Globital Time: Time in the Global digital Age

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7Globital Time: Time in the Digital Globalised AgeAnna Reading

Introduction

The traditional playground game of generations of children ‘What’s the time, Mr Wolf?’ anticipates a metaphor for time that is neither tele-ological nor digitally networked, but expressed dynamically in terms of folding. If it is Two O’clock, Three O’clock, Four O’clock or any other O’clock, the players may creep towards the big bad Wolf, who has her back turned, with the aim of touching the wall first. But, if the wolf turns and howls that it is ‘Dinner Time’, the players shriek and run like hell to escape being eaten, and the horror of becoming the big bad Wolf themselves. Children delight most not in O’clock Time but in weather-ing the consequences of the unpredictable Dinner Time: the moment of devouring, of terror, of pleasure and fulfilment (for the wolf); of fearful transformation, of becoming for the losing player, and of rapid move-ment for all that can still be anytime. Perhaps this is why the philoso-pher Michel Serres delights in the fact that in French the word for time (temps) is the same word for weather.1

While previous chapters have focused on particular case studies exam-ining the ways in which media technologies shift our temporal horizons, this chapter asks how the mediation of time through digital technolo-gies may require a new epistemological framework to understand time. How is time to be conceptualised and understood in the ‘globalised’ digital media era, in which mobile phones and networked time inter-mediate a range of temporalities? What form of analysis is needed for the media and social theorist to investigate time? Digital technologies, digitisation and what was coined by Nicholas Negroponte2 as digitality, the conditions of living in a digital culture, are moving human beings to a stochastic sense of being between times. I argue that the synergetic

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dynamics of globalisation and digitisation are co-extensively reconfig-uring the symbolic meaning of time, as well as the ways in which time is measured and experienced or, perhaps, weathered.

Contrary to the view I propose here, much established research on cultural and economic globalisation and new technologies has tended to accord with the view that time in the digital age is characterised by acceleration, speed and instantaneity. Harvey describes what he sees as the ‘breakdown of the temporal ordering of things’.3 Huyssen writes of the ways in which memory and the memory boom is both a reaction to the ‘dissolution of time’ within the digital archive as well as to the rapidity of synchronic communication networks.4 Jameson suggests that there is now the dominance of space over time.5 More recent empirical studies on mobile technologies also seem to evidence how the past and future are through new communications technologies col-lapsed within the everyday into an extended present.6 Search engines such as Google are shown to operate in ways that seem to favour the recent over the past.7 This view of digital technologies speeding up and compressing past and future time into the present is not unsurprising: if time is understood as a measure of velocity, and, data, people and things are, as the sociologist John Urry8 argues, more on the move than ever before; time may be, in an albeit oversimplified way, characterised as accelerated and collapsed.

However, many of these accounts are themselves ‘caught up within a binary and linear framework’ that sets the then of the modern against the now of the postmodern.9 Historically, the digitisation and digital communication of time developed in parallel with the analogue.10 This suggests the need for a conceptualisation of time in relation to digital technologies through a paradigm that analyses the specific temporal implications of digitisation and digitality while recognising the coexist-ence and intermediation of the analogue with the digital.

The global development and experience of digital media and com-munications technologies, like patterns of globalisation more generally, are uneven and discontinuous. Time may involve varied glocalised analogue-digital experiences of affective temporal logics. Mobile and networked technologies may allow for the coexistence of multiple connected temporalities that are not necessarily characterised only by proximity, immediacy or temporal collapse. Internet time may be multi-channelled and hyperlinked providing for a generous sense of time that is both immediate and archived. Game time in the video game, has continuities and discontinuities with the playground game ‘What’s the time, Mr Wolf?’. It is both immersive and repeatable, and yet unlike


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Mr Wolf, digital game time can be paused, re-loaded, restarted, recorded, connected to others on-line in different time zones, and started again.

