying to think around these two issues in relation to homelessness, but I find myself often shying away from it. You describe it very convincingly, small movements, which at least partly resist the temporal order and shift it a tiny bit. When I turned to the homeless issue, it becomes a bit more problematic because there is a danger to romanticize these, assuming a resistance, because they contradict the temporal order. Well, I think, maybe it’s two things. The night, for example, doesn’t necessarily have to be thought of as separate time. In other words, the night appears in the day. In some sense, we tend to spatialize time here—day and night as compartments, and the things that seem out of place in the day (like a sleeping person on the street) is a way of considering how day/night do not account for multiple temporalities. This is not romanticizing resistance. This is about survival. This sleeping body is not just tired and out of place. They are trying to survive. How do our public services correspond to this day/night delineation? They are not recognizing the temporal politics. This is a policy question and not just a way of mapping publics.

Power Chronography Maren Hartmann: One of the most intriguing concepts in your work is power chronography—and a perfect example of combining the question of time with political economy and other lines of thinking. Karin Deckner: At some point, we asked ourselves: How did this interest in the unevenness of time arise? Was there a moment when you simply realized how unequally

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time is distributed, or was this preceded by any particular observation or experience—or caused by a theoretical impetus? No, I think it’s right in the book. There are scenes in/from the everyday. For example, when I was walking to take the bus or transit down the street, there was a refugee-processing centre, and here, they were waiting all day long, just waiting. I would see the men sitting there on a balcony, but I also noticed all the women were cooking in the basement, and I just thought that there were several layers to this waiting, including gendered time. You could tell the whole family is there waiting to be processed, and all these men are just sitting there smoking and drinking coffee, and then the women are also waiting, but cooking, and then there were just little things: I found it so heart-breaking every time I would be on the subway, and you’d see a security guard or cleaning crew falling asleep, and I’m just starting my day. It was such a stark contrast, and I would just wonder, what does it feel like to be ending your day when everyone else is starting—is it a real feeling or sensibility, and there was a news story at the time of a woman in the suburbs who had left her children, teenager kids, at home, and then she worked at one of these chain restaurants in the suburbs, and she finished work at 1:00 in the morning, and I think there was no bus, or she was walking home, crossing a highway, and she got hit by a car, and I just remember just thinking of her and how, at this moment, there was also this work about suburban architectures and big chain box stores as non-places and the offence of these architectures of consumption and monotony, but these were spaces full of labour, differential temporalities and real lives. Even in the sort of spectacle critique, there is nothing about the labour in these spaces. We have a wrong view even on consumption and what con-

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sumptive spaces look like, so that was also where the non-place idea came from. I think non-place came first, even before temporality, because I was looking at labour within non-places and these box stores, and then I suddenly realized, “Wow, the actual differential is temporality”. If we have a multiple sense of time, we cannot render these spaces all the same, and we cannot just stay focused on a political economy of the spaces with universal notions of who works in them and who shops in them. Maren Hartmann: At a recent workshop in Sweden, we had quite an interesting debate around Doreen Massey, who we kept returning to, since whatever she has written was already pre-empting a lot of the things that we are now saying again, especially around questions of power (as in the quote: “It is that the mobility and control of some groups can actively weaken other people” (Massey 1994, p.  150)). Especially in the mobilities field, where mobility is often treated as a form of progression, this is an extremely potent reminder. You also used her work to build on? Sarah Sharma: Yes, I needed it. I couldn’t do it without it. No, she is singlehandedly to me responsible for the concept of uneven mobility. Critical mobility studies begins from her; it wouldn’t exist otherwise. She basically gave a field work to do. That’s what I think power geometry did. It gave geography more critical work to do. Maren Hartmann: But in a way, I also think, at least in the mobilities field, they haven’t quite taken up the challenge because she’s pointing out to exactly what you’re pointing out with an emphasis on the temporal in terms of the power relationships. Sarah Sharma: I do not even know if I go beyond what Massey says in my book. I am always super indebted to her. I didn’t think it was such a brilliant thing that I did.

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I just extended her concept from space to time. Like on some level, maybe that’s all I was doing. I think the weirder thing happens when people are like, “Well, is it space, or is that time? Is this slow or fast?” and that’s when I’m like… “Really?” I think that was the most interesting to me, to put Massey in conversation with Canadian political economist of the railroad turned media theorist Harold Adams Innis, precisely because of this focus on time-space bias and a lot of interest in David Harvey’s updating of Marx’s time-space compression. She intervened in the spatial turn where Harvey, Soja, Jameson were also politicizing space—yet without any attention to what she termed the power geometry of whatever space was in question, and it wasn’t because she forgot about time that I suggested power chronography. Rather, I think, culturally, there is an imbalance in thinking about space and time (as Innis argued and as I laid out above). Thinking politically about time means recognizing your privilege in a way that I think is too hard for many. Maren Hartmann: There is this feeling that you’re now saying, “Been there, done that, want to move on”, in relation to questions of time. Is this just a question of you yourself thinking, “Okay, I’ve done my part. I can do other things”, or is it because you discovered more important topics? Sarah Sharma: After the book came out, I extended out a few of the key ideas in In the Meantime (2014a), for example, with a piece on truck drivers and task rabbit, and also a co-written piece with Armond Towns “Seizing Time and Ceasing Fire”, which related to mobility and time in the context of race and police brutality and white supremacy (Sharma and Towns 2016). I also focussed for a bit on developing a more robust understanding of architectures of time—to actually show people it doesn’t hinge on my example of taxi drivers (I feel like, if I have to say “taxi driver” or “business traveller” again, I feel

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nauseated of this relation, like there are so many others, and this was only one way of many possible of the argument to come through). It is one set of relational time. Maren Hartmann: So it is only one possible example for the theoretical work that you’ve done—but one that seems to have been very relatable, but as we said: you have moved on to other things now. What is this new work about, and why do some people associate the spatial rather than the temporal with this? Sarah Sharma: Sometimes people ask about my new project on exit and gender if, “Oh, is it that you’re doing space now?” and I’m like, “No! It’s not a spatial thing I’m doing”. I didn’t take on gender so much in In the Meantime (2014a), partly because there was such a dominating way of understanding woman’s time. At the end of my presentations, everybody would still want to talk about work-life balance. I was trying to imagine Virilio—not that I’m a Virilio—but when he writes about technological acceleration, no one asks him, “Hey, Paul, but how do you do it all?” or you can imagine the accelerationist manifestos about work-life balance, about if they have Fitbits and children. I don’t want to have these conversations. So while I’m now actually connecting the projects, I asked myself: “How would I be able to talk about social reproduction without ­re-­entrenching a normative framework of the politics of care? Can you talk about care without re-binarizing gender?” I’m looking for a non-normative way of considering gender, time and care which doesn’t rely on upholding a binary split. So this new project on exit is about refusal and the feminist possibilities of refusal when exits from patriarchy aren’t always exits from capital and exits from capital aren’t always exits from patriarchy. Karin Deckner: No, but there’s one thing we would like you to think about. Maybe it’s really obvious and clear, but when you’re writing about the frequent busi-

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ness traveller as we experience him waiting at the airport, as you’re writing, he/she is forced to wait, but we also learn here that waiting times are not democratic: he picks up his smartphone, no matter if the room is shared with others or not, and speaks into his phone. You describe very accurately how he is talking in codes and acronyms to show or demonstrate how to spend empty time wisely. The frequent business travellers can make themselves matter in otherwise uneventful time, reaffirming the waiting as a temporal condition reserved for others as “for them, life is full”. In the interviews of our research project, participants told us that they sometimes perform similar actions, in a way that nearly hints at an “imitation”, almost like a kind of temporal mimicry. What’s this kind of self-­ expression all about? Where else does this behaviour manifest itself? Maybe there’s a techno-feminist response to this. I also think it’s a larger gendered issue with power and control, you made me just realize. In the book I’m writing on “exit”, which is about exit and refusal of gendered lines, I want my last chapter to be about his refusal to leave. Part of this is that chrononormative path that has upheld patriarchy and capitalism. Just looking around all of our respective institutions, all old boys’ clubs, filled though with men who find it hard to retire, coupled with the emerging energy of those who have previously been denied entry into these institutions whether they are queer, of colour or first-generation university students, and then imagine, I’m being a little facetious here, but the ready-to-retire man just on his way out of an institution, and maybe he’s probably one of the worst institutional characters possible. His hobby is unfortunately his work. He’s coming in because he has free time, and his chrononormative path still leads him to here. There, he meets these other figures who are not there because it is

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their hobby but because this is their work to do. To be even more facetious, imagine your job is managing somebody who is doing it for fun or because their wives have sent them there, unable to stand their bored and nervous energy at home: “Thank you: you’ve kicked him out of the house and told him just to go to work and now left him for women in the institutions to deal with.” So when I think of this guy at the airport, I think he’s on this chrononormative path where work is his life, and he needs it to feel alive and needs you to also affirm his self-­ worth. It is not Bartelby, the Scrivener, but perhaps Bartelby’s frenemy. The guy for whom a suit, an office, a morning commute and an empty briefcase is good enough. Maren Hartmann: But there’s also an interesting question: why do we assume that this guy, who speaks into his smartphone, the business traveller, is not mimicking, on a different level. Sarah Sharma: But that’s what this is, refusal to leave is mimicry, right? It states, “I’m still important”, and that’s also a sad story. This isn’t the story of today’s precariat or freelancer struggling. It’s about those for whom having your life be so deeply invested in by these sort of workplace corporate structures, having a sort of gender dynamic at the home, like all these sorts of things do. I also think it points out this domination of work and home and the lack of other spaces. There’s this disruption of these spaces through politics of time. Just like this exit project I’m working on, it’s also to disrupt the way that home and work are the central spaces. Until somebody like Kathi Weeks (2011), who talks about a feminist refusal that is oriented towards not home and work, but multiplying spheres of intimacy, but you see—with somebody like this—he might go to play golf, or you might go home, like there there’s no other sphere for this social character. Karin Deckner: What’s left is talking to your smartphone.

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Redefining Waiting and Boredom Maren Hartmann: Do moments like waiting moments themselves become different? Sarah Sharma: In the Meantime (2014a) was also like the meanness of time. I thought of the term to be really about a critique of the sort of public sphere sense of time, where we have a conception of the politics you enter, like you arrive to it, and I was more interested in the processes of “on the way”, like getting there or not being able to get there, and I’m now realizing another link with exodus, you know, exits and arrivals. A lot of the time, in the political sphere, there’s not even an arrival. I was interested in that sort of “in the meantime” and even a politics that isn’t based on a revolutionary moment but on “What do we do in the meantime?” Maren Hartmann: What do you think about boredom, contemplation and idleness? As older concepts, e.g. in the motivations for media use, they often seem to be forgotten in current theorizations. Sarah Sharma: All these things circulate as strategies and mechanisms, and when I read them, I always read them as outside of the frame of this. If I’m interested in labour, I’m interested in the labour oriented towards the achievement of somebody else’s idleness, right? I don’t have anything to say about boredom. Boredom is good, but there’s a lot of stuff on it recently, like how to be bored. How to be idlers is not a new question; how to do nothing isn’t a new question, like there’s all this art of doing nothing and art of not giving a fuck as a recent self-help book promises. I think that’s another set of questions in a sense. I think boredom would be culturally specific. I think idleness is culturally specific. These are similar to my issue with acceleration. I wouldn’t ever call anything accelerated because I’m not looking for a singular conception of time. This is

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just the most problematic thing. I think we can say there’s certain experiences that are accelerated for particular people, but I would never ever call something accelerated. While you can’t deny that things are different, I’m more interested in the rhythm, the unevenness all the way along rather than a singular sort of ontology. Maren Hartmann: The activity of boredom, that’s an interesting combination. Sarah Sharma: But I’m really interested in the collective and the social side of this, so when I get asked a question about individual lifestyle politics, I want the question to be oriented towards “the political”. I don’t think that boredom and idleness aren’t important for the political. I’m sure they can be, but I think of the temporal activities that could be oriented towards a more collective sense of time. It’s not like a refusal to answer because I don’t believe in boredom or I realize that it’s a cultural fixation right now. It’s these temporal practices. I’m interested in them in so far as they open up the possibility for people to think about time in a relational way. Otherwise, we just keep talking about our individual experiences of time as we sit at the terminal, etc. It’s really hard for people to get out of this notion of not bringing it back to themselves and not realizing the sort of entanglement. What would it do, all this new research in time and media studies, if people had to fully move beyond this idea of individualistic time or that I could keep condemning it over and over again: “This is a privileged sense of time”, or, “That’s not your time?” This is that sort of individualistic linear thinking, sort of. Maren Hartmann: Which is a good last sentence. What if…

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References Massey, D. (1994). Space, place, and gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press/Polity Press. McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. New York: McGraw-Hill Education. Morley, D. (2009). For a materialist, non-media-centric media studies. Television & New Media, 10(1), 114–116. Sharma, S. (2011). The biopolitical economy of time. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 35(4), 439–444. Sharma, S. (2012). It changes space and time! Introducing power-chronography. In J.  Packer & S.  B. C.  Wiley (Eds.), Communication matters: Materialist approaches to media, mobility, and networks (pp. 66–77). London/New York: Routledge. Sharma, S. (2014a). In the meantime: Temporality and cultural politics. Durham: Duke University Press. Sharma, S. (2014b). Because the night belongs to lovers: Occupying the time of precarity. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 11(1), 5–14. Sharma, S., & Towns, A. (2016). Seizing time and ceasing fire: Race and mobility on the LA gang tour. Transfers—Journal of Mobility Studies, 6(1), 26–44. Singh, R., & Sharma, S. (2019). Platform uncommons. Feminist Media Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2019.1573547 Weeks, K. (2011). The problem with work: Feminism, Marxism, antiwork politics, and postwork imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press.

PART III

Always Already On: Perspectives on Media and Time over Time

CHAPTER 11

As Time Goes By: Tracking Polychronic Temporalities in Journalism and Mediated Memory Irene Neverla and Stefanie Trümper

Introduction Time has long remained a rather enigmatic category in media and communication research, primarily coming into the foreground in acute phases of technological innovation. The increasing digitalisation of media production and media use necessitates scholars to reconsider a proper array of terms and concepts that ground the inherent temporality of media and communication processes. In this process, sociology and communication research have developed several approaches to reflect and to analyse how the social construction of time and individual social practices of shaping time are closely connected with media technologies and institutions of all kinds. In the first part of this chapter, we show that polychronicity—the intensification of an abstract understanding of time that allows for temporal

I. Neverla (*) University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] S. Trümper German Climate Association, Berlin, Germany © The Author(s) 2019 M. Hartmann et al. (eds.), Mediated Time, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24950-2_11

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multiplicity—provides the prerequisite for a twofold and dialectic ­development: on the one hand, polychronicity allows (but also forces) individuals and institutions to process and shape their timing patterns in everyday life. On the other hand, polychronicity provides the basis for increasing acceleration, which has become the most significant and dominant time mode in production, distribution and consumption of goods and services, including all kinds of media production and use. In the second part, we investigate societal responses to both polychronicity and acceleration. We take journalism and its function of providing mediated memory as an example of social institutions that are grounded in the present and may take a shift towards retrospective past and prospective future. We will explore this hypothesis with the example of memory construction in journalism. We will show how journalism as a significant social system dealing with new, socially relevant and fact-based information copes with the challenges as well as the effects of acceleration and digitalisation. Journalism seems to respond to changing media production logics with a certain level of chronological flexibility, e.g. by strategically integrating not only retrospective components of memory in news reports but also prospective elements in order to act ahead of time.

The Social Construction of Mediated Time and Its Conceptualisation The concept of mediated time, which is featured in this volume, is the outcome of manifold scholarly assumptions in two core fields: communication research and sociology, specifically sociology of time. To get a better understanding of where we are, what we are heading for and what might be missing, it is worth to reconsider some fruitful convergences of these two contributions from two disciplinary fields. From early periods of communication research, the focus on timely and time-related communication was obvious, especially in the subfield of journalism studies. Several journalism scholars in the German and English-­ speaking academic world explored timeliness (Aktualität) as well as the temporal conditions within journalistic news production. They reflected, for instance, on the pressure of immediacy (meaning proximity between event and reporting) or the pre-fabrication of news about expected events (e.g. Hagemann 1947; Groth 1960; Prakke 1968; Tuchman 1973; Schlesinger 1978; Schudson 1987). However, most of these works were related to mathematical concepts of time and duration, missing in-depth

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analyses of two independent but mutually influencing concepts: the social construction of time, which came up in sociology in the 1980s, and mediatisation, which emerged in communication theory from the 2000s onwards. Elias (1992) was one of the first sociologists to take the notion of time as a cultural construct as a starting point for modern time sociology. This conceptualisation is embedded in Elias’s approach of process sociology and his theory of the civilisation process (1994). Society is based on networks of interdependencies in which structures and individual agencies are closely tied to one another. In this context, time is a social construction that provides mutual points of reference for interactions. In his historical analysis, Elias (1992) shows the development from occasional time in ancient societies to circular time in emerging capitalism to abstract time in late-modern society. We do not know exactly in which period Elias’s writing process for the book Time: An Essay (1992) actually took place. It was first published in German in 1984, based on previous writings in English, but Elias did not refer to modern media and mediated communication in his book. The only symbolic media he refers to is human language. This is in spite of the fact that, in the 1980s, printed and electronic media were part of everyday life in any industrialised country, and computerisation had also already reached a point of broader dissemination. One important link between time and media is the work by Hömberg (1990). He transferred Elias’s historical analysis to media history. He was able to show the development from occasional time in early media production, such as single-page prints and broadsheets, to circular time in the periodical production of weekly and daily newspapers, to the abstract time in electronic media such as radio and television. Neverla adapted Elias’s concept to media theory and audience reception studies. In her work, she focused on electronic media as institutions for social timing (soziale Zeitgeber; Neverla 1992, p.  59), most notably TV, which was the most important medium in Western societies in the 1980s. Besides that, she explored the audience’s media use as a way of forming everyday timing patterns and of synchronising these patterns according to those of prominent institutions and individuals (Neverla 1992, 1999). From today’s perspective, this would be considered an example of a study based on the concept of (deep) mediatisation—a theoretical perspective that came up later (see e.g. Hepp et al. 2015; Lundby 2014). Towards the end of this short upswing of the time and the media topic in the 1990s, Beck (1994)

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systematically conferred the concept of time as a social construct to the various fields of communication research. While this topic was able to gain some attention in communication research, it did however remain a rather incidental research field of marginal relevance. Polychronicity: Potentials and Ambiguities of Abstract Time Regimes As electronic media and computerisation became more broadly disseminated, sociological concepts increasingly referred to media from the mid-­ 1980s onwards. Conversely, communication scholars made use of sociological concepts and applied these to media theory, audience and user research, as well as to journalism theory. We are going to draw some outlines of these overlaps and transformations. In 1989, Nowotny proposed two terms and concepts which were ground-breaking for the analysis of upcoming digital communication. Laboratory time (Laborzeit) is a metaphor of abstract time: a temporality that is detached from any biological or natural rhythm, formed in a mathematical scheme. It is applied not only to laboratories, but also to industries, everyday life, and not least to electronic media like TV and film. The rise of electronic technologies has fully detached events and processes from their “natural” shapes: from their allocation, durations and rhythms. Laboratory time conveys the impression that processes can be manipulated in any direction and at any speed, whether in acceleration, deceleration or even frozen in a deadlock. Closely related to laboratory time is a phenomenon which Nowotny calls own time (Eigenzeit): the desire and search of individuals to form and practise their own specific timing that suits them best. The flexible character of laboratory time opens up opportunities for individuals to search and eventually find their own time and to explore patterns of allocations and rhythms in their everyday lives and their biographies according to their specific social settings (see Nowotny in this volume). With these two terms, Nowotny paved the way for a core issue that has remained relevant in the scientific discourse until today. It is about the twofold, ambivalent risks and potentials of abstract temporality: on the one hand, it puts individuals, organisations and institutions under pressure, as we all have to follow the logic of abstract, mathematical and economical time regimes. On the other hand, abstract temporality opens up the freedom to form, fold and manage individual patterns of time. Both

