Digital Media and the Making of Network Temporality

Philip Pond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000411928
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Physics
• Index: Physics

This book presents an exciting new theory of time for a world built on hyper-fast digital media networks. Computers have changed the human social experience enormously. We're becoming familiar with many of the macro changes, but we rarely consider the complex, underlying mechanics of how a technology interacts with our social, political and economic worlds. And we cannot explain how the mechanics of a technology are being translated into social influence unless we understand the role of time in that process.

Offering an original reconsideration of temporality, Philip Pond explains how super-powerful computers and global webs of connection have remade time through speed. The book introduces key developments in network time theory and explains their importance, before presenting a new model of time which seeks to reconcile the traditionally separate subjective and objective approaches to time theory and measurement.

1 Network time theory

Introduction

The year 2020 was a difficult one, full of acute traumas and diffuse unease; fire-ravaged, pandemic-ridden and Trump-wrecked. The global population has spent months of the year locked down, under local rules, watching infections spike and deaths inevitably follow. COVID-19 has driven us further into the data-scapes of social media, video conferencing and robotic news production. We have learnt, communed, confessed, worked and mourned online this year. We know that internet companies are collecting more of our secrets than we would share with our loved ones, yet we log on and post. We face the digitisation of our experiences with weary resignation, knowing that eventually automation will destroy our economies of work, but not knowing how to protest that course, let alone change it. Often, it feels inevitable. At times, it has even felt easy.

What were the alternatives? Perhaps we could have withdrawn into our bodies and our homes, our families and the quiet rhythms of closeted days. We could have become more physical with each other, paid more attention to the breath between words, the warmth and the coldness of shared spaces, the slow arc of empty days. We could have aimed for regression, for an older analogue experience, alone with ourselves for a while – but these words sound ridiculous, even as I write them. This is not the world we have built, of course. We log on and check the news because that is where the numbers are reported, the press conferences held, the scandals splashed. The frantic hum of humanity is digital.

Personally, the COVID-19 crisis has been a weirdly disembodied experience, something happening elsewhere, mostly online, more recently in suburbs where I do not live. At some level, I am of course aware that it may spread into my physical experience, but it has not done so yet. For me, it remains a media-thing, a worry in the diffuse or abstract sense. The reaction to it – my city being closed, the loss of work – is far more real and present. Still, the media have my attention. My days revolve around the reporting cycle: the overnight tweets from dystopic America, the morning numbers report, fretful afternoons, bad news from waking Europe and then a few evening hours of Netflix-stupor. All of this happens online for me, mostly through the dull haze of my laptop display, a constant stream of clicks, scrolls and data sales. The news flows, and sometimes I sense that I am flowing back into it. The feeling when the updates stop, when there is no more news for a moment, is really weird. I struggle with the weight of the empty time.

I am not suggesting that COVID-19 is primarily a crisis of time – clearly this is not the case – but I do think that time is implicated in all crises and that we often interpret crises through time. This has certainly been the case historically: periods of major disruption or rapid change were often interpreted temporally, largely I expect because people felt time shift and reshape itself during these periods (Solnit 2003). A major philosophical development during the twentieth century was the realisation that time is the denominator of human experience (Husserl 1999; McCumber 2011). Being human means being conscious of the world in time, which is both a compelling and a challenging idea. When the world changes, the time of the world also changes, and that means something in the human experience changes with it. The concept of network time was developed to help describe and explain some of the most keenly felt changes of the digital age.

This is a book about network time – or, rather, this is a book about that the relationship between two types of time: the time that seems to flow formlessly through the data-scape and the time that confronts us when the flow stops. In this first chapter, I describe what network time is, both in the technical sense and as it relates to social experience, and I try to explain how it comes about as a theory. This requires a couple of things. The first is a brief account of networked computing and the communication practices it supports. Network time is specific to the hyper-fast transfer protocols of the modern internet and the digital data structures upon which they operate. It is hard to understand network time without having some sense of the technology that produces it. Second, it requires a general understanding of social time theory, which develops the idea of time away from the clock and, more broadly, away from the idea of constant universal flow.

