Making Time: Techniques of Forgetting Amidst Technologies of Remembering

• In Event: Doing and Making Times IV: Temporal Ontologies

Abstract

Information systems are often consulted to answer questions and guide action. Information systems are generally held to track or represent some state of the world, like an inventory does. What would it mean, however, if systems did not track some state of the world but instead created it? In the terminology of propositional logic, what does it mean that some information systems contain facts instead of propositions?
This paper examines the production of facts about the current time within the assemblage of computational timekeeping. From atomic clocks, through scientific time standards and network synchronization protocols to the time displayed upon smartphones, layers of certainty chain upon each other in complex ways. The many interlinked systems and practices which constitute modern computational timekeeping form an information infrastructure (Bowker et al., 2010), defined as “pervasive enabling resources in network form” (p. 98). As an infrastructure, computational timekeeping is distributed, taken for granted (Star & Ruhleder, 1996), and maintained by ‘invisible’ labor (Star, 1991). This paper analyzes this infrastructure’s role in creating the fact of the time of day, a globally ubiquitous component of what philosopher John Searle has called social reality (Searle, 2010). Specific components of the assemblage are examined recursively, including the UTC time standard, Network Time Protocol (NTP), and the tz time zone database (see Hauser, 2018). The analysis reveals contrasting examples of Bowker has called memory practices (Bowker, 2006), and which I examine as techniques of forgetting surrounding technologies of remembering.

Author

• Elliott Hauser, The University of Texas at Austin