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arguments now gaining broader attention are about acceleration, which is evidently triggered by abstract temporality and which seems to continuously reach new levels. Similar to Nowotny, Castells coined the term timeless time within his analysis of the so-called Information Age and Network Society (2010, p. 406). He argued that digitalisation has minimised or even annihilated time. At closer inspection, this becomes obvious in the compressed duration of the production, distribution, transport, communication of goods and human activity. Moreover, as Castells (2009) argues, the sequences of social practices that encompass past, present and future as well as lifecycle patterns are increasingly blurring both productive and reproductive life. With the upcoming of computerisation and what was called new media in the 1990s, several empirical studies on time management in industries and social practices with new media explored the complexity of juxtapositions of different time regimes in the family and working spheres. They detected time pioneers (Zeitpioniere; Hörning et al. 1990) in search of new cultures of timing (ibid. 1997) and variable modulations of time (Ahrens et al. 1994, p. 232). All these approaches implicate that abstract temporality in late-modern society is highly ambivalent. It sets constraints with strict rules and expectations in terms of tight time schedules while simultaneously opening up opportunities for individuals to flexibly manage their own time. Communication scholars fruitfully transferred and refined the idea of time management in abstract time regimes to empirical studies. In an analysis of the use of television in the late 1980s, Neverla (1992) shows links between social settings of individuals and their television patterns, e.g. ritual patterns of elderly and retired couples and marginal patterns of working mothers. Based on these conceptualisations and empirical findings, and while noting the emergence of the Internet in the 2000s, the concept of polychronicity was developed (Neverla 2002). Polychronicity indicates a new stage of time regime: it is the intensification of abstract time, still based on a mathematical concept and driven by economic forces, but additionally enhanced by digital technology. Individuals and institutions are under pressure to work out their specific temporalities in relation to their own settings, and in relation to the varieties of time patterns of other individuals, other organisations and institutions that are relevant in various social domains, including family, working and reproductive life. The practice of time is an ongoing process of shaping, forming and balancing a wide range of individual and institutional time patterns. Polychronicity is both a con-

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straint as well as an emancipatory option (Neverla 1994). It is an extremely demanding time regime, ubiquitous and omnipresent, but it also offers possibilities for the individualisation of time patterns. Linked to other processes of individualisation, it enables us to find windows of opportunities to emancipate from the regime of abstract time and its accelerations—at least for limited periods. One prominent example is the so-called time out (Auszeit) or digital detox, to use a modern term. Acceleration: Dominant Time Mode in Digital Societies Within the time regime of abstract temporality and its extension of polychronicity, acceleration is its most significant and dominant time mode. It is likely that the phenomenon of acceleration most clearly comes to the forefront during periods of intense technological innovation and its distribution or, in other words, during transformations of mediated time. History shows that acceleration received high attention during the industrialisation process of the nineteenth century with the essayistic diagnosis of what was then named the nervous society. In the twentieth and twenty-­ first centuries, the phenomenon was called thrills of speed (Temporausch; Radkau 1998). The French philosopher Virilio (1989) developed the approach of dromology, the science of speed, and coined the metaphoric term of frantic stagnation (Rasender Stillstand; ibid. 1992). Others, like the German historian Lübbe, emphasised the close relationship between acceleration and historical consciousness. He argued that due to rapid and ongoing dynamics of innovation, the presence is disappearing. This disappearing presence (Gegenwartsschrumpfung) arouses a need to pre-­emptively preserve and archive cultural relics and testimonies of a rapidly outdated present, for instance, in museums, which could be regarded as a strategy to compensate for growing losses and uncertainties (Lübbe 1990, p. 14, 1992, 2000, p. 13). The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa (2015, p. 316) refers to acceleration as an ethically and politically uncontrollable trend, which increasingly provides a basis for pathologies of acceleration. In a similar vein, Rosa and the political scientist Scheuerman (2009, p. 18) reflect on acceleration as a driving force as well as a component of alienation in late-­ modern, high-speed society. They ask whether pathologies of social acceleration can be overcome without attacking its central driving forces. Tomlinson (2007) has analysed the Culture of Speed and considers immediacy as its culmination (see also Hassan 2012, p.  24; Wajcman

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2008). Similarly, Adam (2006) focuses on acceleration, synchronicity and the regime of immediacy while Keightley (2013) refers to the potentials of the modern media environment for offering the audience zones of intermediacy amid the immediacy of mediated time. Acceleration means an increase of acts in a given time unit, respectively, in shorter time units than before. This might relate to production and distribution processes of goods and human activity, the amount of information and stimuli per unit, or a more intense rate of transformation processes in any given period (Heller 1981, p. 306; Hassan 2012, p. 24 ff.; Rosa 2010; Borscheid 2004, p. 12; Nowotny 1989, p. 97). Whenever the transformation process of acceleration is intensified, it evokes further coping strategies like resistance, resilience and deceleration. This can be seen in various fields of arts, for instance, in literature (Die Entdeckung der Langsamkeit by Nadolny 1983), cultural productions such as journalistic features (SPEED—Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit by Opitz 2012) or in social movements like slow food, slow travel as well as slow media and journalism. Obviously, polychronicity and acceleration are critical for journalism as a significant social system dealing with new, socially relevant and fact-­based information. As we will explore in the third part of this chapter, several scholars have shown that the temporal horizons that journalists refer to while setting the agenda have expanded and differentiated into the past and future. Consequently, one could argue that both journalism and audiences have gained more windows of opportunities to prioritise, contextualise and re-contextualise current events or issues. Also, the issue of an ever-shorter presence may foster a media production logic that leaves more room for future events and scenarios because the editorial production line allows for better anticipation and organisation—especially in print media. With its impact on synchronicity and immediacy, acceleration conflicts with the objective of journalism to provide new and timely information (Aktualität). The selection criteria of what is new and which topics or events should be covered are now more ambiguous than ever. As indicated in our abovementioned hypothesis, a different (but not completely new) definition of new and timely information comes into play, which focuses on background information or context as provided by journalists. These links between time regime, news production and consumption are primarily based on the changing media environment and increasing innovations of media technologies and the ways that journalists and audiences use them (Kramp and Loosen 2018).

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Our brief history of the social construction of mediated time and its theoretical conceptualisation, including the concept of polychronicity, has shown, so far, how communication research and sociology inspire each other and how they have converged over the past decades. While sociological approaches have offered complex concepts of time in society, they did miss a deeper theoretical understanding of mediated communication. In communication studies, the dimension of time, if at all recognised, had been a side stage of theoretical conceptualisation. This gap between sociology of time and communication research on mediated time seems to have gradually diminished. Regarding the aforementioned considerations on the abstract or rather polychronic time regime and acceleration as the dominant time mode in late-modern digital societies, in the next part, we focus on journalism and the construction of memory in journalism as one specific form of temporal movement. There seems to be no doubt that memory plays a central role within journalism, and journalism is an important site of memory construction in society. Furthermore, it is also widely agreed that memory construction essentially means connecting the past with the present and the future. By showing how past and future infuse themselves into news discourse through memory construction, we argue that journalism is able to extend the frame of relevance by using the temporal rhythms of news work, going against the grain of journalists’ rhetoric of the immediate present and thus offering a mode of deceleration.

Polychronicity and the Construction of Memory in Journalism Journalism operates within the subliminal space between past and future and is assigned with multiple roles to bring news, chronicle the past and forecast future developments. The increasing digital acceleration and automation of news flows that characterises polychronicity led us to acknowledge that the present as the principal frame of relevance that guides journalism as a social system might be losing relevance. We thus focus on journalism as it is notably affected by several trends in a changing media environment. Acceleration of communicative practices in journalism is one consequence of this (Kramp and Loosen 2018, p. 210). It challenges the mediatised temporality and thereby the journalistic role in terms of synchronising and integrating members of society with each other.

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In the following, we investigate to which extent memory could be regarded as one communicative practice and context-sensitive reporting strategy that creates new frames of relevance that shift from the immediate present to the past and the future. From Retrospective to Prospective Memory Temporal references are obvious and self-explanatory in every act of remembrance. However, time as a category has not yet fully been grasped and integrated into the fields of cultural and communication memory studies. In line with the abovementioned social construction of mediated time and its conceptualisation, we can find important reference points to the sociology of time and of knowledge, which help to clarify why time and temporality of memory should be given more attention. Here, we refer once more to Elias (1992) and his work Time: An Essay, wherein he emphasises the human ability to make associations between events that have taken place at various points in time. Likewise, in his essay Tiresias or Our Knowledge of Future Events, the sociologist Schütz (1976) argues that past experiences allow us to anticipate future experiences and that, by passing on knowledge from one generation to the other, we are able to shape our future. Furthermore, the sociological works of Adam (2004) and Nowotny (2008) also deliver valuable reflections on memory as a relation of past and future and illustrate that these temporal relations are essential for anticipating and solving contemporary uncertainties, risks and threats. Adam even speaks about the memory of future and memory aids for the future and gives examples of future topics such as atomic energy or genetically modified food—in other words, aspects of industrial and technical progress and the associated risks. Nowotny refers to the phenomenon of insatiable curiosity of modern science to explore the future as well as the social drive for innovation. She discusses the ambivalence between trust in progress on the one hand and the aspect of uncertain (scientific) knowledge on the other hand. As the future is fragile, Nowotny consequently raises the question whether we might lose our future because we have lost our ability to control the future (Nowotny 2008, p. 113—for further reflections, see Nowotny in this volume). Notwithstanding the obvious triad of past, present and future regarding memory, most of the cultural and communication memory research until the first decade of this millennium privileged the past over the present and the future and mainly focused on memory understood as a

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r­ etrospective form and practice. The German sociologist Welzer even criticised the “very strong bias towards retrospective memory forms and practices” (2010b, p.  8). Inspired by a debate on contemporary forms and formats of knowledge transfer, he suggests to “adjust memory cultures towards the future” (Welzer 2010a, p. 22). This would enable us to analyse the effects of historical experiences and apply this to future actions on both the individual and societal levels. The Predictive Power of Memory in Journalism This shift from retrospective to prospective memory most notably emerges from communication memory studies that concentrate on journalism as an important memory agent. It is particularly interesting that several scholars developed very similar approaches during the past years to theorise and analyse the predictive power of journalism’s memory work. Moreover, they did so almost simultaneously, which might hint towards a growing relevance of time-related questions within communication studies in general. While some scholars stress the timeliness of past (Neverla and Lohner 2012; Schudson 2014), others assume a growing relevance of future in current news stories and propose concepts like prospective or sustainable mediated memory that notably highlight the role of journalism as a predictor (Tenenboim-Weinblatt 2011, 2013; Trümper and Neverla 2013; Trümper 2018). The latter gives way to more general perspectives on time in news narratives (Neiger and Tenenboim-Weinblatt 2016; Tenenboim-Weinblatt and Neiger 2015, 2018). We suppose that both the growing body of research on temporal orientation of journalism and the fact that news production and memory construction expand into the past and into the future (Barnhurst 2011) correlate with the abovementioned potentials and ambiguities of mediated time in digital societies and the underlying abstract time regimes. Several empirical studies, mainly content-based research, support this assumption. One strand of research, which analyses time within news reports, indicates that references to the past are predominant, while references to the future are rare (e.g. Bentele 1992; Bell 1995; Siems 2009; Henn and Vowe 2015). Studies on special anniversary reports (Lohner 2014; Ammann and Grittmann 2013) as well as on non-commemorative memory in news reports (Trümper 2018; Trümper and Broer 2019) also show that journalism clearly favours the integration of references to the past over references to the future. These findings are in line with the

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­ eneral assumption that journalism tends to focus on secure terrains of g knowledge: on facts that can be proven and explained to the audience instead of uncertain projections (Schönbach 2008, p. 507). However, on closer inspection, there is no general aversion to integrate future-related issues in news or memory reports. At this point, the predictive power of mediated or journalistic memory becomes evident. Journalism attributes high reliability to the past, and analogies between past and present seem to be a tried and tested method to evaluate present and even future circumstances. As Edy has pointedly summed up, “the fact that the past event really happened (regardless of its subsequent interpretation and reconstruction, and the plausibility of its comparison to the present) makes it appear to be a better predictor than the guesswork of officials or experts” (1999, p. 79). Both content-based research on prospective mediated memory (Tenenboim-Weinblatt 2011, 2013; Trümper and Neverla 2013; Trümper 2018) and actor-based research on strategic motivations behind journalists’ memory work (Trümper and Broer 2019) have revealed that a glance into the future based on historical facts or historical analogies seems to be a convenient practice for journalists. They use parts of memory to guide their audiences in a certain direction, for instance, to sensitise them for perceived societal threats or to mitigate perceived threats (climate change, refugee influx; ibid.). This way, journalists can point to unsolved problems, highlight the urgency for action and capture audiences’ attention for what needs to be done in politics or society. To get at an idea about which future is at issue when we talk about the predictive power of memory in journalism, findings from content- and actor-based research on journalistic memory work show that the distant and uncertain future rarely serves as a point of reference for journalists. Rather, the dominant timeframe of 15  years into the future provides a framework for deeper analysis and interpretation, likely because the near future is to some extent easier to verify than the abstract and distant future. In this way, journalists stay very close to their own and their audiences’ life worlds and interests (Trümper 2018, p. 248 f.; Trümper and Broer 2016). The literature we have set out here allows us to draw tentative conclusions concerning the predictive power of memory in journalism. The use of memory in journalism—understood as a communicative practice of implementing past and future references in news stories—enables journalists to compose and offer new temporal frames of relevance to their audiences. Furthermore, this communicative practice, which in the end is a

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context-sensitive reporting strategy, puts journalists in a rather powerful position. As they can actively shift the frame of relevance to past, present or future, journalists are able to guide their readers in a certain direction. The intrinsic power of journalistic memory work and the ways it might steer public opinion is a highly interesting topic that warrants further attention. From Predictive Memory to Strategic Future Orientation As stated earlier, research on the special role of the future within journalistic memory construction has initiated more general research on the prevalence of an orientation towards the future in news narratives as well as on journalists’ future-oriented work. Following this, we will argue on a broader level that both the contemporary time regime of polychronicity and the dominant time mode of acceleration are not only reflected in the temporal structures of news narratives, they can also be attributed to changing media production logics as well as innovative communicative practices in journalism. Next, we continue our argument that journalism has the agency to shift and shape frames of relevance, as manifested by the topics and issues that are finally covered, and try to show that communication practices of journalists can also alter media specificity and institutionalised media logics (see Hepp 2013 for a general discussion). Here, we could find three associated studies that deal in detail with media-related temporal affordances and which all show how media technologies forge the temporal orientation of news—albeit with different emphases (Tenenboim-Weinblatt and Neiger 2015, 2018; Neiger and Tenenboim-Weinblatt 2016). These studies are mainly based on cross-­ media content analyses of print and online news stories. The first study presents a more general perspective on the temporal orientation of news stories analysing how past, present and future are represented in leading Israeli daily newspapers and news websites in the second quarter of 2012 (n = 429) (Tenenboim-Weinblatt and Neiger 2015). The second study is a more nuanced analysis of the temporal layers in news narratives (Neiger and Tenenboim-Weinblatt 2016) based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative content analysis of print and online news items in the United States and Israel (n = 732). Both studies, however, indicate that news in print media has a higher temporal orientation towards the future than online news, for instance, by dealing with upcoming events or discussing potential results. The third study is based on a

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quantitative content analysis of Israeli and US online news stories and print items from 1950 to 2013 (n = 597) added with five interviews with senior editors at Israeli news outlets. It reflects the temporal conditions of media production in different technological eras and argues that there is a trend of a growing future orientation in news narratives, notably in print, but also in online media (Tenenboim-Weinblatt and Neiger 2018). In addition to these three associated analyses, another cross-cultural study on non-commemorative memory in journalism and the role of past and future within journalists’ daily activities supports the aforementioned findings. This study integrates content-based results with actor-based views. It encompasses a quantitative long-term content analysis of news reports in Dutch and German national and regional print media (n = 2799) and 10 qualitative interviews with leading editors at Dutch and German news outlets. The results show that there is indeed chronological flexibility in news production up to a certain degree on both the level of media content as well as on the level of media production (Trümper and Broer 2016, 2019; see also Trümper 2018, 2019). Regarding the question how journalists employ future in their work, especially the interviews make clear that the future is considered a problematic though necessary part of the job. This is not only true in the case of memory work but in general. Doing journalism involves making assumptions about what will interest the reader of tomorrow. There is a perceived duty to warn the public in case of future threats and to provide a sense of direction in current developments. On a more practical scale, journalists need to prepare topics, sometimes months in advance. Regarding the role of the future in the daily, professional activities of the participants, it becomes apparent that journalism is indeed forced to keep up with the developments of news consumption and is required to look forward. An orientation towards the future is used to make the newspaper more attractive. In times where news updates are available 24/7, newspapers obviously have to invent new modes of reporting. To put it in the words of a lead-editor of a large Dutch national newspaper, who was interviewed for this study: “the newspaper already is such a slow medium. It’s better to look forward rather than backward” (Trümper and Broer 2016). Instead of frantically pursuing time, journalists clearly need to balance between the time-related possibilities and constraints associated with the conditions and characteristics of the respective medium (here: print media). In sum, all of these briefly discussed content- and actor-based studies suggest not only that journalists may create and alter the temporality of

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certain media, like print media, but also that there are shifting roles within journalism that were not as evident in the pre-digital era. In addition to reporting present issues and being an agent of memory, journalism nowadays also tends to be a predictor: a role that we are convinced will become more important in the future.

Conclusion In this chapter, it was our aim to contribute to the analytical power of the concept of mediated time, which is featured in this volume. We have pursued three lines of thought, ending up with a preliminary exploration of these thoughts into the world of journalism. First, we argue that polychronicity is the core temporal structure in late-modern society and digitalised societies. Polychronicity is the intensification of abstract time, or laboratory time, which allows but also forces individuals and institutions to “practise time”. This process has a twofold and ambivalent character: it offers opportunities for individuals to organise, shape and form their timing, but it also constrains our actions and forces us to manage, organise and calculate both our lifetime and everyday time according to the mathematical and economical requirements of abstract time. Secondly, we argue that one of the core temporal modes of polychronicity is acceleration, which again offers both opportunities and constraints to individuals and institutions. The increasing acceleration challenges coping strategies such as deceleration and the changing of temporal frames, i.e. by shifting the focus from the shrinking and “disappearing” presence to the past (retrospective) and the future (prospective), or even by blending these perspectives in chronological flexibility. Based on this conceptual framework, we finally explored the shifting temporalities of journalism. We were particularly interested in the extent to which temporal frames of relevance shift and extend from present to past and future. Assuming that this might be part of a general coping strategy for journalism (and its audience) to deal with acceleration, we focused on the construction of memory as one specific form of temporal movement and showed how past and future infuse themselves into news discourses. Taking the idea of prospective memory, we were able to trace a growing relevance of time-related questions diffusing from the nascent field of communication memory studies to journalism studies. It is particularly interesting that several studies associate mediated memory with innovative communicative practices. It seems that the inclusion of ­memory

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is then a way to use temporalities for coping with the challenges of acceleration, particularly those that can be attributed to changing media production logics. Journalism and its audiences currently face challenges regarding objectivity and truth, as expressed in recent controversial debates about fake news and a post-truth society. These developments show that past and future are at risk of being exploited by several actors to strengthen populist opinions in the present—be it in politics, science or media. Consequently, journalists are forced to look both back and ahead in order to fulfil their guiding role within society. Emerging forms and approaches like digital storytelling and long-form journalism seem to reflect a growing demand for attentive, elaborated, sustainable and reliable journalism in the digital age. Altogether, chronological flexibility, which characterises both journalism and audiences in polychronic times, requires further theoretical as well as empirical time-related research.