In Chapter 2, I explore in far more detail the differences between scientific clock time and the variable times of social experience. This is an important distinction to unpack because the relationship between our different conceptualisations of time has changed. For much of history, scientists and philosophers assumed that they were studying the same phenomenon, even if they chose to approach it very differently; that is no longer the case. Many social theorists agree that they are not interested in the same time as scientists, and many question whether science is really interested in time at all. Indeed, even within the sciences, plenty of researchers hold the view that time is an illusion, a by-product of the human mind’s struggle to interpret other physical phenomena. I will examine these ideas and compare them with each other. I want to ask, first, whether there is a thing that we can call time and, second, whether it can be the same thing for both natural and social scientists.

These questions matter because time plays such an important role in our study of change in both natural and social processes, and the measurement of time – particularly in the social sciences – is a very contested idea. Social time theorists have invested considerable resources in demonstrating that the seconds, minutes and hours marked by the clock are themselves constructed through social and technological practices. In effect, they have settled on the idea that social time cannot be measured, and must instead be described through qualitative statements of sense and experience. Scientific time, by contrast, is defined by the practice of measurement, and this distinction is largely responsible for the divergence of the two approaches. In Chapter 3, I look at the possibility of temporal reconciliation, of realigning the social and scientific approaches to time and developing a form of social time measurement. If possible, this would enable social time theorists to use network time as an explanatory variable in their comparative analyses of modern media.

What do we stand to gain from a conceptualisation of network time that supports measurement? This is a question worth asking because we are likely to reveal something important about our temporal thinking in our response. There will be people for whom the concept of time without measurement makes very little sense at all, simply because their conceptualisations of time are so closely bound to the numerical intervals counted by the clock. Clock time is deeply embedded in our social and cultural experiences. It is the hegemonic time within our society and has been since the Industrial Revolution, when labour moved from the field to the factory and required stricter synchronisation (Hassan 2009). Equally, there will be people for whom the distinction between social time and the ‘measurable’ times of the clock and science is of paramount importance. They will consider my suggestion that social time is measurable nonsense, and see me betraying my ignorance about the phenomenon that the concept describes. For some temporal theorists, the ‘impossibility of measurement’ is as central to the conceptualisation of social time as the quantification of time is to the scientist.

While this easy categorisation of temporal theorists is helpful, I would suggest that we have more to gain from reconciliation. As I have already noted, the impossibility of measurement limits the explanatory power of social time. I don’t say this because I think numbers are necessarily the best way of describing every phenomenon, but rather because the possibility of numbers would enable social time to be deployed comparatively. This is an important point, so it is worth establishing a little more clearly. In Chapter 2, I will spend a little time describing the differences between Bergson’s (1999) quantitative and qualitative multiplicities, because this is a distinction upon which a lot of social time theory is predicated. In Bergson’s view, some phenomena are measurable because they are effectively repeated instantiations of the same type, and some are not. Time cannot be measured because it falls into the latter category – whereas numbers describe instances of the same thing, the temporal experience at moment n is fundamentally different from the experience at n + 1.

This means that the temporal experience we describe in one context tells us nothing at all about the temporal experience within a different context, even if those contexts are broadly comparable. This is another way of saying that social time has little comparative explanatory power because it is always embedded within the instance of its experience. This is a problem for a couple of reasons. The first is a general issue: the narrow contextualisation of social time makes it an elusive concept. Descriptions of network time, for instance, often seem more focussed on telling us what the phenomenon is not rather than describing what it is. Manuel Castells (1996: xli) defines his version of network time as ‘timeless time’ to emphasise the ‘systematic perturbation in the sequential order of the social practices’. Weltevrede et al. (2014: 129) call network time ‘a “non-time” without past and without duration’. These descriptions agree that network time is very fast, but beyond this characterisation they focus on temporal features that appear not to be absent from network time. Ultimately, discussions of network time tend to become generalised discussions about temporal theory rather than being discrete, objective descriptions of a phenomenon unfolding in the world. Network time becomes the confounding of the theorist’s temporal expectations. The temporal challenge, as it is presented, is to the theorist’s understanding of social time: that is the principal phenomenon under review.

