Book Review: Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time: Essays on Hardwired Temporalities

In the classic punk rock song “Good Riddance,” Green Day laments feeling at the mercy of Time and adjures the listener to be resigned to it without asking why. While the 90s song is not the impetus for Axel Volmar and Kyle Stine’s edited volume Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time, the chapters therein illuminate the dynamics of infrastructures and temporalities of each other that might produce sensitivity to time as a deterministic force. Moreover, the book contributes to the phenomenology of time by delving into the ways digital time plays out in modern capitalism through media theory, lived experiences, and future implications. As a digital sociologist, my interest in the collection is rooted in what the experiences and politics of digital time illuminate and reify about certain segments of society.

In their introductory chapter, Volmar and Stine situate digital time in the idea that all technological change impacts what we can do with time. They differentiate between infrastructures of temporality (such as a calendar) and temporalities of infrastructure (such as work hours) to convey the relationship between time and technology. For example, global capitalism entails workers in the service industry working nontraditional hours to keep up with demand (p. 10). That working nontraditional hours has become a fixed or what the editors call a hardwired temporality of the industry illustrates the spirit behind some of the essays in this collection. Further in this vein, the editors advance the idea that technological innovation “rewires power relations” (p. 13) and, as new tech becomes concretized in infrastructures, patterns time in new ways. These new ways include the time-critical, operative dimensions of Wolfgang Ernst’s work that many contributors to the volume lean into to foreground the role of microtime in media infrastructures.

The essays are divided into four sections: Media Philosophies of Time Patterning, Microtimes, Lifetimes, and Futures. The first section on media theory begins with John Durham Peters’ essay arguing that the forward-movement of time gives it meaning and explaining how technology functions to capture and distort time. The next chapter by Gabriel Schabacher presents a helpful framework for conceptualizing the practices of care involved in technological systems: repair, maintenance, abandonment, and repurposing. Through the example of the new Berlin airport, she shows how temporalities of infrastructure are entangled by lifespans of various materials that obsolesce at different rates and how the plans and maintenance cycles that comprise infrastructures of temporality govern time. Both chapters illustrate how time is not simply linear, as technology can remediate it and thereby draw attention to what is often taken for granted.

The next two essays in the section address the latent futurity in predictive technologies and measuring time in terms of technological events, respectively. However, both would have benefited from being grounded in a tangible issue to avoid the risk of obliquity that comes with a purely theoretical argument. Yuk Hui presents a clever argument with a sequence of bold, albeit unsubstantiated claims, for the importance of tertiary protention—meaning a projected anticipation that does not directly originate from the self—as “the missing term in current understandings of time” (p. 77). A primary pretension, one might be skeptical of the necessity of a new phrase to refer to preemptive algorithms given that colloquially algorithms imply machine learning. He further attempts to problematize the digital future and “articulate a world history” through stringing together a series of -isms and nominalizations that obfuscate rather than buttress the scope of his argument (p. 82). Drawing from his recent book, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics, he concludes with a discursive, arcane meditation on universal technology which, without implicating a clear object, leaves the reader uncertain what it was all about.

The second section, on Microtime, aptly conveys how imperceptibly small units of time can have big consequences and how digital temporality can be relative to localized time. Isabell Otto begins her chapter with an observation familiar to many: how working with others across the globe entails heightened awareness of temporal plurality and how that imposes a work ethic stretching outside of local business hours. Ipso facto, with digital interconnectivity, workers orient themselves to other time zones. This matters as a refutation of the utopic imagined refuge from the busy off-line world hypothesized by early Web 2.0 futurists (which Otto notes ironically has inverted into digital detox movements—with busyness associated with being connected (p. 110)). Moreover, she notes the relativity and irregularity of time scales and the need over the last 40 years for the leap second to temporarily stabilize them. Such temporal plurality becomes relevant in the need to coordinate world time and awareness of what is entailed in such reordering (p. 121–2).