This chapter proposes an epistemology for what can be termed globital time which draws on some of the insights of the philosopher Michel Serres who suggests that different kinds of time are folded into each other. His approach also suggests an analytical emphasis on the relationality, the flight, the movement between different kinds of time. Combined conceptually with a reworking of Deleuze and Guartarri’s idea of assemblage,11 this as we shall see enables an understanding of time not so much in terms of the assemblage or heterogeneous compo-sition in itself, but in terms of the ‘incitements’ between the elements of an assemblage.

The context for this chapter on globital time is a broader research project that seeks to understand globalisation and digitisation as syn-ergetic dynamics in relation to media and cultural memory.12 The term globital combines ‘global’ with ‘bit’ to suggest the dynamic enmeshing or rather defragging of globalisation with digitisation. The research pro-poses that both affective logics are so insinuated into everyday life that individual, social, cultural and economic life in the twenty-first century take place within a globital memory field. Part of the affective logic of the new order that human beings inhabit and experience within the globital memory field involves multiple temporalities and experiences of time. This chapter argues that time in the globalised digital age, or globital time, involves multivalent affective temporal logics, multiple material expressions and specialised expressive interventions that are both a departure from and in dialogue with time in the ‘pre-digital’ media age.

As with any emergent concept, globital time both resonates with and creatively goes beyond previous conceptualisations of time. Hence this chapter opens by briefly examining some of the established approaches relating to time, technologies, globalisation and digital media. These are largely configured around the Wolf in the playground’s ‘Clock Time’ for thinking about time and temporality. The chapter then proposes a philosophical approach that incorporates the wolf in the playground’s Dinner Time. It then develops an analysis that shows three dynamics at work in the multiple valences and temporalities of globital time: dis embedding, dis connecting and dis embodying.

From O’Clock time to folded time

Conceptualisations of time over the past 200 years have been predomi-nantly caught up within a view of time with routes to and from the

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Enlightenment positivist rationalist tradition. This sees time as exter-nal, measurable, divisible. Time is not understood in terms of complex and partially autonomous relationships with a range of temporalities. Rather, with the coming of the ‘rational society’ and industrial capi-talism in the nineteenth century came societies ‘driven by the clock’ to the extent that ‘all we had to do was synchronize to its rhythm’.13 This sense of time became so self evident, especially within the social sciences, that even Albert Einstein’s views on the relativity of time and space had little impact until the last quarter of the twentieth century, when social scientists began to address the impact of globalisation.14

Clock time resulted in a sense of time that is de-contextualised and disembodied. It facilitates an ‘acute present-orientation and a sense of distance, disconnection, independence even from the physical world and external influences’.15 Clock time was then transformed into world time through the nascent network of the global telegraph and then the telephone, satellite TV and more recently networked computers which have all have contributed to ‘the global present’, the ability for human beings to participate in distant events as they are happening.16 Thus Manuel Castells argued for example that ‘Space and Time, the mate-rial foundations of human experience, have been transformed, as the space of flows dominates the space of places, and timeless time super-sedes clock time of the industrial era’.17 The result Castells suggested is timeless time characterised by the commute from work to home in which one uses a mobile to connect to others during dead time.18 The professional practices of media workers have also been shown to have changed in relation to time, most notably in the working practices of on-line journalism, ‘with its 24/7 cycle, the lessening of social space between producer and recipient, and the potential to reach suprana-tional audiences’.19 This paradigm of time contends that electronic and network cultures flatten temporalities as we are increasingly dominated by the ‘dictatorship of speed’.20 Electronic culture through virtualisation is globalising instantaneity; ‘For the first time, history is going to unfold within a one-time system: global time’,21 which increasingly dominates local and regional time frames.

These arguments have since been echoed by a number of media scholars. Grusin and Bolter suggest, for example, the ways in which new media in remediating old media recycles the past, effectively contract-ing it with the present: ‘Because we understand media through the ways in which they challenge and reform other media, we understand our mediated selves as reformed versions of earlier mediated selves’.22 They argue that there are two versions of the contemporary mediated self.