References Adam, B. (2004). Memory of futures. KronoScope, 4(2), 297–315. Adam, B. (2006). Time. Time, Culture and Society, 23, 119–126. Ahrens, D., Gerhard, A., & Hörning, K. H. (1994). Neue Technologien im Kampf mit der Zeit. In N.  Beckenbach & W. van Treeck (Eds.), Umbrüche gesellschaftlicher Arbeit (pp.  227–240). Göttingen: Schwartz (Soziale Welt, Sonderband). Ammann, I., & Grittmann, E. (2013). Das Trauma anderer betrachten—Zehn Jahre 9/11 im Bild. Medien- & Kommunikationswissenschaft, 61(3), 368–386. Barnhurst, K. G. (2011). The problem of modern time in American journalism. KronoScope, 11, 98–123. Beck, K. (1994). Medien und die soziale Konstruktion von Zeit. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Bell, A. (1995). News time. Time & Society, 4(3), 305–328. Bentele, G. (1992). Zeitstrukturen in den aktuellen Informationsmedien. In W.  Hömberg & M.  Schmolke (Eds.), Zeit, Raum, Kommunikation (pp. 159–176). München: Ölschläger. Borscheid, P. (2004). Das Tempo-Virus: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Beschleunigung. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Castells, M. (2009). Communication power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Castells, M. (2010). The information age: Economy, society and culture. The rise of the network society (2nd ed.). Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.

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Edy, J. A. (1999). Journalistic uses of collective memory. Journal of Communication, 4(2), 71–85. Elias, N. (1992). Time: An essay. Oxford [i.a.]: Blackwell. Elias, N. (1994). The civilizing process. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Groth, O. (1960). Die unerkannte Kulturmacht. Grundlegung der Zeitungswissenschaft (Periodik). Bd. 1. Das Wesen des Werkes. Berlin: Verlag Walter de Gruyter & Co. Hagemann, W. (1947). Grundzüge der Publizistik. Regensberg: Münster. Hassan, R. (2012). The age of distraction: Reading, writing and politics in a high-­ speed networked economy. London: Transaction Publishers. Heller, A. (1981). Das Alltagsleben. Versuch einer Erklärung der individuellen Reproduktion. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Henn, P., & Vowe, G. (2015). Facetten von Sicherheit und Unsicherheit. Welches Bild von Terrorismus, Kriminalität und Katastrophen zeigen die Medien? Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft, 63(3), 341–362. Hepp, A. (2013). The communicative figurations of mediatized worlds: Mediatization research in times of the ‘mediation of everything’. Communicative figurations working paper, Nr. 1. Zemki University of Bremen. https://www. kommunikative-figurationen.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Arbeitspapiere/ CoFi_EWP_No-1_Hepp.pdf. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Hepp, A., Hjavard, S., & Lundby, K. (2015). Mediatization. Theorizing the interplay between media, culture and society. Media, Culture and Society, 37(2), 314–324. Hömberg, W. (1990). Zeit, Zeitung, Zeitbewußtsein. Massenmedien und Temporalstrukturen. Publizistik, 35(1), 5–17. Hörning, K.  H., Michailow, M., & Gerhard, A. (1990). Zeitpioniere—Flexible Arbeitszeit—neuer Lebensstil. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Hörning, K.  H., Ahrens, D., & Gerhard, A. (1997). Zeitpraktiken. Experimentierfelder der Spätmoderne. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Keightly, E. (2013). From immediacy to intermediacy: The mediation of lived time. Time and Society, 22(1), 55–75. Kramp, L., & Loosen, W. (2018). The transformation of journalism: From changing newsroom cultures to a new communicative orientation? In A.  Hepp, A. Breiter, & U. Hasebrink (Eds.), Communicative figurations. Transforming communications—Studies in cross-media research (pp.  205–239). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Lohner, J. (2014). Journalistische Erinnerung als Dimension europäisierter Öffentlichkeit: Theoretische Grundlegung und empirische Anwendung am Beispiel der „Europäischen Wende“. Dissertation. Hamburg: Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg. http://ediss.sub.uni-hamburg.de/volltexte/2014/6973/pdf/Dissertation.pdf. Accessed 16 Mar 2019.

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Rosa, H. (2010). Alienation and acceleration. Towards a critical theory of late-­ modern temporality. Malmö: NSU Press. Rosa, H. (2015). Social acceleration: A new theory of modernity. Trans. J. Trejo-­ Mathys. New York: Columbia University Press. Rosa, H., & Scheuermann, W.  E. (2009). Introduction. In H.  Rosa & W.  E. Scheuermann (Eds.), High-speed society. Social acceleration, power and modernity (pp. 1–32). University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Schlesinger, P. (1978). Putting ‘reality’ together. BBC news. London: Constable. Schönbach, K. (2008). Das Prinzip der zuverlässigen Überraschung. Bürgerjournalismus und die Zukunft der traditionellen Nachrichtenmedien. In B.  Pörksen, W.  Loosen, & A.  Scholl (Eds.), Paradoxien des Journalismus. Theorie—Empirie—Praxis (pp. 503–511). Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Schudson, M. (1987). When? Deadlines, datelines and history. In R. K. Manoff & M. Schudson (Eds.), Reading the news (pp. 79–108). New York: Pantheon. Schudson, M. (2014). Journalism as a vehicle of non-commemorative cultural memory. In B.  Zelizer & K.  Tenenboim-Weinblatt (Eds.), Journalism and memory (pp. 85–96). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Schütz, A. (1976). Tiresias, or our knowledge of future events. In A. Brodersen (Ed.), Collected papers II. Studies in social theory (pp. 277–293). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Siems, A. (2009). Zahlen in Medienangeboten. Eine Studie zur Konstitution und Funktion medialer Zahlenwirklichkeit. Oberhausen: Athena. Tenenboim-Weinblatt, K. (2011). Journalism as an agent of prospective memory. In M. Neiger, O. Meyers, & E. Zandberg (Eds.), On media memory. Collective memory in a new media age (pp. 213–225). Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Tenenboim-Weinblatt, K. (2013). Bridging collective memories and public agendas: Towards a theory of mediated prospective memory. Communication Theory, 23(2), 91–111. Tenenboim-Weinblatt, K., & Neiger, M. (2015). Print is future, online is past: Cross-media analysis of temporal orientations in the news. Communication Research, 42(8), 1047–1067. Tenenboim-Weinblatt, K., & Neiger, M. (2018). Temporal affordances in the news. Journalism, 19(1), 37–55. Tomlinson, J. (2007). The culture of speed. London: Sage. Trümper, S. (2018). Nachhaltige Erinnerung im Journalismus. Konzept und Fallstudie Konzept und Fallstudie zur Medienaufmerksamkeit für vergangene Flutkatastrophen. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Trümper, S. (2019). Traces of flood disasters in journalistic memory: Remembering, locating and anticipating the impact of water. Paper presented at the 3rd Annual Memory Studies Association Conference (MSA) in Madrid (Spain) from 25th to 28th June 2019.

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Trümper, S., & Broer, I. G. B. (2016). Looking back, looking ahead: Comparing the predictive power of journalists’ memory work in news reporting across countries and newspapers. Paper presented at the 6th European Communication Conference (ECREA) in the Journalism Studies Section (JOS) in Prague (Czech Republic) from 09th to 12th November 2016. Trümper, S., & Broer, I.  G. B. (2019). Non-commemorative memory in news production: Discovering underlying motivations for journalists’ memory work. Memory Studies. Online first. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698019863158. Trümper, S., & Neverla, I. (2013). Sustainable memory. How journalism keeps the attention for past disasters alive. Studies in Communication/Media, 2(1), 1–37. Tuchman, G. (1973). Making news by doing the work: Routinizing the unexpected. American Journal of Sociology, 79(1), 110–131. Virilio, P. (1989). Der negative Horizont. Bewegung/Geschwindigkeit/ Beschleunigung. München/Wien: Hanser. Virilo, P. (1992). Rasender Stillstand. München: Hansa. Wajcman, J. (2008). Life in the fast lane? Towards a sociology of technology and time. British Journal of Sociology, 59(1), 59–77. Welzer, H. (2010a). Erinnerungskultur und Zukunftsgedächtnis. Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte. Zukunft der Erinnerung, 25/26, 16–23. http://www.bpb.de/ system/fi-les/pdf/WQUNYO.pdf. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Welzer, H. (2010b). Erinnerung und Gedächtnis. Desiderate und Perspektiven. In C. Gudehus, A. Eichenberg, & H. Welzer (Eds.), Gedächtnis und Erinnerung. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch (pp. 1–10). Stuttgart: J.B. Melzer.

CHAPTER 12

Local News Time on the Web Henrik Bødker and Niels Brügger

Introduction The temporalities of contemporary journalism are constituted in complex interactions between digital technologies and practices within and in between the production and consumption of news. A recurrent trope for understanding the development of such interactions has been that of acceleration and, linked to that, complex relations between capitalism and technology (see, for instance, Hassan 2012; Wajcman 2015). While notions of acceleration and speed indeed are important lenses through which we can understand contemporary news, there are arguably a range of processes and nuances that fall through the cracks if such a perspective is left unchallenged. One of the major goals of this chapter is therefore to focus on three local news sites in the United Kingdom in order to investigate how websites as texts construct time and, through that, suggest some perspectives and concepts that hopefully will be useful for further studies. The approach in this chapter is a continuation of earlier works, Bødker (2017) and Bødker and Brügger (2017), which both nuance how online journalism constructs time textually, i.e. how the news website as a text manifests time in terms of organisation and specific temporal terms. This

H. Bødker (*) • N. Brügger Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 M. Hartmann et al. (eds.), Mediated Time, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24950-2_12

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particular perspective is laid out in the first article, while the latter applies it to the textual constitution of time on the Guardian’s website from its beginning in 1996 to 2015. While time was a significant and organising principle on this site, the development of the role of time as an organising principle does not support an interpretation of a steady acceleration in terms of digital news delivery. This chapter follows in the footsteps of that study by casting a similar analytical perspective on the textual constitution of time in smaller digital news outlets in differently sized UK communities with varying relations to the local, regional and national: The Huddersfield Daily Examiner (Huddersfield), The Press (York) and Yorkshire Evening Post (Leeds). This shift away from a focus on national news is grounded in a wish to understand the constitution of time in types of outlets most often thought of in terms of geography (see Hess and Waller 2014). The question we ask is thus simply how time is textually constructed on these non-national news sites and through that (hopefully) get a sense of how space and place act as important mediators of time. This broader impetus rests on a wish to speak on both journalism and Internet studies as the chapter raises broader questions about how the digital may co-constitute time and space. This means, firstly, nuancing the prevalent focus on time within many studies of national news outlets and, secondly, and linked to this, questioning the assumption within much research on digital (news) media that the (almost) naturalised affordances of the digital, e.g. speed, spatial extension, linking and interactivity, are always realised or, put differently, that there is a tendency to study digital media in which that is the case. An important point we make in this chapter is that slowly updated, standalone local news sites are (also) a staple of digital news and as such a constituent part of the temporalities of the Internet. Indeed, we argue that permanence is an overlooked and important digital affordance that distinguishes digital news from print just as much as acceleration and speed. In order to reach this conclusion, we start with some basic thoughts on the co-constitution of time through media and journalism. Following this, we outline our methodological design and analytical framework after which we focus on three overall analytical points, namely the relations between here and there, the local as continuity, and lastly, the notion of a temporal sanctuary. As these concepts suggest, the broader aim of this chapter is mainly theoretical. As the arguments grow out of a rather small case study based on textual analysis, they are not fully substantiated and thus meant to be suggestive rather than comprehensive. In the conclusion, we suggest further avenues of research, e.g. a perspective linked to archives rather than—or in addition to—news.

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Journalism, Media, Time and Space What follows is an attempt to establish a broad conceptual foundation in relation to which we can develop the analyses. While most journalism—at least traditionally—caters to more or less place-bound communities, there has been—both within journalism itself and within research on journalism— a preoccupation with time rather than space. At some level, this seems, if we follow Giddens (1991), to have been intimately tied to globalisation, i.e. expansions on the ground and related technologies of communication that, starting with the telegraph, made the “event… more or less completely dominant over location” and which made “media presentation” take “the form of the juxtaposition of stories and items which share nothing in common other than they are ‘timely’ and consequential” (Giddens 1991, p. 26). Indeed, much digital media seem to apply a similar “collage effect” (Giddens 1991, p. 26) by bringing together almost real-­time but disparate content from a dispersed network. Following this, it seems that digital connectivity, almost automatically, is assumed to be global with only tenuous ties to the local. There are, however, also a number of studies that attempt to “ground” digital media, e.g. Miller’s (2011) work on Facebook in Trinidad. Despite such studies, it is, however, fair to say that much research on digital media and digital journalism has been less concerned with space than with breaking news and immediacy (e.g. Usher 2018; Buhl et  al. 2018). One reason for this is that much research has focused on national news, which most often is produced in metropolitan centres not seldomly tied up with social and economic relations beyond the nation state and thus less in tune with events in smaller localities within the nation state. Following this, one could say that the institution and practices of national journalism play into the construction of broader rhythms of public life. Additionally, as the speed of transmission has increased along with a seemingly easier reachability of events in a globally distributed network, the collage effect produces a sense of acceleration in the sense that we— through national news—are made aware of a multitude of constantly developing events whose relations to the local are not necessarily evident. However, while different societal and technological developments indeed have affected the co-constitution of time and space (which is what concerned Giddens), we need to remind ourselves that the global only can be observed from somewhere and that “the significance of locality persists”, as Meyrowitz (2005, p. 21) states, “even in the face of massive social and technological changes”. The timely and consequential that Giddens

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saw as tying together seemingly disparate content is thus linked to a specific vantage point; at the national level, this often means timely and consequential for the nation and the temporality of the nation is “constructed of a past filled with the nation’s founding myths… that is, the national is a time that looks to the past and inherits a future” (Sassen 2001, p. 223). This is, in other words, Anderson’s “imagined community… moving calendrically through homogenous, empty time” (1991, p. 26) and “measured” by various events with differing relations to the national. Without opening up a vast theoretical discussion, we see space and place as inscribed into each other. In doing so, we lean on Merrifield’s (1993) “Lefebvrian reconciliation”. In line with a range of other theorists (e.g. Giddens), Merrifield sees places as more concrete and tactile than spaces, yet the point is that more abstract spaces are materially present in places as, for instance, a newspaper (Anderson’s point). Thus, as space is manifested in place; place is written into larger spaces: “The space of the whole thus takes on meaning through place; and each part (i.e. place) in its interconnection with other parts (places) engenders the space of the whole” (Merrifield 1993, p.  520). In relation to local news sites, this means that they—by being materially manifested through technological devices—at the outset, are inscribed into bigger, global spaces, and perhaps the same applies to the mediation on the sites themselves, as (digital) representations are removed somewhat from the tangibility of place. However, one could also argue that digital representations have become almost fully integrated into daily life and that a masthead with a town name or a photo of the local church constitutes concrete manifestations of place (or locality) that are simultaneously written into larger spaces, i.e. West Yorkshire and/or the global community of Christianity. Seen from this perspective, places and spaces are not only written into each other; yet, in the following, we try to make a broad distinction between textually manifested places and spaces based on notions of proximity, and in order to investigate constructions of proximity, distance and connectivity, we have to look into how communities manifest themselves differently in “‘local life’… [which] is the vast order of human social existence” (Tomlinson 1999, p. 9) regardless of whether one lives in a metropolitan centre or a small village. However, living in a metropolitan centre may not necessarily connect you to a national community just as much as living in a small village does not necessarily entail a sense of belonging to what may seem a more tangible community. Such processes of belonging are complex and increas-

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ingly so with digital media, where one can be inscribed within a multitude of belongings. Hess and Waller (2014) consequently question the practice of mapping community onto geography and instead point to the “symbolic rather than geographic dimension of ‘community’”, and also caution that “constructing the idea of ‘community’ or ‘collective’” only deals with “one aspect of news media, rather than providing a theoretical basis to understand and analyse the complexities of small newspapers in the digital age” (Hess and Waller 2014, pp.  124–125). Following this, Hess and Waller suggest a symbolic notion of community, which in this chapter, is seen through textual markers of time and space. As pointed out above, time is often a relatively dominant and visible logic of structuring national news and—related to that—a significant aspect of the cultures of journalism (see, among many others, Schudson 1986). The question we seek to understand is what this means for local news sites, and this raises questions of how to define a local news site and what characterises local journalism. The first question was touched upon above, and while acknowledging that there are no transparent relations between community and geography, we define a local news site as a digital outlet placed in and predominantly serving a specific locality. In the “about us” section, on the Huddersfield Examiner site, for instance, it says: “for more than 160 years [we have]… told stories of the people of Huddersfield, Kirklees and surrounding villages”, and in “more recent times these stories have also been told digitally”.1 With regard to the second question, i.e. how to characterise local journalism, it is, firstly, important to note that national journalism is often perceived as journalism per se, and this often casts local variants as somehow degraded versions, e.g. in terms of objectivity, speaking truth to power, and so on. While this in certain cases may be true, such an approach runs the danger of glossing over a range of other functions and qualities, e.g. the construction of community as already mentioned or, as Weber and Napoli (2018) point to in the United States, the existing correlation between the presence of local news sites and the inclination to participate in politics (both local and national). Given the aim of this chapter, we have been inspired by Hess and Waller, who—in suggestive ways—attempt to conceptualise local (and hyperlocal) journalism as a subculture in order “to broaden the theoretical possibilities for understanding excessively local news” (2016, p. 194). The goal is, put differently, to approach the phenomenon as culture rather than through perspectives linked to the market and/or democracy, and one does need to buy the whole packet of subcultural theory in order to

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find some of their overall arguments relevant, e.g “that being local is practical and embodied” (Hess and Waller 2016, p. 199) and that to “be local is to have a grounded connection with, and understanding of a physical place and its social and cultural dimensions that is practical and embodied… [and which] involves an investment of time, requiring that one maintain a prolonged and continual presence in that place” (ibid., p. 197). Locality here translates into continuity and is, as we will see in the analysis, linked to a consistent focus on “the news value of proximity” (Hess and Waller 2016, p. 202). The co-constitution of time and space through various media and materialities is obviously much more complex than what the outline above suggests. The important point for our purposes here is—to sum up—that various belongings are constituted as both spatial and temporal markers in journalism. In a rather schematic fashion, we can say that, on national news sites, this can be understood as various constellations of a national community maintained as a continuous (mythical) entity somehow attested to by rapidly updating timely and consequential news from within and outside, while at the local level, community is mainly constituted by markers of continuity directly related to embodiment and local knowledge. Such constellations can, of course, be mixed in various ways, all depending on the nature of the event and the news site in focus—which is why we have chosen sites with varying relations to the local, regional and national within a specific region, which allows us to consider issues of scaling and embeddedness. The more specific aspects of these choices as well as other methodological considerations will be outlined in the next section.

