Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time

Abstract

In a crucial sense, all machines are time machines. The essays in Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time develop the central concept of hardwired temporalities to consider how technical networks hardwire and rewire patterns of time. Digital media introduce new temporal patterns in their features of instant communication, synchronous collaboration, intricate time management, and continually improved speed. They construct temporal infrastructures that affect the rhythms of lived experience and shape social relations and practices of cooperation. Interdisciplinary in method and international in scope, the volume draws together insights from media and communication studies, cultural studies, and science and technology studies while staging an important encounter between two distinct approaches to the temporal patterning of media infrastructures, a North American strain emphasizing the social and cultural experiences of lived time and a European tradition, prominent especially in Germany, focusing on technological time and time-critical processes.

4. Streaming against the Environment: Digital Infrastructures, Video Compression, and the Environmental Footprint of Video Streaming

“…These partnerships take the form of consortia such as the Alliance for Open Media, whose influence on the energy use of our electronics we address further below. The standards development process results in new video formats through which economic cooperations and rivalries are negotiated (Volmar 2020). At this point, what is important to us is that video compression standards, despite seeming like abstract documents that only deal with the computation of data as disconnected from issues of materiality, actually exert significant material effects on the environment.…”

Latent Cosmologies, Latent Media: The Material Temporality of Twelver Shi'i Media Practices in Mumbai

“…In order to explain this intersection of latency and media, I distinguish between three modes of media-related latency that support and reinforce the latency found in Shi'i ritual and cosmology. First, latency can be understood as a "hardwired" temporal logic (Volmar and Stine 2021) that underlies the functioning of all technical media that reproduce sound and images. In addition, there are two further particular modes of mediatic latency that support and reinforce Twelver Shi'i cosmologies and engagements with the divine.…”