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These correspond with two versions of remediation. First, there is the logic of transparent immediacy in which immersion is a key quality of self. In terms of time, this relates to the sense of immersion and being in a different sense of time described by players deeply involved in a video game or on-line virtual worlds.23 Then there is the logic of ‘hyper-mediacy’ or the way in which with digital multimedia and networked environments, interrelationships and connections are the key quality of the self. Hence in terms of time and temporality this points to the importance of the ways in which through the logic of hypermediacy, time is experienced through connection and relationship.

Grusin also suggests how new media are changing the relationship of the future to the present through what he terms ‘pre-mediation’. This is not the same as prediction, or forecasting. Rather, ‘premediation … is not necessarily about getting the future right as much as it is about try-ing to imagine or map out as many possible futures as could plausibly be imagined’.24 Hence in what became termed the ‘War on Terror’ after the terrorist attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in 2001, future scenarios were and are pre-mediated, including the invasion of Iraq by US and British forces in 2003. In this way the media becomes part of the process of enabling present actions to securitise the future.

The problem, though, with these views of time is that they largely fail to account for any unevenness with which any digital media and com-munication technologies have been taken up. They also do not capture the relationalities between multivalent temporalities resulting from the various translations between the analogue and digital.

To suggest that time is global does not allow for the fact that clock time and networked time is not entirely globalised or digitised. Nor do these earlier arguments capture the fact that there are other experiences of time that continue despite the rhetoric of 24/7 within ‘globalised’ networked time that are not only about speed or temporal collapse:

machine time has not replaced the temporality of the body, the earth and the cosmos. The diurnal cycle is unchanged by it. Seasons con-tinue to mark the annual round. We still need to sleep – preferably at night – eat at certain intervals, and we continue to age and die. Despite the empty, neutral hours imposed as norm on public life, our experience of time is seething with differences.25

Yet, the paradigm that relates electronic and networked cultures to tem-poral changes suggestive of speed, compression and collapse, as earlier chapters in this book have noted, has never gone entirely unchallenged.26


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Inter-connectivity is perhaps as Poster suggests making clock time more fragile.27 Cubitt notes that what is different about digital media tech-nologies is that they articulate a complex layering of temporalities.28 Carmen Leccardi reminds us that Rhinhard Koselleck’s research on time and railways in the nineteenth century clearly showed how people’s sense of the acceleration of time preceded the more recent technicisation of information and communication.29 This acceleration continued with the increased rapid circulation of goods and information, signalled most strongly through the extension of the railway with its standardisation of time attesting to ‘the progressive subjugation of space by time’.30 This went in parallel with the development of new ways of thinking about time in many fields of thought, including physics, psychology, music and the arts.31 From this Leccardi asks whether the current epoch, given that acceleration appears to be a feature of societies for at least 200 years, can be rightly characterised as involving only the further acceleration of time. De-temporalisation of the present in relation to the decontextu-lised space is a feature of networked time. But, argues Leccardi, this is not inevitable: in response to these processes are political movements such as the anti-globalisation that provide a form of resistance:

In this context the political community is temporalised: the global sense of belonging together materialises through a non-reified time and space. At their heart the planet is profiled like a dynamic system of interconnected spaces and times that have ahistorically sedi-mented temporality and spatiality.32

Yet although this and Hassan and Purser’s work is seminal in suggest-ing we need to take further our analysis of the digital and globalised implications of time, their focus is primarily still networked cultures, the implications of the network for time rather than the broader issues associated with digitality.33

For approaches that offer something yet more nuanced, it is neces-sary to turn away from media theory and reach further afield to phi-losophy and to human computer interaction and mathematics. Hence, N. Katherine Hayles cites Vivian Sobchack’s use of a Heidiggerian frame-work to describe how in phenomenological terms as ‘en-worlded’ sub-jects temporalities changed from photographic nostalgia to a thickening of time associated with the cinematic and to a flattening of temporali-ties to the instant with electronic time. Hayles argues that this explains much for the contemporary impact on temporality of electronic and computer technologies but that a more nuanced sense of time is required