The second issue is a critique of how social time is used in social theory. Also in Chapter 2, I will explore these ideas in more detail. For now, let’s say simply that social time theorists tend to focus on qualitative descriptions of temporal experience for the social categories that interest them. While this framing sounds banal, it really is not. It means that social time is realised through the established practices of social research, which tend to be focussed on specific roles or practices within the established schema of social theory. Descriptions of different social times exist for different types of labour (academic time, for instance), and for different cultural modes (leisure time), institutions, technologies and media – in other words, for all the different categories that tend to attract social researchers.

There is a logical contradiction implicit within this sorting of social times into neat contextual categories. If social time is truly contextual, born entirely within a specific phenomenon, and truly impossible to measure, it cannot also be shared by individual instances within a category. For instance, the category of academic time envelops hundreds of thousands of academics globally in a shared temporal experience, when those academics work in multitudinous different ways, to different rhythms and with highly variable rewards for each unit of their labour-time. Any sense of a shared academic time, then, is dependent on a massive reduction in this complexity and the description of a few dominant threads or trends in shared practice. Once the possibility of sharing is introduced, the logic of contextual instantiation breaks down; the impossibility of measurement becomes impossible itself. If there is temporal sharing between units within a temporal category, then this surely implies that the thing being shared must be continuous between those units. In other words, there must be an objective phenomenon that is being shared between contexts, and we must be able to recognise it as the same phenomenon. This rather suggests that the time being shared is a repeated instantiation of the same type, which means it must be countable.

To my mind, this logical uncertainty should be untenable, especially if we accept that time is the denominator of experience, the variable that underwrites our interactions in the world. This is why I think reconciliation is desirable, even necessary, and we should be working to ensure that social and scientific time theorists can understand each other. In Chapter 3, I argue that reconciliation may be possible, provided that we rethink some of our longstanding assumptions about objective reality. This ‘rethinking’ is the major theoretical contribution of the book, and it requires a rejection of object-permanence in favour of an ontological model based around systemic change. Rejection is, perhaps, not the ideal word here, because it implies a dramatic break with object-permanence, suggesting that is currently a universally accepted view and that, of course, is not the case. System-theoretical models of change are already well established in both the physical and the social sciences and my main contribution here is simply to observe similarities between them – and to wonder if these similarities might be aligned more closely.

In physics, quantum theories of time are predicated on probabilistic systemic becoming. In Niklas Luhmann’s social system theory, time is located within the differentiation processes of discrete systems, part of the ‘interpretation of reality with regard to the difference between past and future’ (Luhmann 1976: 135). Are the systems of physicists and the systems of social scientists fundamentally so different? My suggestion is that they are not, and my aim is to show that a discrete set of quantifiable events can produce multiple subjective experiences, assuming those events are located within a wider field of systemic interaction. Most of Chapter 3 is spent establishing these ideas, identifying and explaining the shared principles of scientific and social time, and uniting these principles within a general model of systemic time.

In Chapter 4 and again in Chapter 5, I return to the concept of network time and ask what it might look reinterpreted according to the principles of systemic time theory. There are several steps in this process. First, I consider what sort of events are implicated in the assemblage of the network system. These events are key markers of change within the network – under the system model, time is produced through change events as part of the systemic differentiation process. Using empirical examples, I show how change is produced from interactions between different components of the network system: users, code, data, discourse and so on. I establish a method for identifying and recording these interaction events and assigning them a value for temporal comparison.

Unfortunately, the reconciliation of the subjective and scientific approaches to network time is more complicated than simply identifying a set of relevant events that can be accepted by both sets of theorists....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of table
• 1 Network time theory
• 2 The scientific and the subjective positions
• 3 Systems, interaction and perspective
• 4 Time recoded, time recorded
• 5 Measuring network time
• Index