Methodological Design To fuel the theoretical discussion of time, space, place and local news, we have selected three journals from the West Yorkshire area in the United Kingdom: The Huddersfield Daily Examiner, The Press and Yorkshire Evening Post. These journals were chosen for various reasons. First, we were looking for a region located at a reasonable distance from the large metropolis of London and Manchester to ensure that the selected cities were not just part of a periphery of a very big city, but were also spatial entities in their own right. Second, the region should have three cities of different sizes, each with a local journal which would enable a grading within the region, from small town to regional centre. Third, and finally, we were looking for journals that all had an online version.2 The

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Huddersfield Daily Examiner is based in Huddersfield, a city of 162,000 inhabitants (4674 hectares), The Press is out of York, which has 198,000 inhabitants in York Local Authority (27,000 hectares) and Yorkshire Evening Post is based in Leeds with 751,000 inhabitants in Leeds Local Authority (55,000 hectares).3 As seen in Fig. 12.1, all three journals have experienced a considerable drop in circulation of their print newspapers between 2010 and 2017. The Huddersfield Daily Examiner and The Press have been halved, whereas Yorkshire Evening Post has lost two-thirds of their circulation. As to the websites, the size of the cities is mirrored in the ranking of the website on the UK web domain: Yorkshire Evening Post from Leeds is ranked 2947, The Press from York is 3986 and The Huddersfield Daily Examiner is ranked 5460. The Huddersfield Daily Examiner and Yorkshire Evening Post have almost the same number of daily unique visitors, and their daily page views per visitor are very similar, whereas each visitor on The Press’s website looks at a slightly higher number of pages and is also spending more time on the Print

Website

Ownership

Rank in the Daily UK unique browsers (2016)

Daily Page -views per Visitor

Daily Time Total Sites on Site Linking In

The Hudders ield 10,418 (2017) Daily Examiner 20,540 (2010)

5,460

66,281

1.80

2:15

1,225

Trinity Mirror Regional (also owner of Daily Mirror, largest newspaper publisher in the UK)

The Press

13,104 (2017) 25,989 (2010)

3,986

÷

2.40

2:48

1,546

Newsquest Media Group

11,494 (2017) 36,512 (2010)

2,947

74,166

1.90

2:34

1,476

JP (Johnston Press) Yorkshire

Circulation

Yorkshire Evening Post

Fig. 12.1  Statistics about The Huddersfield Daily Examiner, The Press and Yorkshire Evening Post. (Sources: print, circulation: Mayhew, F.  Regional ABCs print: steep circulation falls for dailies the Yorkshire Evening Post and Carlisle & News Star, https://www.pressgazette.co.uk, 1 Mar 2018 [for 2017]; Linford, P.  ABC figures: how the regional dailies performed, http://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk, 31 Aug 2011 [for 2010]. Website: (a) daily unique browsers, Mayhew, F. Regional Website ABCs: online growth for publishers as website figures jump year-on-year, https://www.pressgazette.co.uk, 25 Aug 2016; (b) rank in the United Kingdom, daily page views per visitor, daily time on site, total sites linking in, https://www.alexa.com; (c) ownership, Audit Bureau of Circulation [ABC], https://www.abc.org.uk)

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website. Finally, The Press is the most popular of the three websites, if popularity is measured in number of in-links from other websites. However, despite these differences, it is striking how close the three journal websites are to each other regarding their traffic numbers despite the fact that they are ranked differently on the UK web and that they come from cities of different sizes. This backs Hess and Waller’s (2014) caution about automatically ascribing community to geography in the sense that a specific location does not define the audience. Apparently, the form of ownership of the journals does not influence this, since they are all owned by larger national media companies. The next methodological steps concern which parts of the website should be investigated, which period(s), and how the online newspapers should be collected and preserved. Since this is a theory-driven investigation and not a comprehensive and in-depth study of the three newspapers’ websites, it was decided to focus on the front pages only; that is, the web page on which a web user would land if the three web addresses were typed in the location bar of a web browser. It is obvious that this choice may impact how time, space and news are manifested, since one can expect other ways of doing this on sub-pages, below the front page. On the other hand, the front page is very often the place to start for the web user. It is here that the newspaper, in an overall sense, has to negotiate time, space and news. It does so by labelling and organising the different news items within a web space that is limited by the outer boundaries of the web page, in particular the width of the web page (which is usually structured by a few columns), whereas the length of the page tends to be variable and flexible (news websites tend to be 3–4 columns broad, but with relative long pages). Thus, the front page is the part of the website where the entire macro-cosmos of the site is usually condensed in a micro-cosmos with textual markers of time and space often used as structuring devices, and therefore, it constitutes a privileged entry point for discussion of time and space. As to the periods of time we wanted to focus on, it was decided to study the three websites during one entire week with a view of investigating if there were any differences regarding how the relation to time and space was negotiated on different days of the week. We decided to study week 35 of 2018 (27 August to 2 September), which we took as a normal news week with no particular events taking place. In addition, we decided to embed the study of one week in a larger temporal framework, namely that of society and culture outside the online world, to see if events or the cal-

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endar of the year had an impact of how time was constructed. Therefore, we also briefly look at the three newspapers in one week during a global international sports event, namely the World Cup (week 26, 25 June to 1 July 2018) as well as one week during the summer vacation, where presumably not much was happening (week 30, 24–29 July). Since the study is based on webpages, it is important to have in mind that, in general, the web is changing at a very rapid pace (Brügger 2018, pp. 75–77), and this applies even more so to news websites. Therefore, with a view to ensure that our object of study did not change while we were studying it, the front pages of the three websites from the weeks mentioned above were collected and preserved. Not only does content on webpages change, so do websites as such. This is clearly illustrated by the fact that, a few weeks after The Huddersfield Daily Examiner was archived in week 35, the website was redesigned, the name was changed to ExaminerLive and the web address was changed.4

Analytical Frame The analysis of the webpage aims at identifying how time and space are textually constructed on the three front pages, and therefore, it is guided by a theoretical framework that brings the text in itself into focus (Brügger 2010; Bødker and Brügger 2017, pp. 59–61). This implies that the overall object of study is the textuality of the front pages; that is, the different textual elements and their relations, which constitute the website as a textual phenomenon (often by the use of paratexts), in contrast to the text properly speaking, as for instance in this case the journal articles.5 Textual elements not only include words and images, but also placement on the web page (e.g. in columns), scrolling and jumping by the use of hyperlinks. This packaging of the proper texts (the articles) is a text in its own right, and it can be examined as such. Thus, we consider the front page a textual landscape constituted as such by the use of different forms of expression that make the front page understandable as a web front page. Therefore, what will be studied is the use of textual markers of time and space and their use on the page, for instance, words like “now”, “today”, “here” and names of locations (streets, neighbourhoods, cities, etc.) as well as images showing specific locations. On a more detailed level, the analytical approach distinguishes between three characteristics of the individual textual element—formal, semantic and physical performative—as well as two ways of approaching a textual

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element, either by focusing on how it is composed (its morphology) or on its relation to other elements (its syntax) (Brügger 2010, pp.  19–24; Bødker and Brügger 2017, pp. 60–61). An article on a website can serve as an example: on the morphological level, it is composed of written characters, lines and maybe columns (formal), it has a specific meaning (semantic) and we may be able to perform a certain action by scrolling up and down (physical performative). Each of these three can be analysed morphologically for each individual textual element, but textual elements often relate to each other, so it is also possible to study the syntactical level; that is, the relations between textual elements: images may be placed next to each other or connected by a shared background colour (formal), they may be related by treating the same topic (semantic) or they can be related by the performance of an action such as clicking and jumping to another web element (physical performative). In the present case, this analytical grid is used as a systematic approach to identify how time and space are manifested on the three front pages. For instance, regarding space, the masthead is a logo (morphology, formal) with the city name (morphology, semantic) and with the possibility of jumping back to the front page whenever clicked (syntactical, physical performative), or menu items consist of letters forming words, placed horizontally next to each other (morphology and syntactical, formal), the words refer to specific locations like “In your area”, “Huddersfield town”, and the like (morphology, semantic) and with the possibility of jumping to the related web page when clicked (syntactical, physical performative). A similar approach is used regarding textual markers of time. With this analytical approach, we will aim at answering the following questions: How are time and space manifested textually in the overall textuality of the web pages? Which possible constructions of meaning and use forms does the structure of the temporal and spatial markers on the textual interface promote?

Place, Continuity and Temporal Sanctuaries The analysis will proceed in two steps: first, we will give a relatively broad description of the websites in relation to some of the markers from the analytical framework outlined above; after that, we zoom in on key identified (theoretical) issues in the negotiations between space and time, issues that cut across the three sites and which will be discussed with examples from each. These are, as stated above, the relations between here and there, the local as continuity and, lastly, the notion of a temporal sanctuary.

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Generally speaking, all three websites are somewhat messy when compared to the largely temporal and thematic ordering of news on national serious news sites. Instead, they appear as splash screens, where items are seemingly placed with no explicit guiding principle. However, looking at The Huddersfield Daily Examiner (week 35), for instance, the overall organising principle is that of place (Huddersfield), as the name of the city appears in numerous headlines and subheadings. The biggest story of the day (18 August) is on Huddsfest, a local festival, and this story covers the whole width of the website. In addition to the morphological level, the locality is also present in the masthead, and the top, horizontal menu with items such as “Huddersfield Town”. In addition to such appearances on the morphological level, place is also implicitly present in, for instance, a menu item such as “What’s on”. Huddersfield is, however, also positioned within a larger regional space with a story—just below the main story of a local festival—that is headlined “Pictured: Drugs Seized at Leeds Festival 2018”, a story that is categorised as “West Yorkshire News” (and which, incidentally, appears close to the top of the site again two days later). The juxtaposition between the local festival, which is followed with all the actions and the drugs of the larger regional metropolitan centre plays into a well-known city–village dichotomy between the problems of big city life and the cosiness of the local—something that is underlined by the story immediately to the right of the story on drugs: “Winner Has Been Chosen in Vote for Cutest Pooch in Huddersfield 2018”. In terms of a hierarchy of place, all sites are characterised by national (global) news coming way down on the site. On The Huddersfield Daily Examiner, for instance, the “UK and World News” section appears after the section on the local football club. On The Press, “National News” is the very last section on the front pages (reachable only by scrolling); on The Yorkshire Evening Post, national news are higher up, which may be explained partly by processes in Leeds being closer tied to national affairs and by the fact that national news feeds into and is linked to via a different outlet called “Inews”, which is owned by the same company as The Yorkshire Evening Post. Thus, contrary to the other sites, the outside world and its events are brought in based on news time and not by being linked to the local through a specific person and/or event. However, seen across the three sites, it is fair to say that the distant (national and global news) is both syntactically and formally under-prioritised. Also, in terms of content, national news (apart from on The Yorkshire Evening Post) is framed in

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relation to the small things that may affect daily life, e.g. a story like “The Bank of England Are Looking to Scrap the 1 p Coin” (The Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 18 August). Although the main organising principle is nearness, time does play into the news presented. The main story on The Huddersfield Daily Examiner (18 August) is clearly related to time as it is following the local festival as it happens, yet many of the other stories are more difficult to place in time. We are not told, for instance, when the drugs were seized in Leeds or when the cutest dog was found. This temporal indeterminacy is also largely found on the other two sites, The Press (York) and The Yorkshire Evening Post (Leeds). While some stories on The Press’s website do have a marker that says “10 hrs ago” (The Harry Potter Story) and “30 mins ago” (photos from Leeds festival), this is not related to the positioning on the page. Looking at the different days of the websites, it also becomes clear that the same story can remain close to the top of the site without this being tied to a particular change or news value. There are thus, contrary to space as an organising principle, no real temporal hierarchies in the way that stories are positioned, apart from the occasional breaking news story. As is evident from above, the focus of (national) journalism is on the present, and immediacy is not very dominant on the three sites. This is most likely due to a number of factors, e.g. not enough important events happening within the geographical area mainly catered to by the sites and/or a lack of resources to find them. The wider the newsnet is cast, the more events are caught—which is partly what explains the speed of updating on (big) national news sites. Another explanation is simply the consistent focus on “the news value of proximity” (Hess and Waller 2016, p. 202)—as touched upon above. This does, of course, not mean that time is absent. Although time seems measured and experienced by change, it is against a background of what might be called an accumulative continuity, which absorbs change into a forward moving and continuously developing narrative. In terms of news publications (print or web), however, “what stays the same is”, according to Mussell (2012, p. 30), “often overlooked for what is different”. This is, however, not the case with regard to the speed of change on the studied websites (which we will return to in more detail). The time constructed on the studied websites thus happens through the interweaving of (slow) change against a background of ­continuity closely linked to place and space. In the following sections, we will elaborate on that.

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There as Only Relevant When Related to Here United Kingdom and global news do not, as already pointed out, figure very prominently on the studied sites. The distant is, however, present as particular links to the local, e.g. in “Meet the Great British Bake Off Contestant from West Yorkshire” (The Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 27 August) and in “These Huddersfield Restaurants Have Been Nominated for the English Curry Awards 2018” (The Huddersfield Daily Examiner, 31 August). Spheres beyond the local are thus made relevant through minute and curious events (the scrapping of the 1p coin) or through specific people with connections to processes beyond the local. Common to both these types of stories is that they (may) have implications on the quality of local and lived experiences and time, e.g. you know that local restaurants and an amateur baker can compete out there. What is also common is that the events covered are not potentially impinging on the continuity and quality of live as we know it, and linked to that, they call for identifications with people within what may seem a knowable community, something that is markedly different from the coverage of calamitous events on the global scene, which call for solidarity or empathy for distant others. Without such “intrusions”, the “production of the ordinary” remains unchallenged and “fantastic” as Ahmed (2004, p. 118) writes in a rather different context, and by protecting the local and ordinary against the outside, against unrelated and threatening news, the news sites implicitly construct an underlying continuity, which is near and recognisable.

The Significance of Place in Relation to Time: Or, the Local as Continuity While the content of both distant and local news implicitly creates a reassuring continuity, this is also apparent in the slow updating of news as well as the fact that news items stay on the websites for several days in the same or different positions, which relates back to the comment above about no apparent temporal ordering of stories on a specific day, or across days. The website thus somehow resembles the slow-changing physical settings of the community that it caters to, and here, a story about a local within the British Bake Off remains almost as relevant on day three and four as it does on the first day, and this again attests to the continuity of the local. When Hess and Waller write about the “local being local is practical and embodied” (2016, p. 199), this seems highly pertinent here. This is, in a sense,

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slow journalism but not in the sense of a journalism that “requires the time for deeper reflection and/or investigation about an original subject” (Le Masurier 2015, p. 143) in opposition to the speedy updating of running news. The slowness and continuous character of the sites we studied is seemingly not linked to the time it takes to either produce or consume the specific news and as such not turned against fast journalism as such. It seems, rather, that this is a slowness that is inherently related to the pace of life at a specific locality; in that sense it may also represent a pace longed for within or in opposition to a networked and constantly updated digital environment, it is, of course, related to and opposing speed.

The Notion of a Temporal Sanctuary The value of proximity, the slow updating as well as unchanging stories over several days indeed constitute what may be seen as a specific subculture of mainstream national news (as discussed above), and as such, it points to the construction of what Annany calls a “temporal public” (2016, p. 417). Given that Ananny is interested in “networked news time” from a sociotechnical perspective, he sees “temporal publics” as coming into being through a number of interrelated processes (e.g. “labour routines”, “platform rhythms” and “computational algorithms”). Based on such elements, there is, says Ananny, a push within networked news time through which the construction of temporalities is taken away from individual actors or institutions, and—since he is interested in the public’s right to hear, he calls for different types of delay—“pauses to reflect, hesitate, and doubt” (Annany 2016, p. 425). This makes very good sense in a general way, but the local sites we are studying do not really fit the notion of “networked news” as they are more standalone and not really “networked” and focused on making an appearance of a constant updating and reshuffling. Following that, the sites could be conceptualised as temporal sanctuaries where the many (global) events in national journalism are kept out. Another way to put this is that the slower rhythm of the local is a kind of affirmative grounding against the many events crowding a broader sphere. What we see are thus various ways in which place/continuity is harnessed against speed, yet this seems somewhat different from Annany’s ­discussion—with reference to Sharma (2014)—about “people [who] have the power to pause or delay action to enjoy ‘a sort of distance from the world that makes it possible to assess one’s place in it’ (111), [or] slowness [as] a ‘privileged tempo’ that shows the inequalities of ‘democracy and the public sphere’ (110)” (Annany 2016, pp. 416–417).

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The ability to opt out is, of course, linked to power, but there is arguably a difference between cosmopolitans (for want of a better word) and those who (perhaps) never opted into the broader temporal frame perceived as acceleration, or put differently, what by some may be perceived as a “pause” is rather different from the chosen pace of what we here call a temporal sanctuary. However, simply based on textual analysis, we cannot know to what extent this is a privileged retreat or a more regressive affirmation of the local. In order to investigate this, one would need to examine processes of both production and consumption. What we do know, however, is that these sites do not fully realise some of the perhaps most obvious affordances of the web, i.e. speed, linking and interactivity. Regardless of why, which we cannot know, this calls attention to an often-­ overlooked affordance of the web, namely permanence. The slowness and consistent appearance of the same story on the front of The Huddersfield Daily Examiner could not have appeared in print. Daily print publications need to update to make sense; websites do not. The studied news sites thus call attention to overlooked aspects of online news, namely continuity and permanence, aspects that, in addition, thus also should be seen as constituent elements of the Internet. One can only speculate about the amount of rarely unchanged content that make up our (national) web spheres. That calls for more detailed studies, e.g. by seeing local news sites as forms of archives. What needs to be underlined here is that somewhat isolated and slow news sites with a significant element of permanence are also important constituents of what we call online news.

Conclusion This chapter has studied the front pages of three local news sites in a normal week in order to nuance discussions of how online news constitute time or, more precisely, how time and space are co-constituted. The choice of local news sites was founded in a wish to more clearly bring in space in relation to time—against a dominant tendency to read digital developments in terms of speed and acceleration. We have thus aimed for both an empirical and a theoretical contribution. The empirical contribution ­consists of documenting—albeit on a very small scale—how the local as continuity is a consistent temporal framing of space and change; the theoretical contribution is linked to this through the notion of the local as a somewhat bounded continuity, and related to that, the idea of permanence as an overlooked digital affordance.

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Developing and nuancing the ideas put forth in this chapter requires a more elaborate empirical base, a more systematic reading and a deeper theoretical engagement. As it is, the study is to be considered exploratory and suggestive—and as such raises more empirical and theoretical questions than are answered. However, this chapter does, we argue, offer the contours of an important research path aiming to study more closely how time and space intertwine in online news—right from the hyperlocal to the global. Our study does suggest a gradual shift in emphasis from space to time along such a scale. Thus, contrary to the two smallest sites, on The Yorkshire Evening Post (Leeds), almost all the items in the first block are categorised as news ordered in terms of time. However, it is also important to underline the aspect of coconstitution, which is why we approached the local as time and why we wish to suggest more studies of national online news in terms space and place. In terms of theory, it is, we think, to progress beyond concepts mainly focused on the production of news or, put differently, concepts that develop from an overarching concern with presentism. Related to this, Bødker has underlined that, with regard to online news, one of the “most important difference[s] from the printed serial” is “the accumulation of content” (2017, p. 59), an aspect followed up by Bødker and Brügger (2017), who saw this as a significant aspect on the national news site of The Guardian. On the local sites studied in this chapter, it was notable that old historical photos were a stable type of content, which is why, moving forward, it would make sense to see them not only as news sites but also as places of cultural memory production and maintenance. The somewhat messy appearance of divergent but local content on the sites does in fact resemble a sort of scrapbook. Following that, one could approach the sites as archives—tracking, monitoring and accumulating continuity. Such a view would be in line with the “deconstructive exercise” of dismantling the notion of an archive as “a central building and its catalogues of material authority” and consider archives as “any site of information storage (however temporary) that can influence a person’s thoughts, words or deeds” (Timcke 2018, p.  10; see also Bødker 2018). Such an approach could indeed develop the notions of continuity and permanence d ­ eveloped in this chapter and, building on recent audience studies of local news (e.g. Gulyas et al. 2018; Lie 2018), this could certainly add to our understanding of how time and space interlink on what generally is perceived as local news sites. Acknowledgements  We wish to thank the editors of this anthology and Matt Weber (University of Minnesota) for constructive comments.