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to explain how communications technology shapes our perceptions of time (socially and individually). In a culture of high-speed broadband, integrated technology and mobile applications it seems that we are always ‘connected’ – connected to each other and to readily accessible information. But, Hayles asks, how is our experience of time through digital media splitting into a dichotomy of high-speed connectedness and slow spots of disconnection? Drawing on work by Bruno Latour and Adrian Mackenzie, Hayles suggests that time may be better understood as ‘folded’, with past, present and future intermingled.34

This sense that time is both interior and exterior and flows in ways that are folded in unexpected, complicated ways has also been antici-pated by a number of philosophers. Henri Bergson’s work in the first quarter of the twentieth century in the face of scientific rationalism focused on those less easily definable and analysable areas of life, including time and memory. He argued that time cannot be reduced to external numerical values since it is internal and durational. As Linstead and Mularky eloquently put it:

Bergson’s approach begins in time, with culture as a socialised dimen-sion of time, actualised in and never independent of, durée. Time is experience – if culture is shared experience, as most anthropological interpretations accept with or without some qualification, it is shared experience not of things or events, but of time itself.35

To Bergson, time cannot be taxonomised: it is indivisible. Time flows and is qualitatively embodied. What is useful about Bergson’s work is that he enabled a perspective that separated the qualitative lived durée of time from a more quantitative rationalised view of time.36 Similarly, Husserl’s phenomenological view of time, as with Bergson’s, argues against the Newtonian perspective that time can be measured and categorised. His starting point in the Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness is that time is subjective. It is from this subjective experi-ence of time that it is then possible to analyse time. Although Husserl did not use the metaphor of folded time, he did characterise time as a ‘living present’ in which past and future are also present.

This has then been taken further within the philosophy of Michael Serres, where it is possible to identify the ‘germ of a new theory of time’.37 Serres suggests,

We have to pull together at least three kinds of time: the reversible time of clocks and mechanics, all to do with cogs and levers; then


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there is the irreversible time of thermodynamics, born of fire; and finally the time of what is called ‘negative entropy’ which is what gives rise to singularities.38

In Serres’s published conversations with Bruno Latour there is the develop-ment of the sense of the multi-valencies and multi-temporalities expressed through the use of the metaphor of ‘folded time’.39 Latour explains, for example, how with a handkerchief metrical time may be conceived of as flat, whereas our experience of it may be folded. Conceptualising time as folded allows for time to be understood in terms of topology, the science of nearness and rifts, as well as in terms of metrical geometry, the ‘science of stable and well defined distances’. Serres is particularly fond of using the image of the old-fashioned mappa mundi or cloth maps, in which with a fold one point becomes proximate with another. Saying that time is folded has a simplicity, Latour points out, since ‘pli’ has etymological links to the French word for fold, pli.40 However, to Serres what is most important in this metaphor of time is the movement implicated in the between of the pli, of the fold: ‘This god or angels pass through folded time, making millions of connections. Between has always struck me as a preposition of prime importance’.41

To Serres, the Angel is a messenger and the world is thus characterised by the continual flow of multiple messages and messengers.42 This formu-lation of the importance of time in terms of flows of messages between suggests an epistemology for time in terms of trajectory and between-ness from an unevenly globalised world, patchily (dis) connected with multiple forms of analogue-digital communication. Serres’s thinking on space and time takes us beyond the metaphor of the network or of con-nected nodes or cells across the globe in which media and communica-tion studies has become entrenched since the mid-1990s. To Serres, the network, which to Virilio and to Castells in the 1990s seemed radically new, is a conservative way of thinking. In the network and its associated metaphors of network time or networked or connected memory, Serres argues that there is the retention of a sense of here and there, with the node and the vector. Serres asks instead that we imaginatively let go of the metaphor of the network with its wires and connections and instead think in terms of ‘aqueous or airy volubility’.43 For communication and media scholars not familiar with physics, mathematics or chemistry, this may be uncomfortable to accommodate. However, as Connor suggests:

In Serres’s perception, events, actions and relations never simply reside in a given space; they make room for themselves, inciting the

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space they inhabit. Serres’s space has no background; there is no space within or across which the traversals and passages of information take place, since the space is itself formed from them. There is no darin, or dedans, no space-within-which, because there is no invariant outside, no outside that remains at a distance; the outside is always in the process of being folded into the inside, like the kneaded dough of the baker.44

What may be significant about digital technologies is not the connec-tion via the ‘nodes’ of computers but rather the journeys, mobilities, the angelic translations, transformations and transferences of ‘aqueous’ data via analogue-digitisation which then has particular implications in terms of how we experience time. We need to be attentive in the digital age not only to how different kinds of time are folded into each other, but what this then means analytically in terms of understanding the relationality and trajectories between temporalities and valences, in terms of the flight, the movements of people, things and data.

If so, what is the analytic method for understanding this sense of ‘between-ness’ of mediated time? Digitisation allows for rapidity of transformation, the capacity for messages and communications to be assembled and reassembled, trans-nationally and trans-medially across time zones, across the organic and the inorganic with components terri-torialised and deterritorialised. Drawing on Deleuze and Guartarri’s idea of the assemblage45 I would suggest that globital time may be analysed in terms of the heterogeneous composition of movement involving the traversals between three axes: the first material expressive axis that seeks to involve the components of time as states of both things and bodies, as material practices and of formations. This defines the vari-able roles that the components of globital time may play. The second axis concerns the processes in which these components of time are ter-ritorialised and deterritorialised. These work to consolidate the material practices and discursive formations of time as a functional assemblage while also working to open the assemblage of time to change through the process of de-territorialisation. A third axis relates to the particular processes in which time is articulated through specialised expressive media. These might be algorithmic, electric, genetic or linguistic and intervene into the assemblages of time through various modes of trans-lation or coding and decoding of them.

From this it is possible to have an analytical approach to some of the dynamics at work in globital time. Temporalities may be articu-lated between a multiplicity of affective temporal logics that involve


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incitements between not only earthbound networked, mobile and static computer technologies, but the interior cells of bodies, the exterior movements of the earth and the moon in relation to the sun, and the light from the beginnings of the ends of the Universe. Globital time, I would suggest, is not to be understood in terms of ‘the assemblage’, or the heterogeneous composition in itself, but in terms of the potential of aqueous volubility, the ‘incitements’ between the elements of an assemblage. This moves us into an understanding of globital time or time in the digital media age that is neither interior nor exterior, neither analogue nor digital; that is neither the continuous passage of existence nor a mathematical measure of velocity or duration.

The analytical significance of globital time as a paradigm thus concerns giving emphasis to revealing time as interferences, incite-ments and translations between the different axes of an assemblage. In the next part I explore some of the interferences, incitements and translations between various axes of globital time, focusing on the relationship between mediated Clock Time and other mediations of time. These interferences, incitements and translations largely involve three intersecting dynamics that are characteristic of the workings and experience of time in the analogue-digital media era: the dynamic of dis embedding, the dynamic of dis connecting and the dynamic of dis embodying.

The dynamic of dis embedding

On the one hand, many digital technologies seem to embed modalities of digital Clock Time in everyday lives in terms of its measurement and expression, yet these modalities are undergo continual dis embedding through particular localised temporal cultures and expressive forms. To illustrate this let us consider some of the different ways in which Clock Time in modernity is measured and represented through expressive media. In its day-to-day use Clock Time is measured in terms of seconds, minutes and hours. However, Clock Time is no longer predominantly expressed in terms of the analogue movement of hands circling the face of a clock; it is also expressed through notational symbols – numerals used to represent natural numbers. What is then revealed if we focus for a moment analytically on the movements ‘between’ analogue Clock Time and digital Clock Time in terms of the expressive media used? What is apparent is that the numerals used for measuring digital Clock Time are the same numerals used for activities other than measuring and counting out Clock Time: they are used for general counting and