The importance of microtime is concretized in other essays in the section. In a chapter on self-driving cars, Florian Sprenger wants us to humanize our technical vocabulary in distinguishing between an algorithm, which draws from pre-programmed data to inform and anticipate probabilities, and what he calls micro-decisions at sub-human levels of perception that utilize real-time data to preempt evasive action. Instilling vehicles with de facto situational awareness, Sprenger notes that “automated vehicles couldn’t effectively interact with their environment if they weren’t able to decide in fragments of seconds” (p. 160). The affordance of AI making real-time micro-decisions differs dramatically from the overarching prescriptive and proscriptive macro-decisions we are more familiar with from Asimov’s Laws of Robotics. It thus calls into question the politics of agency. If a car is equipped with computational agency, reads a situation, attempts to prevaricate before the driver notices the situation, and an accident ensues, would the fault lie with the programmers or with the driver for entering an impossibly dangerous situation—or would accountability become unplaceable? This scenario is exactly why Sprenger wants us to recognize adaptive machine-learning as decisions—so as not to trivialize the programming as culpable for undesirable contingencies.

The theme of preemption continues into the next section, Lifetimes, which transitions from the impersonal to lived experiences. In the most existential chapter of the volume, James Hodge discusses the role of technology in exacerbating feelings of anxiety. Drawing from the DSM-V, in which “anxiety is a fundamentally flawed relation to the future” (p. 208) and Heidegger (1962) who identifies anxiety as a felt threat that is nothing and nowhere, Hodge names the enigmatically anxiety-inducing “nothing” of today as the network. Through always-on computing in which welcome or unwelcome information can interrupt at any time via beep, vibration, or push notification on multiple networked devices, there is good reason to feel anxious. Consider the reach of digital preemption from predictive text to targeted ads that effectively make us more dependent on algorithmic predictions that, in turn, decrease our own ability to anticipate what we have (willingly or unwillingly) outsourced. This diminished ability to anticipate, coupled with not knowing who knows what about us, fosters a very anxious society. As Hodges notes, the other side of feeling overdetermined that also breeds anxiety is radical possibility as articulated by Kierkagaard and Fromm (1994). ¹ In the networked era, this freedom takes the form of disconnecting from digital technologies. However, rather than feel condemned to a cycle of disconnecting and reconnecting out of necessity, in a Monty Python-esque ‘always look on the bright side’ vein, Hodge suggests that social networks allow us to share our feelings—including anxiety—the very act of which feels good (p. 212). Coming from a people who perfected kvetching, I couldn’t agree more.

The last section, Futures, offers projections for where new regimes of time are taking us. The one that stands out the most is Eva-Maria Nyckel’s chapter on Amazon’s anticipatory shipping method. She scrutinizes an Amazon patent for technology that speculates when someone might want an item and initiates a shipment to that person’s region without needing a full address. As the package gets closer to the targeted buyer, to ensure the self-fulfilling prophecy of the algorithm, the targeted buyer can be nudged through targeted ads or even discounts. In the event of a false prediction, the item would be redirected to another area where a purchase is anticipated, returned to sender, or delivered for free to the non-customer to foster corporate goodwill. Through what statisticians Andrew Gelman and Guido Imbens (2013) call forward causal inference, an approach that illuminates the effects of a cause by manipulating a single variable, surely Amazon will learn how to achieve optimal outcomes soon enough. With such logistical contingencies accounting for multiple futures, as Nyckel concludes, shipments preceding orders means Amazon can rewire temporality right out of science fiction. ²

Taken as a whole, Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time is intended for academics with an interest in any of the intersections of the words in the title. Its essays vary in accessibility—with some chapters affording a fluid, inviting read while others assuming the reader’s familiarity with multiple canons of literature. All the same, the text provokes reflection on, and new understanding of, the past, present, and future through critically examining the role that technological and cultural infrastructures play in shaping everyday lives. This includes both privileged and marginalized groups, thereby offering a trove of perspectives for scholars interested in the gritty particularities of hardwired temporalities—all lessons learned in time.