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Notes 1. https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/about-us/ 2. The three online newspapers can be found at https://www.examinerlive. co.uk, https://www.yorkpress.co.uk and https://www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk, respectively. 3. All figures are taken from the Office for National Statistics, nomis, Area reports, 2011 Census key statistics. 4. It changed from https://www.examiner.co.uk to https://www.examinerlive.co.uk. We had considered preserving the websites by using software that can preserve an entire website, but for technical reasons, the two types of archiving software we tried (HTTrack and webrecorder.io) were not able to preserve the websites in a good enough quality. Therefore, we decided to use screen filming (using QuickTime Players’ in-built screen movie feature), where each front page was filmed while scrolling down the page. This ensured that we did get all web elements and that we did get the web page exactly as it looked when replayed in our web browser (about web archiving, see Brügger 2018, pp. 73–90, and about screen filming, pp. 89–90). 5. It has to be stressed that we do not limit the term textual to written words, rather textual is understood in a broad sense, including all forms of expression such as written text, images and sound.

References Ahmed, S. (2004). Affective economies. Social Text, 22(2), 117–139. Ananny, M. (2016). Networked news time. Digital Journalism, 4(4), 414–431. Anderson, B. (1991 [1983]). Imagined communities. London: Verso. Bødker, H. (2017). The time(s) of news websites. In B. Franklin & S. Eldridge II (Eds.), The Routledge companion to digital journalism studies (pp.  55–63). London: Routledge. Bødker, H. (2018). Introduction: Journalism history and digital archives. Digital Journalism, 6(9), 1113–1120. Bødker, H., & Brügger, N. (2017). The shifting temporalities of online news: The Guardian’s news site from 1996–2015. Journalism, 19(1), 56–74. Brügger, N. (2010). Website analysis: Elements of a conceptual architecture. Aarhus: The Centre for Internet Studies. Brügger, N. (2018). The archived web: Doing history in the digital age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Buhl, F., Günther, E., & Quandt, T. (2018). Observing the dynamics of the online news ecosystem. Journalism Studies, 19(1), 79–104. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late-modern age. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Gulyas, A., O’Hara, S., & Eilenberg, J. (2018). Experiencing local news online: Audience practices and perceptions. Journalism Studies. https://doi.org/10.1 080/1461670X.2018.1539345. Hassan, R. (2012). The age of distraction: Reading, writing, and politics in a high-­ speed networked society. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Hess, K., & Waller, L. (2014). Geo-social journalism: Reorienting the study of small commercial newspapers in a digital environment. Journalism Practice, 8(2), 121–136. Hess, K., & Waller, L. (2016). Hip to be hyper. Digital Journalism, 4(2), 193–210. Le Masurier, M. (2015). What is slow journalism? Journalism Practice, 9(2), 138–152. Lie, M. (2018). Local newspapers, Facebook and local civic engagement: A study of media use in two Norwegian communities. Nordicom Review, 39, 49–62. Merrifield, A. (1993). Place and space: A Lefebvrian reconciliation. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 18(4), 516–531. Meyrowitz, J. (2005). The rise of glocality: New senses of place and identity in the global village. In K.  Nyíri (Ed.), A sense of place: The global and the local in mobile communication (pp. 21–30). Vienna: Passagen Verlag. Miller, D. (2011). Tales from Facebook. Cambridge: Polity. Mussell, J. (2012). The nineteenth-century press in the digital age. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sassen, S. (2001). The global city—New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Schudson, M. (1986). Deadlines, datelines, and history. In R.  K. Manoff & M. Schudson (Eds.), Reading the news (pp. 79–108). New York: Pantheon. Sharma, S. (2014). In the meantime: Temporality and cultural politics. Durham: Duke University Press. Timcke, S. (2018). The materials of memory: Tracing archives in communication studies. Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture, 8(1), 9–20. Tomlinson, J. (1999). Globalization and culture. Cambridge: Polity. Usher, N. (2018). Breaking news production processes in US metropolitan newspapers: Immediacy and journalistic authority. Journalism, 19(1), 21–36. Wajcman, J. (2015). Pressed for time: The acceleration of life in digital capitalism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Weber, M., & Napoli, P. M. (2018). Journalism history, Web archives, and new methods for understanding the evolution of digital journalism. Digital Journalism, 6(9), 1186–1205.

CHAPTER 13

Synchronising the Nation: Media Networks and Russian Time Reforms of the 1920s and 2010s Maria Rikitianskaia

Introduction In 2018, Russia had 11 local times and held the world record for having 10 of them in contiguous landmass. Different parts of the country follow different rhythms of lives, and there are always regions that are considerably ahead or behind in time. For instance, waiting to welcome New Year in its local time, the West-positioned Kaliningrad watches 11 hours of continuous live broadcasts of fireworks and concerts from different cities around the country. The recording of the President’s New Year address gets broadcast in each region shortly before midnight, being repeated 11 times during the day in total. By the time Moscow gets to broadcast his speech, the analysts are ready to offer comments, as they have already heard it in Vladivostok’s transmission. Territorial magnitude, diverse climatic landscapes and numerous time zones have always been an important part of Russian historiography. Scholars underline that this peculiarity of Russian geography and the M. Rikitianskaia (*) Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 M. Hartmann et al. (eds.), Mediated Time, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24950-2_13

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resulting complicated relationship between time and space is reflected in the social and cultural aspects of everyday life experiences (Baron 2008), as well as in Russian architecture (Paperny 2002) and language (Makarova and Nesset 2013). Intellectual, social, and political movements, such as Slavophilia or Marxism, have also been partly shaped by the cultural legacies of this boundless space (Bassin 1992). The mix of different local times and their spread also complicates the political organisation of the country: it is vastly spread not only through space but also through time as well. The regions are distant and asynchronous. Different Russian political leaders attempted to facilitate this temporal complexity by introducing new clock times. These time reforms had always been accompanied with struggles and debates on the accuracy of the newly introduced time and generally had a great influence on the everyday practices of citizens. Drawing on the case of Chinese timekeeping reforms, Hassid and Watson underline that the change of the clock is one of the greatest reforms that any government could ever undertake. They also underscore how understudied these temporal reforms still remain in scholarship: “More concretely, few state actions shape citizens’ quotidian experience as fundamentally as setting the boundaries of time, yet social scientists have generally elided the political implications of temporal authority” (Hassid and Watson 2014, p. 170). The media play an essential role in communicating time. Peters (2013, 2015) coined the term logistical media in order to refer to the fact that calendars and clocks deeply structure human life and provide the link between nature and culture. Specific material tools, such as calendars, clocks, monuments, and archives, bridge two essential temporalities: as a socially constructed personal experience on the one hand, or as an objective, universal time on the other. Recently, scholars have also drawn attention to the fact that it is important not only to acknowledge the process of signalling time but its evolution as well (Schwarz 2004). However, the media does not only communicate time but also deeply influences its social construction (Pentzold 2018). The communicative tools are evolving and could be grasped not only from the perspective of momentary mediation of time in each instance but “the historically transforming mediatization of time” (Fornäs 2016, p. 5221). Historical research also demonstrates that the media did not only communicate the universal and objective time but also greatly affected its creation. The development of railway networks, the electric telegraph and other advancements of communication and transportation accelerated the mobility of goods and people, and mitigated the distance between previ-

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ously distant objects, necessitating sharing the time among different nations (e.g., Ogle 2015). The nineteenth century and early twentieth century were marked by political negotiations where various national representatives agreed upon a uniform time, divided by time zones and shared with the help of various communication means (Rikitianskaia et al. 2018). Some peculiarities, such as the accuracy of the solar time, had to be sacrificed in order to construct this coherent uniform time on a global level, for instance, allowing Paris and Prague to be in the same time zone even if their geographical positions in relation to the sun are considerably different. The telegraph and railway networks transported this uniform time to the remotest places, while the wireless time signals spread across national spaces therefore allowing nations to synchronise over national borders. This study deepens the research on relations between media and time. It tackles an important and mostly obscured aspect of the time reforms: the implementation of new clock time through different media infrastructures. Time and space were culturally constructed and contested in Russia more than once, and the Russian government each time faced the problem of communicating the right time to different parts of the extensive territory of the country to synchronise the nation. Numerously, the Soviet and later the Russian government introduced particular reforms that changed the temporality in Russia, regarding the time zones, summer/winter time and calendar. This chapter explores two Russian time reforms of the 1920s and 2010s, which had a long history of modifications and adjustments through the various types of media networks. It analyses how the newly established time was communicated, how different media framed the time signals, and what kind of media networks lay in the foundation of these various timekeeping services. These questions raise the problems of how a particular act of power exploits and affects the infrastructure of media networks, as well as—on a broader scale—produces and reproduces particular temporal discourses in the habitats of everyday life. It is crucial to underline that, in this study, I refer to time only as clock time, as Adam puts it, as a human invention and “the invariant, precise measurement” (1995, p. 25). This chapter is based on the original archival research based on two types of sources: the documents of the Russian government and Central Research Bureau of Time Service on the one hand and the articles and interviews in newspapers that report reactions to the change and its actual implementation on the other hand. All translations are my own unless specified.

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Soviet Reform in the 1920s After having seized power in the October Revolution in 1917, the Bolsheviks started reforms immediately to consolidate power. Changes in national timekeeping were one of them. The introduction of a new clock time became a political act to unify the country and show the political power of the new political elite. The new elite required performative acts of political power, and changing the timekeeping system was one of the most influential and performative act, as it directly influenced citizens’ lives and restructured their order. Similar to the Chinese case of changing time (Hassid and Watson 2014), these timekeeping reforms could also be seen as acts of representing the new power. In December 1917, the Bolsheviks annulled the summertime introduced by the previous government (Council of People’s Commissars 1917). Then in 1919, they officially adopted the system of the international time and time zones. The reasoning behind the new decree was to enter the new temporality shared by Europe and other parts of the world. The order interpreted the introduction of the international time zone system as “unification with the entire civilized world in the accounting of time” (Council of People’s Commissars 1919a; italics added). It also asserted that uniform time would simplify the records of relations between people, social events, and most natural phenomena. In order to spread the coherent time and synchronise previously distant areas, three main media infrastructures were exploited in transmitting exact time signals: railway networks, electric telegraphy, and radiotelegraphy. The implementation of the new law, however, was not smooth and required some adjustments for the media infrastructures. The railway was the only infrastructure in Russia that held the uniform time throughout the whole country. At the time, the regions mainly followed the local mean time, which depended on the average solar day, and therefore did not share the same temporality. The railways and train stations were the only exceptions. The trains operated under the time of Saint Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire and the centre of the railway network. Therefore, in Central Russia, Siberia, or even in the Russian Far East, all clocks in the trains and stations were showing the Saint Petersburg time as a reference, even though it could be drastically different from the local time. The Bolsheviks’ reform did not change this central organisation of the time on the railway, but instead even fortified it with the nationalisation of transport networks. However, eventually the

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centre shifted. An additional special decree of 1919 dictated that to “avoid confusion”, the trains should operate according to Moscow time (Council of People’s Commissars 1919c). According to the new system of time zones, Moscow time coincided with Saint Petersburg time, so technically the hour remained the same. However, it underscored the status change of Moscow, newly announced capital, as the main centre of the railway network and timekeeping. Up until today, on the train tickets, two times of departures are usually mentioned: Moscow time and local time. Another vital network for the newly established time was the telegraph network. The telegraph offices possessed the right time thanks to their connections to the Russian observatories that transmitted the time signals. Here, there was also an important shift in the role of Moscow: the new law asserted that all telegrams “without exception” should be stamped with the time of the second time zone, i.e. Moscow time (Council of People’s Commissars 1919c). Any telegram or railway connection was marked with Moscow time even if the local time differed in hours. This could also be interpreted as a centralisation process: the reorganisation of people in order to easily manage the country. The third and most important media infrastructure was radiotelegraphy. The implementation of the new laws solely based on railway and telegraph, and therefore encountered unexpected problems, as due to World War I, many connections were disrupted. Just several months after the introduction of the international time zones, the new decree postponed the enactment of the new laws due to these “technical difficulties” (Council of People’s Commissars 1919b), and in fact, the major implementation of the new time had occurred only with the spread of radiotelegraphy. Like no other political elite of their time, the Bolsheviks understood the importance of radio as a medium for political messages and the social organisation of life (Lovell 2015, p. 19). The first national time signals in Russia were sent out on the 1st of December 1920 from Saint Petersburg’s radio station, New Holland. The transmission was scheduled at 19:30 every day to begin with and later shifted to 19:00. From March 1921 onwards, the biggest radio station in Moscow, Hodynka, started transmitting the time signals as well. Within a couple of years, these transmissions became regular and consistent, turning from new experimental projects to the most reliable source for uniting the nation (Khrenov and Golub 1989, pp. 56–57). The decree of 1924 became a turning point in the diffusion of the new national time. It obliged all public institutions and enterprises to follow the system of the transmission and receipt of the time signals. The related

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timekeeping service also had a full economic and political context: it helped to organise the masses to create a fully functioning industrial society. The ability to receive national time allowed Soviet people to schedule their lives synchronously. The decree also inaugurated the Time Service Committee, which was assigned the task of not only the organisation of the standardised time transmission, but also drawing up efficient solutions of the standardised receipt of the time signals (Council of People’s Commissars 1924). One of the biggest achievements of the Time Service Committee was the organisation of the network of short wave and long wave radio stations for transmission of the time signal (Khrenov and Golub 1989, p. 57). From 1925 onwards, it also issued the bulletin of the time table of these radio transmissions, and later it became an indispensable part of the regular radio broadcasting. Therefore, the system of consistent time, even if introduced in 1919, was de facto only adopted in 1924, utilising the radiotelegraph. The transmission of this new time by radiotelegraph also meant that time became coherent and easily accessible. The law highlighted that time was an entirely national matter. The decree also abolished the formerly established committee responsible for the implementation of the international system of time zones. Along with the politics that supported the spread of radio, people were encouraged to follow the time signals. Therefore, being previously an exclusive matter for the use of professionals in the observatories, time became shared by ordinary people. The time service sector of the Sternberg Astronomical Institute at the Moscow State University speaking. The signals of the exact time will be transmitted now: two long ones, one short. Citizens, check your watch! (Markevich 1938, p. 4)

This quotation demonstrates that, in the 1930s, radio broadcasting inherited the format of the time signals and transmitted them as if it was still in Morse code, highlighting the importance of the radiotelegraph infrastructure. Moreover, it also emphasised the central organisation of time because it announced the transmission as “how the country finds out that noon has arrived in the capital” (Markevich 1938, p. 4). Overall, the establishment of the national time was finalised in the 1930s with the formation of two new time services and the spread of time in observatories of various republics. In 1932, there were seven of them in the Union, and they were united into one coherent network of radio transmitting stations. The time

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signal reached the final listener at the end of the 1930s with the establishment of speaking clocks over telephone lines. In the 1930s, the timekeeping service became an indispensable medium for everyday practices. Newspapers even noted that, in Moscow in the morning, the telephone line for the speaking clock was frequently busy, as to call for the exact time was a common routine for a Soviet citizen before going to work (“New set of the speaking clocks” [Novyj Komplekt “Govorjashhih chasov”] 1938). As Paperny (2002) underscored, in the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet culture experienced attempts to shift the spatial paradigm from horizontal axes to a centrifugal dynamic, mobility and therefore to a vertical, symmetrical, and hierarchical model. These successful attempts to centralise the time are the greatest example of this shift, as it allowed Soviet Union to share the same notion of spatiality and temporality through the vastly spread communication and transportation networks.

Russian Reform in the 2010s On the night of the 26th of October 2014, for the last time, the Federal Protective Service executed one of its traditional operations on the Red Square, Moscow, which it had executed in such a way for many decades. They switched off the old control mechanism of the clock on the Kremlin tower and turned a steel clock hand on the 6-metre dial to let the main hour of the country change to Daylight Saving Time (TASS 2014). This was a symbolic moment for the long sequence of different time reforms, started by President Medvedev and finalised by President Putin in the 2010s. Today, in 2019, Russia does not change clocks to summertime anymore. Ironically, now it is always winter on the Russian clock. In 2011, President Medvedev announced his decision to abolish the seasonal change of time, therefore keeping summertime all year. The Federal Law “On Calculating Time” adopted on June 3, 2011, fixed the abolition of the seasonal transfer of clocks at the legislative level (Russian Federation 2011). As McCrossen reflects on the Russian case, “jurisdiction over the time was one of the few powers President Medvedev exercised while in the office, much to the frustration of Russians, who lived in darkness until nine or ten in the morning during that 2011–2012 winter” (McCrossen 2013, p. 4). These reforms were justified with the idea to simplify the organisation of political, social, and economic space in Russia. In fact, the abolishment

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of summertime stems from a larger discussion on the possibility of reducing the number of time zones in Russia. In November 2009, Russian President Medvedev in his speech to the Federal Assembly referred to the examples of China and the USA, which both have a lesser amount of time zones. The argumentation of Medvedev concerned the more effective management of the country that the reduction of time zones could potentially bring: Traditionally we used to be proud of the number of time zones, as it seemed a vivid illustration of the greatness of our homeland. This is indeed so. But have we ever seriously thought about how such a fractional division allows us to effectively manage our country? (As cited in Vesti 2009)

Other reasons in favour of the abolishment of summertime were also taken into consideration, such as health issues or that there would be no need any more to reconfigure the equipment at the enterprises and reprogramme the electricity metres (Ivashkina 2015). Furthermore, with this time reform, Russia also separated itself from some former republics of the Soviet Union, such as the Ukraine, as they do not share the same notion of temporality and spatiality anymore. This suggestion got colossal support and criticism at the same time because it also implied a different division of Russia into regions. However, starting in 2010, regions had already begun to follow new time patterns as prescribed by the President. Following the complaints on the lack of sunlight in the evening wakefulness, from 2012, the State Duma (lower house of the Russian Parliament) went into direct confrontation with the Russian government and suggested a number of modifications and new laws. One of them was signed in 2014 by the newly appointed President Putin, which once again made the clock hand move forwards an hour: from the summertime to permanent wintertime. In some regions, different referendums took place and are still taking place to vote on new amendments to Medvedev’s law in order to use a different, more favourable hour. Interestingly, the first law signed by President Medvedev had introduced Moscow time as a term, but it was not used throughout the document. However, the following law, signed by President Putin in 2014, had amended the text, inserting the paragraph that Moscow time serves as the reference time to calculate local times in different time zones, therefore maintaining its special status (Russian Federation 2014). The centralisation of the timekeeping around Moscow, asserted in the 1920s, had been strongly maintained and even further elaborated.