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measuring, they are used on labels and addresses (telephone numbers); they are used to signify money, capital and shares as well as for iden-tity, insurance and mortgage numbers; they are used as serial numbers on products and codes, secret personal codes for banks and on-line accounts as well as digital object identifiers (DOI) for digitised docu-ments. Thus the expressive signifiers of globital time merge and emerge, and are dis embedded, in terms of specialised expressive media, with the other symbolic ordering, classifying and quantifying aspects of culture.

Yet there are then spaces of interference and incitement with a number of territorialising processes and interventions from other spe-cialised expressive media. For example, there is a space of interference with the axis of the verbal expression for time in English which retains the memory of analogue expressive media. The predominant material expression of digital Clock Time on my computer (the system time that at my workplace of the University I do not have the ‘proper privilege’46 to alter) is numerically expressed as 24 hours. I may see 13.45 on the clock on my computer, but I translate this and articulate it mentally and verbally as a quarter to two if I am asked. In British English, colloquially we do not say that the time is Thirteen Forty Five, unless perhaps enun-ciating a travel itinerary, or a travel itinerary being enunciated to us.

Further, within globital time it seems that there is no visible between in terms of approximation, or smaller units of time: the expression of digital Clock Time appears to be exact, resulting in a moment of dis embedding, the appearance of a small minute jump in time, since materially between the minutes, there are no seconds as units of time expressed. Minutes pass in a blink of a number – 24.00 jumps to 00.01. Yet the assemblage that is this numerical expression points to another hidden between, a translation between the analogue and digital. This is the incitement between the expressed number on the machine screen (the computer, the mobile, the radio alarm clock) and the algorithmic mathematical rule within the embedded computer program that most human beings, because they have not been sufficiently trained in com-puter languages, cannot write or read. This is the embedded algorithm that states that, for example, in terms of the use of the numerals for time, 14.73 is not possible; neither is 71.04. There are 24 or 12 hours plus 60 minutes; no more. Column one can be no more than 2; column two can be no more than 9 but only when column one is 1. Column three can be no higher than 6 and column four can be up to 9 but must be zero if column three is 6.

Clock Time within globital time is dis embedded in other ways. The technologies for the telling of Clock Time have developed historically

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from external and centralised sources from the Church clock to the wearable individual time on the wrist in the form of the cheaply avail-able watch. Clock Time within globital time, however, appears embed-ded but is dynamically continually dis embedding: it is still on the Church clock (often stopped); is still there on the wristwatch (forgot-ten) and it is there now embedded in the computerised technologies of everyday life both at work and at home. Thus digital time is visibly expressed in the corner of the screen of the computer, in the screen of the mobile phone, winking in the facia of the electric oven, on the screen of the Satellite Navigation system in the car, on the front of the radio, hailing humans on the sofa from the DVD player, the TV and the unused ‘old’ video player. Just as the camera as a media technology, and with it the possibility to capture a digital image, has been embed-ded in other media technologies, especially those that are mobile, such as the mobile phone, so too is the programme of the digital clock dis embedded into other human technologies, both mobile and static. The digital clock is in the media of communications and entertainment, in the technologies of work, of survival, mobility. When time was on the Church spire or on the factory wall and was externally central, the space of incitement was greater and the interference less: Clock Time could be avoided. When Clock Time became watch time and was wear-able, the space of incitement, of interference between our biological and organic body time and Clock Time appeared to become minimal, although the incitement between was the same. We wore time, but it could be removed. But with the programme for the digital clock embed-ded within everyday technologies, Clock Time is ubiquitously present at leisure and work. Clock time is thus embedded into the media and machines of everyday life so that at work or home, outdoors or inside, as we move through space, or we are screen staring and still, we are, whether we want to be or not, ‘told the time’. In being constantly told by embedded digital Clock Time, whether we want to be told or not, we are dis embedded from other temporal experiences: the temporal experiences and sonic horizons of music recorded 40 years before or the multiple temporalities we experience in watching a film.

