Time Constructs: Values and the Future Internet

• In Event: The Temporal Repertoire

Abstract

This paper uniquely approaches the politics of technology as a set of interlocking temporal concerns. I draw from interviews, documents and observation to uncover how a discourse of time is framed by engineers and projects principals in the course of the development of three Future Internet Architecture projects (FIAs) that hope to replace Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) to determine how Internet traffic will be transmitted and routed in the future. In doing so, this paper reveals categories of the discourse of time, particularly articulations of efficiency, latency, speed, time as a technical resource, and notions of the future as they manifest in the projects under investigation.

The discursive categories fit into a time constructs framework that clarifies how the projects investigated were built with regard to time, and exposes how time manifests as a design ideology that is intertwined with other political ideologies. This project builds upon Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholarship as it demonstrates how notions of time and temporality manifest in engineering projects in ways that implicitly and explicitly reflect and shape social, political and epistemic values. In addition, the time constructs framework contributes a conceptual tool that can be used to surface the social, political and epistemic values of technological development that are often intentionally or unintentionally hidden, and difficult to discuss in cross-disciplinary conversations.

Author

• Britt Paris, Data & Society Research Institute