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The new legal basis for timekeeping also emphasised several communication channels for providing the new time to the Russian cities. It obliged the state time service to provide information about the calendar date and the exact Moscow time through four particular communication systems: GLONASS (a Russian space-based satellite navigation system, analogue to GPS), satellite communication systems (regarding the transmission of time signals), radio communications (including specialised radio stations), and broadcasting and television (including satellite). This case of different amendments and changes had major implications for social life. Initially promising a simplification of timekeeping, this reform encountered major obstacles in its implementation. In particular, some digital media did not keep up immediately with these political changes and encountered difficulties. The problem was that many devices had an automatic transition to summer/wintertime set by default, so when the country was supposed to keep the summertime, computers adjusted clocks ahead forwards one hour anyway. Russians woke up the next morning in total confusion over the time. Many devices showed different times, as most of the digital media had changed the time, while the analogue clocks kept the old one. The old and analogue time was the only right one. A further problem concerned the fact that many devices synchronised over the Internet Time Servers. Computers receive information about UTC Time, and the handling of time zones depends on the computer’s operating system, which configures local time zones according to the settings. Therefore, if the settings were set wrong, the time would be displayed incorrectly. For instance, calendars of some email clients were incorrectly showing the time of events scheduled after 26 October 2014. Those users that prepared and unchecked the box of summer/wintertime transitions did not experience any problem like many others that had the newest system updates. In fact, many information technology giants asserted that installing all updates before 26 October 2014 was necessary (Microsoft Support 2014). Some other users, however, did not take proper care of this question, woke up with the wrong hour and therefore had to set the clock backwards manually. It was a bit more complicated than just turning the clock back. Unchecking the winter/summertime box did not solve the problem, as the transition had already happened and the next one could only happen six months ahead in time. Lengthy manuals appeared online that helped to treat these problems (e.g., Just_Wah 2014). One of the most common solutions was to set a different time

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zone, so some Moscow inhabitants had to alternate their time zone manually, setting Tbilisi as their location. The new laws did not emphasise the role of the railway network anymore, and transportation suffered the most throughout this period of change. Airlines and railway companies refused to sell tickets for future dates when the amendments were not yet approved, as nobody knew what time to print on the tickets. For instance, when waiting for the new law about the change to permanent wintertime, the main railway company RZHD stopped selling tickets for the days after the 26th of October 2014 to avoid confusion. As the head of Russian Railways, Vladimir Yakunin explained his company did not want to become a hostage to the situation, so it was more reasonable to start ticket sales only after the adoption of the law (BBC 2012). Therefore, these recent time reforms in Russia in 2011–2014 led to complex and unexpected conflicts within the communication networks, resulting in some manual adjustments of systems and overall disruption of media infrastructures.

Discussion: Time Reforms Between Analogue and Digital These two cases, i.e. the time reforms in Russia in the 1920s and 2010s, draw attention to three important dichotomies that shed more light on relations between media and time: accuracy–precision, public–private, and national–transnational. Accuracy–Precision The dichotomy of accuracy and precision allows a reflection about the course of implementation of the time reforms in Russia. Introducing aspects of timekeeping, McCrossen underlines a strong distinction between two concepts: accuracy and precision (2013, pp. 11–12), where the first one reflects the ability to set the correct time, while the latter represents the ability to consistently record the passage of a second. The clocks of the 1920s lacked in precision and therefore had to be updated regularly. The time signals at that epoch were designed specifically to resolve the problem of precision of the clocks. The innovations of telegraphic and electric synchronisation were intended to ease the task of setting and regulating clocks. That is why, in the 1920s, it was important not

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only to set a new time once, but also to introduce new mechanisms and practices of maintaining the accurate time and to have the time distributed repeatedly through the publicly available media infrastructures. The development of automatic synchronisation in digital media is frequently seen as a solution to the problem of precision. The case of the time reforms in the 2010s shows, however, that the issue of accuracy and precision is more complex. While being very precise in recording the passages of time, the clocks on many computers and digital devices after the reform were absolutely inaccurate. They were capable of marking every hour precisely, but it was the wrong hour. Sauter, reflecting on the precision and accuracy of the modern time discipline, underscores that “only after people stopped disciplining clocks could clocks discipline people” (2016, p. 709). While this might be true for the majority of cases, the time reform uncovers an unpredicted aspect of change: people had to discipline clocks again. However, the computers and digital devices nowadays rely so much on the automatic transmission of time signals that they are hardly designed to be manually disciplined. Public–Private The history of timekeeping encompasses a transformation from the public clock to the private one. Before the nineteenth century, public clocks such as those on towers and on buildings were the main time-accounting devices, what Evans-Pritchard called the “autonomous points of reference to which activities have to conform with precision” (1940, p. 101). In the late nineteenth century, the spread of private watches and clocks brought a new practice of following the time and caused what McCrossen called an “end of the public clock era” (2013, p.  25). The decline of the public clock occurred gradually. As private clocks did not master precision matters well, individuals needed to adjust mechanisms regularly; therefore, the public clock maintained the reputation of the most important timekeeping device for a while. It was the further spread of media and communication infrastructures and, in particular, the wireless transmission of time signals that contributed to the demise of public clocks, allowing global time to enter directly into private homes. Time signals were the public service delivered to the private means of communication as a necessary substitute for the physical public clock itself. The case of the problematic consequences of the Russian time reform adds to this picture. The example of the time reform in the 2010s draws

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attention to the counter position between centralised political power and decentralised uses of media networks. Even though media networks could adjust accordingly to the state directives, full automation was not possible when some parts of the system were not technically up to date. The fact that the media had to be individually adjusted contributes to the wider topic of the public and private clock. It demonstrates that, even if the private clock is the most used one, it still depends on the global infrastructure and public communication systems. However, as automatic as the synchronisation is, it is still the individual that remains in charge of his or her watch. National decisions can influence public clocks but cannot directly change private clocks. National–Transnational Another valuable observation regards the complex interaction between national and international aspects of timekeeping and its execution through media infrastructures. Both time reforms were justified with the idea of bridging Russian temporality with the outer world by finding a better fit into the system of international time zones. Reorganisation of time was seen as beneficial both in terms of management of the country as well as its relation to international systems of timekeeping, and therefore economic and social processes. Both cases show that, even when time reforms were introduced as an attempt to enter the international timekeeping system, their implementation was focused exclusively on national issues. Both of these reforms represent an attempt to centralise power and, in particular, maintain the status of Moscow as the centre of national time. The first case shows that the establishment of international time zones in the Soviet Union, 1919–1924, necessitated several changes in national media infrastructures and was accomplished through the central organisation of the networks. This centralised organisation of media infrastructures had been an important aspect of the history of media and communication networks, such as in the development of radio broadcasting (e.g., Lovell 2015). The legacy of this 1920s reform, Moscow time and short and long beeps, remained throughout the whole Soviet period in many other media, such as in radio and television transmissions. Moreover, one of the steps in the 1920s reforms was actually the abolishment of the governmental body responsible for the issues of international timekeeping. The 2010s reforms also counteracted the international experience on timekeeping matters. The attempt at reducing

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the number of time zones was not entirely executed, as many Russian regions combated this idea and changed the hand of the clock afterwards. The borders of the time zones changed drastically, but throughout the years of the reform, Russia went from having 11 time zones to 9, but has now returned to 11 again. In fact, the time reforms turned into quite a different set of changes, which emphasise national issues over international ones. The process of the abolishment of the winter/summertime eventually led to even more contradictions to the timekeeping habits in other countries than before.

Conclusions These two time reforms in the 1920s and 2010s unveil the strategic decisions and actions taken by the government regarding the organisation of social order in the country as well as the organisation of the media networks. Both cases represented an attempt to establish a new national time, arguing its necessity with reference to successful foreign experiences. The primary goal in both of these cases was to provide a uniform time that would facilitate the management of the country. Moreover, both time reforms emphasised the particular role of Moscow by referring to Moscow time as the time of reference. For the 1920s onwards, this constituted a new image of Soviet history, where Moscow became the key reference point for the railway networks, electric telegraph, and radiotelegraph and retained its position up to the 2010s. With this emphasis on Moscow time and central timekeeping institutions, these systems of timekeeping emphasise the vertical, centralised and hierarchical organisation of Soviet/Russian society. In both cases, the implementation of national decisions had encountered unexpected problems regarding their media infrastructures. The first case of the 1920s shows that the disruption of the telegraph and railway lines during World War I did not allow for an immediate implementation of the new decree, i.e. its enactment was postponed. The 2010s case had also caused some problems in the implementation of the new law, in particular in the last link, the last stage of reception of the new time signal: the devices of Russian citizens. While in the 1920s, media networks depended entirely on national infrastructure and could be changed according to the directives of the political elite; in the 2010s, seemingly more automatised media in fact depended more on particular individual adjustments. In the 1920s, the individual could synchronise his or her watch to the clocks in the train station, tele-

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graph office or radiotelegraph time signal, therefore keeping his or her individual logistical media separated from the source of the right time. Today, however, the reception of the time signal in mobile phones or computers is automatised. This causes different consequences stemming from this rather similar time reform. The fact that Russian users were late on the day of the time change shows how deep their dependence on this automatised time signal reception was. Moreover, the 2010s time reform also revealed some drawbacks of media convergence: the divergence in different clocks and time signals could not be clearly interpreted and caused misunderstanding. Furthermore, it demonstrates how complicated a manual adjustment of such a system is and how it is essential for further maintaining the social order. Additionally, it also draws attention to the fact that an old clock could be synchronised at any desirable moment, while digital media and their interconnectivity necessitated choosing the right setting in advance, as this is required for constant synchronisation. Therefore, these cases contribute on a larger scale to the discussion about the relation of time and media. In particular, the cases show that not only global media infrastructures mediate time, but also time affects media networks, reconfiguring them.

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INTERLUDE III

The Time of (Your) Live: A Dialogue

CHAPTER 14

A Dialogue About Liveness Philip Auslander, Karin van Es, and Maren Hartmann

Introducing the Discussants Philip Auslander can be seen to be one of the veterans in the study of liveness and therefore of one of the central temporalities in relation to media and other performance arts. He published his central book on the topic— Liveness. Performance in a Mediatized Culture—in 1999, with a second edition in 2008, for which he also received an important prize (the Callaway Prize for the Best Book in Theatre or Drama). He has since revised some of the arguments in an article on Digital Liveness, published in 2012 (Auslander 2012). Both will be part of our discussion. On the more formal side, Philip Auslander has been at the Georgia Institute for Technology (Georgia Tech) in the USA since 1987, since 1999 as a professor. As one of the most renowned scholars in the performance field,

P. Auslander Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA e-mail: [email protected] K. van Es Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] M. Hartmann (*) Berlin University of the Arts, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 M. Hartmann et al. (eds.), Mediated Time, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24950-2_14

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he has contributed to several journals in the field, has written several books (not only the one already mentioned). Next to his academic work, he has been an art writer and critic and published several articles and catalogue essays in that function. Last but not least, he has also served as a film actor. He will be in conversation with Karin van Es, a more recent, but also very prominent scholar in the field of media and performance studies. Her book came out in 2017 and is entitled The Future of Live. In it, she explicitly builds on but also criticises Auslander’s approach (both older and more recent). We will pick up on this later. Karin van Es is an assistant professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and has recently begun to work on the question of datafication. On this topic, she co-coordinates a research platform and has recently co-edited a book entitled the The Datafied Society (Schäfer and van Es 2017). We will return to this as well. Maren Hartmann: I would like to begin by thanking you two for agreeing to discuss the central topic of liveness in relation to our broad concern with mediated time. Liveness, as we shall see, is a—or maybe even the— central category in media studies’ concern with the question of time and media. At the same time, it is difficult to define. Philip, you have called it “a moving target” in the introduction to the second edition of your book on liveness, “a historically contingent concept whose meaning changes over time” (Auslander 2008: xii). The centrality of the liveness category seems to stem from media studies’ long-term engagement with television culture and the televisual as the dominant cultural paradigm. In the just-mentioned introduction to the 2008 edition of your 1999 book, you state that it is increasingly difficult to hold on to the televisual as the dominant paradigm—or rather that the digital is challenging that. What would a foreword to a 2019 third edition entail, an entirely new book, a new understanding of liveness? Philip Auslander: I was very much aware of this question when I worked on the revision of the book for its second edition. I wanted to revise it to acknowledge that it was no longer tenable to treat television as the

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dominant cultural medium, that digital media had usurped this position, without writing a different book. As you said, one of my basic contentions is that liveness is not a stable, reified concept but a moving target that changes definition over time. What counts as liveness or live experience at one point in time is not necessarily the same as what counts that way at another point. Incidentally, this is not a purely hypothetical question, since the publisher approached me recently to start talking about a third edition! Maren Hartmann: Karin, your whole book seems to be an answer to that question, isn’t it? Karin van Es: Certainly! We do have a tendency to overlook radio, though. Liveness was equally seen as the defining characteristic of that medium and has been theorised within that context as well, but it was widely taken up in television studies, to such an extent that John Caldwell referred to it as a “theoretical obsession” in this field; but yes, my dissertation was the product of a frustrated master student who was eager to understand the continued relevance of the category, and its application to other media technologies. It was specifically concerned with liveness claims by digital media. Philip Auslander: I agree with Karin about the significance of radio, historically the first live broadcast medium. I addressed the liveness of radio in a couple of articles I published after the first edition of Liveness, then incorporated some of that material into the second edition.

Questioning Mediated Time and Liveness Maren Hartmann: I would now like you to comment more generally on the question of media and time, or as the title of this book suggests, mediated time. The question is twofold: (a) What is your understanding of medi-

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ated time, and (b) how would you relate your understanding of liveness to the concept of mediated time? In some ways, the concept of mediated time may relate more directly to some of my more recent work than to the way I addressed the idea of liveness. In my newest book, Reactivations: Essays on Performance and Its Documentation (2018), I address the question of how one can have an immediate (live) experience of a performance from its documentation or other kind of recording. I am working against the grain of a discourse that holds that recording inevitably misrepresents and betrays the live event it documents and can only provide an experience that is separate and distinct from the live performance. My position is that we can and do experience performances themselves from their documentation—the question is, how? Much of my book is devoted to offering an account of this phenomenon. It has to do with mediated time because the performance is necessarily something that took place in the past while its documentation continues into the present and arguably makes that past event part of the present. In this sense, photography and other documentary media literally mediate (in the sense of connect or reconcile) past and present. The act of documenting itself is always also a gesture toward mediating time in as much as it seeks in the present to preserve for the future an event that will soon be part of the past. Mediated time, as I understand it, is about the fact that media and time are tightly interwoven. On the one hand, everyday life is structured by media schedules, and on the other hand, media themselves are also structured by time. Think also of how media manipulate time, as in the currently highly popular American television show This Is Us (Fogelman 2016), which stands out for the way it

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combines multiple stories, set in different time periods, into single episodes. Specifically relevant in relation to how time is mediated today is how popular social media platforms make reference to, incorporate and manage (the passing of) time. It’s rather overwhelming! They operate in the assumption that people become addicted to the constant stream of news in their feeds and feel the need to be constantly connected as a result of the fear of missing out (FOMO). Equally central to their functioning is the notion of the attention economy, where time is a valuable commodity and figures as a constraint to consumption. With the datafication of our society and the increasingly important role of predictive systems, questions of time have seemingly become even more complex. News sites these days actually report tomorrow’s headlines. In reply to your second question, I would propose that liveness can be understood as the particular way media are structured in order to demand attention from people now, rather than later. In short, it is very much oriented around newness and constructing the idea of providing unique access to something of social relevance. The abundance of media and media platforms is why I think we are witnessing such a revival of liveness. Each is claiming its significance in the overcrowded media landscape through an appeal to the live. Maren Hartmann: Let me give you some more background to this last question now that you have answered it: in your work, Philip, I found a definition of mediation as a (often technological) in between. While it stands in between, it is necessary for the immediate to emerge: liveness can happen both immediately as well as mediated, they are not in opposition to each other (Auslander 2008: 56). In most cases, you actually seem to prefer the term mediatisation instead, signifying the in between, but with an

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increase. Similarly, in your book, Karin, you describe how liveness is mediated, referring to this process as “the mechanisms through which media production, distribution and consumption are managed” (van Es 2017: 152). And you, too, seem to prefer mediatisation without necessarily picking up that discourse in detail. In our introduction, we refer instead to the work of Roger Silverstone, even if time is not his main concern (although he mentions the fakeness of prerecorded live shows).1 For him, mediation is a question of ethics because everyday ethics can only emerge from communication and this always involves mediation (Silverstone 2002: 761).2 Mediation is here the process(es) around meaning making, especially in relationships to others—and these are, according to Silverstone, unevenly distributed. Distance and trust are important issues (and their transcendence through media an illusion). Instead, we have a moral obligation to accept the other as different (a highly actual claim, I find). He asks each user to partake in this process of mediation, i.e. to not just be active, but to take responsibility. How would you link this, in some way or other, to your just presented understandings of mediated time? The ending of my PhD dissertation reads slightly different than that of the book. In the dissertation, I relay liveness to “the ideal of conversation” (Schudson 1987). Face-to-face interpersonal communication is often seen as characterised by “continuous feedback between participants, multichannel communication, spontaneous utterance, and egalitarian norms”. Against this, Schudson points out, communication via mass media is often evaluated as inferior (in the article, he actually debunks the false ideas that exist about face-to-face communication). Essentially, I pro-

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posed in the dissertation that liveness was a promise of de-­mediation. During the PhD defence, and later when it was reviewed, this proved to be a p ­ roblematic claim, and the critics were right: such a proposition underplays the institutional stake in liveness. So in the book, following Nick Couldry’s lead, I stressed liveness more as a social category in Durkheim’s sense, and I also engaged more with the work of Paddy Scannell, particularly in relation to how liveness works to create communicative entitlement. Anytime I am asked to talk or write about liveness, I return to Scannell’s example of the surveillance camera. He explains that such a camera,  as it records, has the quality of immediacy, but not liveness. Liveness, Scannell so nicely argues, is the product of hard work (switching between multiple cameras, editing, etc.). It is ironic then that liveness is often linked to mundaneness and boredom (see, for example, Netflix’s April Fools’ joke of 2017 with Will Arnett), and I think that my approach to liveness is very interested in deconstructing the process of mediation, not per se by pursuing the details of the hard work Scannell alluded to, but by asking questions about the particular liveness a medium lays claim to: how does the medium mediate (between people, people-events, people-­ institutions)? What promises are made about the relations forged in the process? For what it’s worth, I don’t think I can agree with Scannell’s point about the surveillance camera. For one thing, I don’t find the distinction between immediacy and liveness helpful, since historically immediacy has been understood to be one of the central characteristics of liveness, especially (but not only) in the context of media discourse. For another, surveillance cameras and webcams are always embedded in multiple contexts that frame them in particular ways and give them meaning,

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whether in the context of surveillance and security or in the context of an intimate view of someone else’s life. I don’t think that the effect of liveness results only from the work of media producers engaged in editing, etc. The work of those who produce, frame, and interpret CCTV, for instance, equally generates the effect of liveness. I know Silverstone’s work, but I am not intimately familiar with it. However, I found what sounds like a very similar position in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer (I’m referring primarily to Truth and Method) who also argues that we must respect the alterity of the other (he is concerned particularly with historical artefacts that have been othered by the passage of time) and that dialogue with the other on this basis is an ethical obligation. I agree, but Gadamer also argues that the past with which we can engage is “not really past”, but is always already embedded in our present horizon. Inasmuch as aspects of the past are foundational to our present horizon, there is no unbridgeable gap or chiasma between the two. Rather, the past-inthe-­present becomes a common ground between past and present that makes dialogue possible. Based on some of what I said here, it should come as no surprise when I say that Gadamer’s thought profoundly impacted my thinking about performances and their documentation!