Further, this dynamic of dis embedding occurs through other special-ised expressive media interferences, incitements and translations. Thus the temporal reference for analogue media remains largely retrospective with mistakes often made even in historically crucial circumstances as Barbie Zelizer notes in relation to photojournalism in the liberation of Belsen. In contrast, many digital images have time codes embedded in the image itself, particularly the surveillance video. Images taken


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on a mobile phone not only have the time code but the GPS location which can then be depicted on a global digital map. Yet because the digital image and digitised analogue image are porously voluble, digital data is always potentially on the move, no longer ‘held’ within the embedded time of the newspaper archive or the family album, and is thus simultaneously dis embedded from its own time code.

We see the same dynamic of dis embedding in 24-hour television news networks such as CNN, Fox or the BBC. There is an incitement between the claimed or enunciated immediacy of the ‘news’ image and the actual time code of the image. There is also interference, incitement and a continual translation between the embedded time code and the clock time of the viewer within a particular time zone and the time zone of the event that might be in a different time zone elsewhere on the globe. In the experience of watching 24-hour news different times and temporalities are dynamically dis embedded.

The dynamic of dis connecting

The dis embedding dynamic of globital time can then be understood as intersecting with a dynamic of dis connecting. Thus if we take the example of Clock Time as our starting point again, we see that digital Clock Time is largely connected via inorganic machines, while the organic body clocks of human beings, though we are continually told Clock Time are (not). For those human beings in the regions of the world where Clock time is connected, digital Clock Time is automati-cally synchronised to the extent that we no longer have to wind up

• embedded• Ubiquitous• ‘told the time’

• Electricity• Date transfer

e.g. Clockmachine time

• Verbal expression• System time• Personal adjustments

Dis embedding

Othermediated times

Figure 7.1 The dynamic of dis embedding


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156 Globital Time

and adjust a mechanical clock in the hall by telephoning the national speaking clock service. My computer’s embedded time tells me the same time as my mobile phone, which is synchronised to the time on my oven and my television. What is hidden between is the dis con-necting electric impulses, the on/off/on/off of data processing as my computer’s system time algorithm sends messages back and forth to regularly update its time and to automatically adjust to other changes such as to daylight saving time. Hence, some human programmers, cognisant of the possibly troubling dynamic such dis connection may cause other humans, include machine code that enables, for example, my bedside radio to politely inform me of this hidden connection and that it has automatically synchronised itself to the system. Unlike with dis connected analogue Clock Time, those in zones of connec-tion cannot choose to ignore or miss such a change. We can no longer choose to save the daylight saving time change till the evening, as our machines have already ensured the time has been changed. The space of interference, of incitement, between machines thus appears dimin-ished, as flattened, ironed out. Yet what is hidden is the transference of time data between, as well as the personal adjustments in the spaces of interference, incitement and translation with other temporalities, with the unadjusted analogue clock on the wall, with our bodies that take weeks to adjust, waking up at an hour ‘earlier’ anyway: you do not have the proper privilege level to change the system time.

Globital time thus involves the incitements and interferences between dis embedding machine-recorded times in digital mediations and in dis connecting mediations and communications. The ‘ubiquitous living archive’ (Hoskins 2009) for those humans moving through the techno-logical hot spots of the planet means that communications that include emails, social network postings, our Google searches and saves, are all tagged with the date and the time, then ordered and made searchable by date or other hierarchy between a menu of choices. Between are the algorithms, the data transference, and the on/off/on of electric pulse.

