The Temporal Repertoire

Abstract

Temporality, the way one perceives passage through time and the constitutive beliefs from which such perception arises, sits at the core of what it means to be human. In the phenomenological tradition, the apprehension and conception of time is central to the formation of subjectivity. Temporality, although experienced differently by individual persons, relies on a shared way of ordering a person’s passage through time, an intersubjective temporality that forms a shared repertoire of temporal performances. Yet even as we imagine time to be infinite and universal, temporality emerges from social hierarchies as a fundamental difference that unfolds in the register of the spatiotemporal.  Despite its centrality to forms of human experience, passing through time correctly depends almost entirely on machinic intermediaries: on clocks, alerts, notifications, bells, and other sentries that nudge a person to take up a specific part of a quotidian routine, to wake up, to work, to sleep. The assemblages that standardize, shape, measure, enable, and capture temporality enact commitments about the scope and possibilities of human relations, the role of technology in everyday life, and the intermingling of scientific and state power. This panel turns to these entanglements of temporality, machines, and political economy to question the use of temporality as a way to understand technological change. If temporality is fractured, multiple, and socially differentiated, how might its exploration enrich studies of technologies and techniques increasingly valued for their ability to execute judgements in “real-time”?

Individual Presentations

• Time Constructs: Values and the Future Internet - Britt Paris, Data & Society Research Institute

• Privatization of Temporality in the Infrastrucutral Experience of Uber - Sanna Jamila Ali, Stanford University

• Synchronization and the Timework of Code Development in Physics - Seth Erickson, Penn State University

• When Is Information? - Brian Justie, Department of Information Studies, UCLA

• The Production of a Femtosecond Pulse - Filip Vostal, Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences

Session Organizer

• Roderic Crooks, Informatics, UC Irvine