Constructing Liveness Maren Hartmann: Another question I had also refers to the meta-­ level, i.e. the question of where you locate your work on liveness. In their introduction to a special issue on Media Times, published by the International Journal of Communication, Anne Kaun, Johan Fornäs and Staffan Ericson divide up their engagement with the topic into three different blocks “(a)

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time, history, and memory; (b) liveness, presence, and simultaneity; and (c) cultural techniques (Kulturtechniken), infrastructures, and Eigenzeit” (Kaun et  al. 2016: 5207). While such ordering always follows a pragmatic logic in order to make material more accessible, it obviously follows a content logic as well. When we begin this book with a section on “norms and categories of time” and (nearly)  end with “the time of (your) live”—this interview—we obviously follow a similar, but nonetheless different order. I would like to hear your reaction concerning the placement of liveness in these different orders. How far is liveness in your eyes a normative category? How does it relate to the question of memory and history, and where is its materiality? In some sense, I am picking up on your critique, Karin, which refuses to put liveness into one category only (i.e. ontology vs. phenomenology vs. rhetoric) instead of all three. Maybe we are unnecessarily categorising time in these structures, and maybe we are simultaneously reducing the idea of liveness through that ordering process. Media time is, of course, a far broader category than liveness is. So the ordering logic they make there makes sense to me in that it places concepts into chronologies (history is concerned with the past, liveness with the now, etc.). My issue with the way liveness had been theorised before was that it had always been reduced to either the properties of a technology, an affective encounter or an ideology. These ways of understanding liveness failed to explain—as I mentioned earlier—the persistence of the category and its application to a whole host of other media technologies. For instance, defining it in terms of simultaneity: how simultaneous do transmission and reception in media have to be for it to be regarded as live (White 2004)? That’s why we need to see liveness as a construction. This

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seems to also be the direction in which Philip’s thinking has evolved. With regard to normativity, my book does suggest that there is an ideal against which people evaluate the live. In the case of eJamming, for instance, it became clear that people were upset by the latency they experienced and the inability to share sessions with an audience, but also with The Voice (John de Mol 2011), people on Twitter complained that the show wasn’t live because East Coast had already tweeted spoilers. More specifically, my argument is that we need to see liveness as a socio-technical construction. This allows us to appreciate the multiple forms of the live that populate our current media landscape. These forms are bound as category by the role they fulfil in society. I absolutely agree with Karin that we should see liveness as a socio-technical construction and that this construction has multiple facets, but I think my interest at present is more in how people experience things in the moment as live than in the ways liveness is structured by technology, media, economy, and cultural discourses. My thinking on this may be somewhat reductive (an accusation I am willing to sustain!) and I’m certainly not suggesting that there is no connection between immediate experience and larger framing influences, but more and more, I come to think that liveness is on the side of the spectator or audience and need not be locatable in the object of perception. To put it simply, a recording of music may not be a live event in itself, but I experience it as one when I play it back. The real-time playback is a live event as far as I’m concerned because I experience it as such. I’m not entirely sure that this is because the technologies and cultural discourses involved have constructed the playback of a recording as a live experience (through what Karin calls the metatext) in the same

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sense that television or radio assert their liveness even when the materials they convey are not themselves live. More and more, it seems to me that some of these questions, particularly in the ­discourses of theatre and performance studies and related fields in which I intervene most often, come down to a difference of perspective: the ontological perspective versus the phenomenological perspective. Ontologically, recorded music is not live, but I experience it as such phenomenologically. My interest in the topic of liveness was spurred originally by ontological considerations, but I have increasingly come around to thinking that the audience-­centred phenomenological perspective is the more important one.

Differences in and Experiences on Liveness Maren Hartmann: In a way, this last comment seems a perfect link between both your approaches, but I will return to this point later. Let me be a bit more basic now, since you mentioned the discourses of theatre and performance, Philip: you come from the just-­ mentioned performance-oriented background, while yours, Karin, is much more media focused. Could you describe how far these backgrounds have shaped your take on liveness, or rather: is there anything specific to liveness in the media-context vs. the liveness in other cultural contexts? Philip Auslander: One difference my background makes, I think, is that I take traditional live events such as theatrical performances as the starting point for defining liveness. For example, I recently finished an essay for a collection on analysing music videos. The editors asked me to contrast music videos with audio recordings of music, but the audio recording is not my point of reference for the music video: it’s the live concert performance. The key difference

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between theatrical liveness and media liveness (such as the liveness of broadcast media but also of live streaming and social media) is that the latter does not require (and never has required) the physical co-presence of performers and audience in the way that the former does. Near the end of The Future of Live, Karin defines liveness in terms of “real-time connectivity” (2017: 155). This is a good formulation for talking about the wide range of current media-driven experiences of liveness, and perhaps the common denominator of all live experiences, but it sidesteps the issue of physical co-presence that is so central to the discourses that define liveness in the first instance from the theatrical point of view. My historical perspective is rooted in seeing all subsequent developments of liveness in relation to the basic theatrical situation. Because of this orientation, I am less concerned than I think Karin is with how liveness itself is constructed institutionally, for example. At one level, the liveness of theatrical performances or concerts, whether traditional or not, is pretty self-evident (I am referring again to the physical and temporal co-presence of performers and audience). What is constructed institutionally is the value of live experience, especially now since it is in the interests of a range of cultural institutions to assert the value of traditional live performance on which their survival depends. It is this discursive construction of the value of the live— perhaps not the live itself—that I was trying to examine in Liveness (2008) across three different socio-cultural realms (theatre/television, popular music, and intellectual property law). Interestingly, the department where I work (and where I also obtained by my MA and my PhD degree), the Media and Culture Studies department at Utrecht University, provides education and carries out research in the field of theatre and performance studies, and as a matter of fact, I discov-

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ered my PhD topic whilst attending a seminar series on liveness as a master student. The series explored the historical debate around liveness and ­mediatisation in media and performance theory. In it, we read the work of Philip Auslander and Steve Dixon alongside that of Jane Feuer, Mimi White and Tara McPherson. So ultimately, what I do now is inspired at least in part by a more performanceoriented tradition in thinking about liveness, but Philip is absolutely correct in that the objects of study themselves foreground certain questions (with the context, in theatre studies, perhaps being performance, co-­presence and the body/aliveness rather than technological mediation, framing by media institutions, and so on). In the end, however, I do find we have much to offer each other— as is evident from the fact that my book owes a lot to the work Philip had done before. Maren Hartmann: Karin, in your book on The Future of Live (van Es 2017), you propose to characterise liveness as a constellation, consisting of metatext, space of participation and user responses (in your introduction you still speak of institutions, technologies and users/viewers). This is your attempt at overcoming the shortcomings of existing theorisations, ontology, phenomenology and rhetoric, and earlier in this conversation you mentioned that your approach in interested in deconstructing the process of mediation, putting an emphasis on the relations that emerge from the process, i.e. the constellation. Philip, on the other hand, offers a new emphasis on the documentation of liveness and its (re-)creation of liveness in the (phenomenological) experience of the user. Would this also fit into your constellation definition, Karin, and vice versa, could you see your (new) emphasis fitting in with this concept of constellation, Philip? Does constellation offer an emphasis on the phenomenological without reducing it to this?

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We cannot ignore the experience of liveness, and my proposal to analyse constellations of liveness acknowledges that. Returning to the example of eJamming mentioned earlier, the case I analyse in Chapter 4 of the book, exposes how people can feel that something isn’t live, even if it is advertised as such. The music collaboration platform was criticised for its latency issues (which actually concerned minute, fractions-of-a-second delays in audio signals) and for not providing the opportunity to share jamming sessions with an audience. For users, the platform therefore didn’t deliver liveness, and their experience also served to expose the other dimensions of the construction: the rhetoric that accompanied the platform and its technological affordances. So in this respect, the phenomenological is certainly essential. This reminds me also of the example provided by Jerome Bourdon (2000), of a family watching a live programme (an idea reinforced by a series of codes in the text, such as direct address, etc.) and later discovering that they had been watching a videotape. He uses it to explain how liveness is not only about technical performance but also spectatorial belief, supported through specific codes, and how the two don’t always overlap. (I don’t, however, much like his proposal to distinguish between degrees of live television.) To my mind, liveness is a particular interaction between institutions, technologies and people and creates different forms of the live, and again, you need all three—including the phenomenological dimension—for something to stabilise as live. At present, my work does not move in this direction, but there certainly would be value in thinking, for instance, about the relations that underlie the status of performance art documentation and its uses in both the art world and the academic world to raise questions about whose interests are served

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by different discursive configurations of the relationship between the document and the performance to which it relates.

Caring and the Longue Durée Maren Hartmann: Continuing with the question of phenomenology: Karin already mentioned Paddy Scannell’s work on liveness (and he is an author in this book), which I would briefly like to return to. In his work on television and liveness, he stated that the sociological engagement on this topic is too short-sighted in a double sense: it focuses only on live TV and on today. Hence, the longue durée gets lost. Scannell’s second important point is his emphasis on care structures, i.e. the idea that broadcasting, especially in its live versions, is taking care of us—as individuals, but also as members of our societies (through explaining the world, through offering structure, etc.), which is what Karin also referred to. While this argument is fairly easy to follow for radio and television, he would subscribe the same function to digital media and liveness, albeit in more complex (and sometimes contradictory) ways. My first question in this context is: where do you see your work with regard to the longue durée? The second would be how far you agree with the idea of care structures (especially in relation to such ideas as constellation and documentation)? Philip Auslander: I think I can say that I am interested in the longue durée in the sense that I have traced the continuing evolution of the idea of liveness from before the concept existed (because there was no experiential alternative in the realm of performance) through the eras of theatrical liveness, broadcast liveness, Internet liveness and now social media liveness and tried to be attentive to important turning points in this long-term development. At the

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same time, my particular interest is in the immediate experience of someone perceiving something as live, like the example of recorded music I mentioned earlier, or experiencing a performance from its ­documentation. As far as care structures are concerned, I can see how this concept remains valid today for talking about American television and radio for certain. I can also see how it could be extended to social media, for example, and perhaps certain kinds of gaming. I am less certain of its utility for talking about the Internet. Tara McPherson talks about the liveness of the Internet as residing primarily in our navigation of it, making it a kind of liveness that “foregrounds volition and mobility” (or at least creates the feeling that we are exercising mobility and volition).3 Arguably, on the Internet, we depend less on the care structures offered by the various sites we access and more on those we create for ourselves through our specific navigations of cyberspace. Perhaps we need to think more of structures of self-care in this context. I know that Scannell took issue with the scant historical consideration of liveness in my book (and he assigned Braudel as reading when I organised a master class in Amsterdam a few years back). I understand this remark, and there is a certain truth to fish being unaware of water (the impact of technologies only really becoming clear over time necessitating a reconsideration of what was the norm before), but I hope that my work does show a commitment to questioning newness and to charting change and continuity. I certainly find that a historicisation of new media is essential. Moreover, the concept of constellations of liveness is not medium specific and therefore facilitates tracing and comparing liveness over time. As for the notion of care structures, what I like about it is the idea of intent and hard work it draws

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attention to. Again, a surveillance camera offers immediacy, not liveness. You can’t just turn on a webcam and call it live! However, in his consideration, Scannell tends to stress the integrative role of radio and television and avoids questions of power and ideology. The question of our orientation to media and their power to construct reality is important to consider as well (and in this respect, I align myself more with the work of Nick Couldry). Maren Hartmann: Even if this takes us a step back in some ways, I propose the following: as has already become very clear, liveness implies an at-this-moment-in-time. This harks back to the notion of kairos, of the special moment (which needs to be caught), in contrast to chronos, the everyday habitual sense and structure of time. One could claim that liveness’ quality lies in its emphasis on just this moment, the now of its experience (not necessarily, as we have seen, of its production). At the same time, the experience of a live performance is often meant to turn into a memorable event, since only that transformation into a lived past seems to make it worthwhile (I am not sure this applies to the experience of the documented in the same way), and this tendency for memorability (or memorabilia?) seems to have become more so with the visibility of one’s past in the digital documentation of one’s life (of one’s live?). How far does this shift both the experience of, but also the theorisation of liveness? Philip Auslander: This is an area of discussion that is rife with paradox, since the very specialness of the live event not only makes it desirable but also prompts the desire to preserve it in some way to be experienced again through recording, documentation, re-enactment, etc. The much-discussed, sometimes banned, use of mobile phones at concerts is an example. The phone can be used to make a video of the concert to preserve it for repeated viewing, to take selfies or videos that show one was present at the event and

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perhaps who one was with. It can be used to report on the concert or stream it to people not present at the event, and so on. (A friend of mine recently texted me during a concert he was attending to ask me a question about the equipment the musicians were using.) Those opposed to mobile phone use at concerts claim that all of this sullies the specialness of the event, but there is probably an equally persuasive argument to be made that the mobile phone provides the concert goer with a different but equally special way of experiencing the event. I’m not sure this analysis requires a new theorisation of liveness, but it is one of many current mediated experiences of the live that should be examined through theoretical lenses. In my work, I actually try to trivialise the specialness of liveness and expose its indebtedness to media power. This is precisely what triggers a host of questions about what, how and why something is demarked from the ordinary.

Being-in-Which-Time? Maren Hartmann: Researching time has necessarily led me to think more about the often-addressed relationship between past, present and future. While I am also sceptical of all-encompassing concepts such as acceleration (e.g. Rosa 2015), I am quite intrigued by this question of the collapse of the future into the present and potential problems that arise from this (a similar question is the one about the loss of utopian thinking). I have a hunch—and maybe this is rather naïve—that liveness is related to this question, that maybe a drive to experience liveness— mediated or not—takes place in order to reassure oneself of being-in-the-present. Or, put differently, Karin, you refer to Rebecca Coleman (2017), who talks about multiplication of

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the present with the help of various digital media (a potentially less pessimistic reading). Again, one could try to relate this multiplication potentially with a reference to liveness as a rather particular form of ­experiencing and developing the present. Is this too simple a reading of this potential relationship? Karin van Es: For me, it seems more of a question about being there (or here) together. I think it is important to not neglect the social in thinking about what liveness is and does. It’s about participating in the water cooler conversation, a collective experience (cf. Dayan and Katz 1992), and connected to the idea of communicative entitlement (Scannell 2001), but yes, there is also that feeling that you can turn the course of history because the event is unfolding now. Maren Hartmann: Philip, you have been accused of too negative a take on liveness, which you reacted to in the second edition of your book. I still feel a slight question mark behind it all from your side, but understandably so. Nonetheless, my last question for you two is: what is your personal experience of liveness: what makes it special? What may be problematic? Is there any live experience—in the broad sense that has been defined throughout this conversation—which sticks out for you? Philip Auslander: My most meaningful initial experiences of liveness were as a young theatre actor (I am an actor still, as you mentioned in introducing me, though only on screen now). I remember the excitement of being backstage just before going on, sometimes peeking through the curtain to see and try to assess the audience (“good house”/“bad house”). Studying acting and theatre, I was constantly told about how important liveness is as a defining characteristic of theatre, but the concept was always presented as being sort of ineffable, basically an article of faith rather than a theory or philosophical concept.

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Much later, I became curious as to why there had been no study in the context of theatre or performance studies that addressed this essential concept directly and was surprised to discover, as Karin mentioned, the extent to which it had been taken up in television and broadcast studies but not in theatre studies. My apparent scepticism about liveness is not about the concept itself but about the discourses surrounding it. It is clear, for example, that I do not believe that the approaches I have encountered to differentiating live and recorded performances on ontological grounds stand up to close inspection. I value live performance, but as a lifelong fan of popular music, I also value canned performances. My experience has been that staunch advocates for theatrical liveness tend to mystify the concept and are unwilling even to try to specify what it is or how its value is construed. They also tend to denigrate non-live experiences of performance as necessarily inferior to live performance, which I think is nonsense (to be blunt). Non-live performances can provide very satisfying aesthetic experiences and, since most people experience most kinds of performance in other than live forms most of the time, it makes sense not simply to dismiss those actually normative experiences of performance and to question the privileging of the live that is still endemic to most discourses around theatre, performance art, music and related forms. My most lasting experiences of liveness are also early ones. Living abroad until my early teens, I got exposed to what I might call an exaggerated form of Dutch culture (involving many supposedly culture-­ defining texts, events, and stereotypes). This involved the collective, live watching, along with other expatriates, of soccer matches played by the Dutch national team. Occasions like these were celebrated as contributing to our shared cultural identity and connecting us to our home (a home

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where I had in fact never lived back then). Looking back now—with an impeding Brexit and other developments informed by extreme nationalism—I have mixed feelings about this experience. At the same time, it also evokes associations with a related issue currently at play in the Netherlands. In the aftermath of the success of the Dutch women’s national team (and the poor performances of the men’s team) gender inequality in terms of representation (on television) and pay is gaining public attention. This also involves questions about what is broadcast (live)—questions that tie in in turn with doubts as to whether a public broadcaster should be paying the high licencing fees for airing matches of the men’s national team. In both cases, it is the politics of the live that stick with me. Maren Hartmann: And politics are never easy, especially not at the moment. A great thanks, however, for these inspiring answers—and for an interview that was not conducted live, but feels in fact very live-ly.

Notes 1. Quite the opposite: the paper clearly underlines the dominance of the spatial paradigm at the time. 2. Silverstone outlines that “mediation has significant consequences for the way in which the world appears in and to everyday life, and as such this mediated appearance in turn provides a framework for the definition and conduct of our relationships to the other, and especially the distant other” (Silverstone 2002: 761). 3. McPherson (2006: 202).

References Auslander, P. (2008 [1999]). Liveness. Performance in a mediatized culture. London/New York: Routledge. Auslander, P. (2012). Digital liveness: A Historico-philosophical perspective. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 34(3), 3–11.

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Auslander, P. (2018). Reactivations: Essays on performance and its documentation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bourdon, J. (2000). Live television is still alive. On live television as an unfulfilled promise. Media, Culture & Society, 22(5), 531–556. Coleman, R. (2017). Theorizing the present: Digital media, pre-emergence and infra-structures of feeling. Cultural Studies, 32(4), 600–622. Dayan, D., & Katz, E. (1992). Media events. The live broadcasting of history. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fogelman, D. (Creator). (2016). This is us [Television series]. Los Angeles: NBC. Kaun, A., Fornäs, J., & Ericson, S. (2016). Media times|mediating time— Temporalizing media. Introduction to the special issue. International Journal of Communication, 10, 5206–5212. McPherson, T. (2006). Reload: Liveness, mobility and the web. In W. H. K. Chun & T. Keenan (Eds.), New media, old media: Interrogating the digital revolution (pp. 199–208). New York/London: Routledge. Rosa, H. (2015). Social acceleration: A new theory of modernity. New  York: Columbia University Press. Scannell, P. (2001). Authenticity and experience. Discourse Studies, 3(4), 405–411. Schäfer, M. T., & van Es, K. (Eds.). (2017). The datafied society. Studying culture through data. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Schudson, M. (1987). The new validation of popular culture: Sense and sentimentality in academia. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 4(1), 51–68. Silverstone, R. (2002). Complicity and collusion in the mediation of everyday life. New Literary History, 33(49), 761–780. van Es, K. (2017). The future of live. Cambridge: Polity. White, M. (2004). The attractions of television: Reconsidering liveness. In N. Couldry & A. McCarthy (Eds.), MediaSpace: Place, scale and culture in a media age (pp. 75–91). London: Routledge.

PART IV

Media and Time: Mediated Time?

CHAPTER 15

Polychronicity During Simultaneity: Mediated Time and Mobile Media Elizabeth Prommer

Mobile media use has changed the concept of time and modes of reception. We can now work anywhere, anytime; we can post on Facebook during work hours and listen to music; or play a computer game while answering WhatsApp messages. We use different media with different temporalities at the same time. This chapter will discuss the concept of polychronicity during simultaneity, as this phenomenon can be described, and will reveal how this has changed our modes of media use and media reception. The empirical foundation for this research is informed by two studies: first, on quantitative measurement of the feeling of acceleration and, second, on qualitative time and media biographical interviews.1 In order to connect the research of mediated time with media and communication theories, this research is grounded in social action theory that is based on the theoretical concept of media use which Eichner and Prommer (2017)2 describe as doing media. When we talk about media use today, we talk about activities that can no longer be understood as single units of action which can be narrowly contained in time, space, and usage. In a mediatised world, media use constitutes itself by a multiplicity of media: media usage has become open in every respect as boundaries between the E. Prommer (*) University of Rostock, Rostock, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 M. Hartmann et al. (eds.), Mediated Time, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24950-2_15

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media, our daily lives, and actions blur. The interconnections emerge in a cross-medial, inter-textual and inter-medial system of reference in which the audience in these environments develops polychronic usage patterns (Prommer 2012b). For example, when a young person plays a multi-user online game on a computer, communicates with friends via a mobile phone using WhatsApp or Facebook, and streams music via a laptop all at the same time, they are not only multitasking different activities—these different activities also have different temporalities, contents, and inherent motives for media use. Time here is polychronic in that the different activities not only happen simultaneously but have different temporalities and temporal demands which all occur in the same situation. Listening to music is to follow note for note the rhythm of the tune. Answering WhatsApp messages, sometimes with added time or group pressure (due to two blue ticks) for a quick response or at other times without time-social pressure, creates its own rules. Playing a computer game also follows temporal rhythms; the levels of play, the speed of the possible tasks, and the experience of the players are decisive. In all of these examples, the experience of time can be independent of real time. A fast computer game can be relaxing, yet an urgent WhatsApp stressful. To add more time layers, there might be a different temporality inherent if the music is played from a CD or is streamed. For instance, maybe due to the speed of Wi-Fi, the playlist might be interrupted. Ernst (2013) refers to this as the medial eigenzeit due to the rhythm of the technical media. All of these factors lead to polychronicity during simultaneity (Prommer 2012b). Listening to music and playing computer games can be used as relaxation; however, media activities can also have different motives, like maintaining relationships via social media. The social meaning varies according to the use and modes of reception, and these media usage motives are dynamic. For instance, when looking at a smartphone and a news alert appears about an important event, the situation immediately changes, and so does the subsequent use of media. This multitasking is connected to the concept of time based on the idea that the acceleration of life in modern society is also connected to and with media, especially mobile media. The acceleration of life is a concept which has influenced popular and academic debate, and within its discourse, the acceleration of life is mainly due to the rapid development of communication technology. For Virilio (2006), modern communication technology is the driving force that has increased the lack of time. He proposes that it only seems to offer relief in regard to time management. There is the

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so-­called time-pressure paradox (Wajcman 2015), for even though modern mobile media helps us to save time, it also causes stress and wastes time. Wajcman (2015) connects the modern concept of time to neoliberal forms of capitalism and the need to spend time wisely and within the capitalistic economic system, which in turn leads to stress and the urge to get things done effectively (see also Roth-Ebner 2015). In line with Virilio (2006) and Rosa (2005, 2016), for Wajcman and Dodd (2016), acceleration is an inherent feature of (digital) capitalism: “[T]he cultural condition of digital capitalism is simply one of acceleration” (p. 2). In this regard, polychronous action and multitasking would be the effect as well as the constant pressure to be alert (Gergen 2002). This chapter aims to analyse from the user perspective the relationship between the sense of time and the feeling of acceleration during situations of multitasking with mobile phones with other media. Furthermore, it will connect discussions about time and social acceleration with theories of media, media use, and understandings of media use as social action. The central question of this chapter is: what happens in situations of multitasking with our feeling of time? Does the audience develop new polychrone modes of reception (Prommer 2012b), or are they just simply always on as Turkle (2008) or Vorderer (2015) see it? To provide additional context a brief overview of the concept of doing media (Eichner and Prommer 2017) and the mediated time research on the micro and macro level. Our own empirical data will answer the question whether we develop new polychrone patterns or are just always on.

Media Reception: Doing Media Media use here is seen as meaningful and thus a social action embedded in everyday life in a world constituted by media. The paradigm of the active interpreting recipient, which is based on the action model of symbolic interactionism, is the basis of a theory of media action that is represented by numerous researchers (e.g. Eichner 2014; Keppler 2001; Mikos 2001; Prommer 2012a; Renckstorf and Wester 2001). Even if there is broad agreement that the user is active, there are still different views on whether the user’s activities are located at the macro, meso, or micro level. For example, Hill (2018) describes the active user usage pattern more as a flow by using the term roaming to illustrate the user as wandering through the media content and convergent media environments. Overall, however, the individual is seen not only as an acting subject

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who actively constructs everyday life and the environment through individual meanings but also through traditional and socially mediated meanings. Here, the approaches follow Bourdieu (1997), Giddens (1984), Habermas (1997) or, in a cultural studies approach, Hall (1980). This perspective of sense making and meaning fullness of media reception is not new and has a long tradition within media studies, albeit with different references. Livingstone (2015) refers to the early activity concepts of Liebes and Katz (1990) and recalls that Fiske (1992) speaks of audiencing in order to grasp the practice of the audience in constructing meaning. What they have in common is the idea that the recipients are active in the sense that they understand, interpret, and incorporate what they have seen into their everyday lives. Eichner and Prommer (2017) introduced the concept of doing media in order to have a theoretical framework to analyse the non-linear, partly polychronic actions of the recipients in a convergent media world. Doing media is a holistic concept which focuses on a socially located subject who is capable of social action equipped with agency (Eichner 2014) within the lifeworld. Combining social action theory and symbolic interactionism with film and media theory leads to a more inclusive concept where media structures the reception (Mikos and Prommer 2017). The structuring of reception might be influenced by its technological characteristics and also through the inherent narrative and dramaturgy of the specific content and additionally might converge on different devices. Doing media thus refers to everyday activities related to the media— which embedded in the individual but also global world makes individual as well as social sense for people. These patterns of media use are partly a polychronic flow of use. On the other hand, the various media/texts/ products that approach the users in this flow, with their specific media temporalities and structure, influence the processes of media action. In this sense, doing media always includes everyday social action, cognitive-­ emotional activities, interpretive activities, and embodied practices. For the research design, this means a corresponding orientation to the usage episodes and usage flows. By analysing media use not from the medium or media text, but as a flow of socially embedded activities, the idea of doing media is designed as a multiple and complex action which makes sense and is meaningfully embedded in everyday life. The concept of doing itself gained prominence in the 1980s in the context of gender studies, when West and Zimmermann (1987) emphasised the active production and representation of gender in

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everyday life with Doing Gender. Doing Culture (Hörning and Reuter 2004) or “Doing Mobility” (Höflich 2014) as (for more, see Eichner and Prommer 2017) also highlight the social embeddedness of doing concepts. The doing approach emphasises the meaningful social and individual practices of action. It clarifies that cultural phenomena are not only meaningful media texts but also everyday social practices. Doing media in a mediatised world means you cannot NOT do media; even if you avoid media or social media, you have to actively avoid media and actively not do media, so therefore, you still do media. For our question regarding possible new (polychrone) modes of reception, this means that using mobile media in situations of simultaneity must also make sense for the user and is embedded in their lifeworld. Therefore, research with this theoretical framework must regard the individual sense making, but also the social situations, which we addressed with our triangulative empirical design.

Time and Media Use Early research on the dimension of time and media use in media and communication studies was conducted primarily in the early 1990s (Neverla 1992; Beck 1994). The studies focused on how time is structured via different kinds of media and also on the temporality of media itself (Sandbothe and Zimmerli 1994; Virilio 2006). Television received special attention due to its linear structure and its present orientedness (Beck 1994; see also Scannell in this book), as well as the possibility to organise and structure everyday life according to the consumption of television (Neverla 1992). It seems, however, that the structuring possibility has vanished due to the ability to be able to be online anywhere, anytime. Today the “acceleration and synchronization in media use and media consumption” (Neverla 2010, p. 143) results in a polychronic structure of time. Mobile media is always available and universally deployed and thus permeates and re-­ organises the structure of time. Recently, when time and mobile communication have been analysed, we see either theories of the macro and societal level or research on the micro level of individual experience. In addition, the research often implies and highlights the negative effects. Some research has been done on the temporal dimension of cell phone and smartphone use, which emphasises the psychological factors involved (e.g. Turkle 2008; Vorderer 2015; Vorderer and Kohring 2013; Licoppe 2004; Gergen 2002; Ling and Lai

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2016) and usually equates stress with excessive and almost addictive media consumption. However, the actual measurements regarding the sense of time have not been undertaken in any of the mentioned studies. For example, an absent presence may occur (Gergen 2002) in that recipients are always reachable, despite physical absence, and then mentally absent when physically present. The direct consumption is additionally a recurrent focus, often with the (normatively difficult) question of when this consumption becomes a problematic use reflected in the self-evaluation (see Görland 2018 for more examples). On the macro level, many theoretical models of acceleration have been developed (see, e.g. Rosa 2016; Virilio 2006; Wajcman 2008; Wajcman and Dodd 2016); however, with the exception of Seufert and Wilhelm (2014), these concepts have rarely been researched empirically. In their project, “Media Use as The Allocation of Time”, they show the correlation between disposable leisure time and media use, which draws on available long-term empirical data. They did not, however, look into the sense of time. While there are many studies on excessive media consumption, as well as the change of social interaction and acceleration, the sense of time and the individual perception of time are not or only rarely are connected with these theories and even less to media use. There is a growing body of research on multitasking (e.g. Segijn and Kononova 2018 or Chang 2017) and multi-screening (Wegener 2015), although rarely is this research connected to concepts of time or the sense of time. Chang (2017) connects multitasking with the psychological trait of sensation seeking, and the main result of this kind of multitasking research is that multitasking correlates with age and certain cultures (Segijn and Kononova 2018). The term polychronic or polychronicity is used with different meanings in various studies, psychologically oriented work refers to polychrons as people who multitask and people who do not multitask are monochrons (Lee et al. 2006). However, this research does not connect to time, the sense of time, or the temporality of media, but relates time to and as a personal trait. Neverla and Trümper (in this book) define polychronicity as the overall temporal description of modern society itself (see also Neverla 2002). For them, acceleration is an inherent structure of polychronic times (for more details on the definition of acceleration and media, see Görland 2018). In this chapter, polychronicity is understood as a direct translation of the Greek word poly as many and the Greek chronikós and Latin chronicus

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for time. We could also speak of “many times” or “multi-timeness”. The aim of our research is to base the definition of polychronicity on empirical data. By connecting multitasking to the concept of time, and the need to spend time wisely in the chrononormative sense (Freeman 2010), multitasking is seen as an increase in activity in the life of the recipients. With this logic, multitasking becomes a coping strategy in order to be able to counter the “more” within available time spans (Pawlak et al. 2015; Rosa 2005; Wajcman 2015). Beck (1994) therefore sees the multitasking period as a strategy of “time compression or time deepening” (p. 332). In concrete terms, this means stretching time to use it as effectively as possible. Multitasking and the flow of media use are difficult to tell apart. Rieger et al. (2017) refer to the switching between the functions and apps on a device as comparison time and sees multitasking as more of a constant flow due to the continuous switching back and forth since the processes can hardly be distinguished from each other and converge with each other in the moment of use. There is an inherent ambivalence embedded in the coexistence of several activities at the same time; however, this also has the potential of new conflicts since it possesses “a new quality of oppositeness” (Gentzel 2015, p.  398). Due to the individual in the moment of comparison, previous oppositional factors, such as acceleration and deceleration, can lie in a temporal simultaneousness, for example, when, during (relaxed) television consumption, simultaneously (usually rather stressful) work emails are answered (for more details, see Görland 2018).

Methods We want to understand if and how far our perception of time, especially our concrete time structuration, has changed due to the use of mobile devices to bridge the gap between macro-level theories and micro-level studies. At the centre of this research stands the question of whether the audience develops new patterns of reception in regard to the individual concept of time. The question will be answered via a data triangulation combining qualitative and quantitative studies. This includes 24 time and media biographical interviews combined with mobile experience sampling method (MESM). The MESM is used to send a standardised push questionnaire five to seven times in a week to a sample of 100 people on their mobile phones. The qualitative interviews highlight the context of usage of mobile media and

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the changing perceptions of time on an individual level. The MESM is meant to explore the situated media use patterns in accordance with the immediate perception of time and to get closer to the concept of flow in doing media. By using MESM, we have been able to identify polychrone usage points and communicative contexts. For more details of the MESM, see Görland (2016). Of the 100 respondents to the MESM, half were female, and they were diverse in age, education, and economic and social status. Half of the respondents lived in large German cities (more than 1 million) and half in smaller towns (up to 200,000). Time, especially free time, was important to most of the respondents. Almost two-thirds (63%) agreed with the statement “time is luxury” and that free time is more important than a high income (66%). At the same time, half (49%) of the respondents had the feeling of time pressure and not having enough time. Over half (56%) agree that mobile media enhances multitasking, and a third believe that we have to cope with more tasks in shorter time spans, while 29% disagree with this statement and 34% are undecided. Time is therefore definitely a valuable commodity for our respondents.

Does the Audience Develop New Polychrone Patterns? Yes and No, the Empirical Data Parallel Usage To answer our research questions, we had 100 respondents, which we quota sampled according to the typical online user in Germany (Koch and Frees 2015), answer six short online questionnaires sent to their mobile phones per day for a seven-day period. This adds up to 2841 data points which resemble episodes of use of the mobile phone, and they will be referred to as usage points in the following text. The questionnaire consisted of ten questions regarding the kind of mobile media usage, the place, the motives, whether the usage is more work or leisure oriented and a central question relating to the perception of time. We asked them to move the metre on the scale to resemble how time moves for them at the moment (see Fig. 15.1). An additional question was aimed at multitasking. We wanted to know whether the respondents were using other media in the same moment when they were using their smartphone.

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Fig. 15.1  Please tell us how time moves for you at this moment. Please choose one point at the axis (translated from German) Table 15.1  Have you been using other media at the same time? If yes, which media? (n = 664, multiple answers possible) Have you been using other media at the same time? Yes  PC/laptop  Tablet  TV  Radio  Print No Total Missinga All

Frequency of usage points 644 405 30 114 98 25 1635 2279 562 2841

Per cent 22.7 62.7 4.7 17.7 15.1 4.0 57.6 80.2 19.8 100.0

Missing (n = 562) are data points where the smartphone was not used in the last 2 hours

a

In about one-fifth (22.7) of the usage episodes, we measured a form of parallel usage. Mostly a laptop came into use in addition to the mobile phone. In other relevant cases, the parallel usage involved television and radio with the mobile phone. Tablets or print media seem not to matter for multitasking (see Table 15.1). The main applications that were used during these usage points of multitasking had to do with communication, and most of the time (72%), this communication was targeted to a specific recipient (64%). Respondents were making phone calls, sending messages via a text messaging application

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or checking the phone for incoming messages, and they were clearly making the point that they were waiting for a message or had to respond to someone. Therefore, communication was purposeful and connected directly one-on-one. This differs from idle communication on social media, for example, scrolling through Facebook posts or Instagram pictures. Multitasking in our study is an action that is not connected to mobility. In over 80% of the cases, the respondents were at home (56%) or at work (31%). Multitasking very rarely took place during mobility or in public spaces (see Table 15.2). This goes hand in hand with the simultaneous use of laptop/PC or television and radio, as these devices are not available on the move and are usually tied to the home environment. Thus, it can be concluded that the parallel use of different devices is related to targeted communication, and this parallel use of different devices is significantly more frequently connected to work-related use; even if this work happens from home, the professional use is predominate. This means emails that have to be written and the calls that are being waited on are connected to work.

Table 15.2  Usage points of parallel usage (n = 644) Application during multitasking Targeted communication (72%)  Making a phone call  Texting  Messenger (WhatsApp, Telegram)  Emailing  Checking for incoming call, mails or texts Entertainment/distraction (28%)  Music  Social networks (Facebook)  Surfing the web  Gaming  Reading news  Clock, calendar Total

Per cent 11 11 37

Motives for use Targeted communication (64%)  I had to respond to someone  I had to contact somebody  I was waiting for a response

Per cent 27 25 12

3 10 Entertainment (27%) 1 10 5 3 2 7 100

 Leisure/distraction  I wanted to inform myself  Relaxation  No real motive Organisation (8%)  I needed to organise my day (dates, public transport)  Total (with rounding error)

10 7 3 7 8 99

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Multitasking and the Perception of Time If we look at the correlation between the perception of how time is moving at the moment of the usage, with the reason for the multitasking and the devices being used, then different temporalities become apparent. If multitasking happens simultaneously between a smartphone and the television (or radio), the perceived feeling of time is slower than if the multitasking happened simultaneously with the use of a laptop, making the device and the reason of use and temporality strongly connected. The comparison between the feeling of time during non-multitasking usage points and multitasking usage points shows no significant difference. This means it is not the multitasking itself that leads to a feeling of acceleration. Whether an accelerated sense of time occurs depends primarily on whether the simultaneous use of the media is connected to work or leisure. Here, we see a clear breakdown of former boundaries between the spheres of work and leisure which go hand in hand with the dissolution of spaces designated for work or leisure. Not only do public and private spheres converge but also the temporalities. When multitasking takes place during leisure time, the polychronicity during simultaneity does not seem to be perceived as negative. Time is felt to be slow because multitasking is voluntary and is thought more of as a form of entertainment or pastime. In this case, there is no stress felt by the simultaneous use. A typical example is Maurice, who uses dating apps while watching a TV show—although later in the same interview, he states that, if the show is really interesting, then he will not multiscreen: Question: Do you use your cell phone when you watch a show or series on TV? Maurice: Yes. I look at Grindr or at Planet Romeo, or I look at WhatsApp… and I don’t do much on Facebook right now. There I am just a little bit. So that was once a month ago somehow more. I think because then I have the other apps now, where I just get to know other boys. (Maurice, 25 years, male, Berlin, translated from German)3 Sabrina also does not feel any acceleration by multitasking. For her, it is an opportunity to have a feeling of closeness with her boyfriend who lives in another town:

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Sabrina:

(laughing) Yeah. So sometimes I really sit in the living room and watch TV, watch some TV shows, I’ve got my laptop on at the same time and Skype and then play around with my cell phone. Question: Why? Sabrina: Hmm. Yes, I Skype then quite often with (my boyfriend), who then also incidentally just plays with the PlayStation. We both have computers on because we don’t see each other SO often. He does something then. I do something. I watch a movie, yes, and actually totally stupid, and I still play mobile games sometimes, don’t I? (Sabrina, 31 years, female, Rostock, translated from German)4 In both examples, the multitasking, which is really a multi-screening, does not create any feelings of acceleration, and the temporalities of the medium seem to be of little relevance. Another interviewee stated that, in instances when she misses something important during a television show because she was playing with her phone or engaging in a WhatsApp chat, she will re-watch the parts of the show she missed. It is important to add here that this re-watching of a television show is only possible due to modern streaming technologies, and this seems to have changed the inherent temporality and connectedness of television to the present or real-timeness. However, if multitasking takes place for professional and work-related reasons, and because of the form of communication, it is necessary that it is done on a laptop, then a feeling of acceleration arises. Whether the communication was necessary or the respondents just felt it was urgent and necessary is not a relevant question here; only the feeling that the communication was urgent matters. There is a clear and high work-related parallel that the use of different devices correlates with an accelerated sense of time (Pearson’s Korr 0.406, P