Between are also the pre-programmed system processes that create unseen interferences and translations. Thus we might identify through one axis of the assemblage of globital time that time zones territorialise and de-territorialise different Clock Times: time zones slice through national boundaries, they connect nation states, they divide and bring together the globe, the sea and continents. Through another axis involving the material practices of travel those humans on the move physically traverse these zones, experiencing the interferences, incitements and translations that result from the territorialisation and


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de-territorialisation of different time zones. Through the material and expressive axes of email we may also move in and out of these zones: the zones becoming interior and exterior, local and global.

Simultaneously, there is something else going on within this dynamic of dis connection that involves multiple translations between the expressive and specialist language of the algorithms of machines and humans. The time tags of incoming email messages are, for example, adjusted via the local algorithm of the computer’s system time to fit the message up with a time tag that makes sense within the human receiv-er’s zone. Thus while media outlets use UTC (Universally Coordinated Time), messages on the move may become fixed with the sender’s time, which then causes interference with the temporality of the receiver(s). Or, messages may adopt different times as they move through differ-ent time zones. So in internet chat rooms, UTC is used; but for email, although the sender’s time is used to calculate when the message was sent, the time is then recalculated by the mail client of the message receiver and shown according to the time zone of the receiver.

This is also evident within other mass media in terms of the discrep-ancies and inconsistencies in the use of different Clock Times which then result in incitements and interferences between local and global audiences. News corporation websites with predominantly domestic audiences will tend to use local time but often with the addition of Universally Coordinated Time (UTC). The English language BBC web-site uses Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) for the time it was last updated; likewise for its Russian language version, but with MKT in brackets and an Arabic version with GMT. The CNN website in its US edition uses Eastern Time (EDT) and then at the click of a mouse, if the user goes to the International Edition, the time is given using GMT with (HKT). Websites with a global readership tend to use US Eastern Time and Pacific Time. Within this the actual computer operating system will include information about time zones as well as information on local daylight saving with the capacity to automatically update the compu-ter’s clock.

In this way, it is not simply that as human beings move into another zone, time changes, but that as data moves, Clock Time within differ-ent zones and in relation to the receiver is automatically recalibrated. A characteristic of globital time is that digitised Clock Time that tags our mediated communications or our media consumption is more than ever mobile and mobilised, undergoing through the dynamics of dis connection various glocalised translations, making it more not less multivalent.

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158 Globital Time

The dynamic of dis embodying

The globital memory field involves complex multivalencies of time in relation to the embodied sense of how humans tick. Intersecting the dynamics of dis embedding and dis connecting is a dynamic of dis embodying. This is the interference, incitement and translations that continually occur between an organic embodied sense of time, the ‘body clock’, our biorhythms with other mediated temporalities. This does not only happen between the boundaries of the body and mediated tempo-ralities but begins with the globital memory field penetrating the core or clothing of our bodies with various temporal reminders. Pacemakers enable human hearts to keep timed beating; mobile phones alert us to when our next period is; time-tagged electronic strip-searching keeps us ‘secure’. Further, this dynamic of dis embodying extends outwards to the all-seeing Google Earth captured from the imaging satellite in space and the remote-controlled surveillance drone. It reaches to the pulsat-ing boundaries and beginnings of time through electron telescopes.

The dynamic of dis embodying begins in the mother’s womb as the medically imaged and network timed and dated DNA tracks the grow-ing human foetus over gestational time. With such medical imaging, the physical growth of the unborn is scanned and imaged, it is recorded and time coded in the mother’s womb. An image is printed out for the parents to take home and include in a photo album, or a video of the moving foetus is provided on a DVD. Timed images are then shared and copied between medical practitioners and also between the parents and their relatives and friends. Organic biological time is thus dis embodied

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• Example: data movementsdis/connected time indigital mediations

• Times zones• Media time zones• Human travel• Data travel• Algorithms of computerse.g. senders machine

time time code onemail

• Temporality of receiver• Mail client of message receiver• Personal adjustments

Interferences andtranslations

Mobilisations: Multivalentand polylectical constituted

through heterogeneousassemblages spaces of

interference

Figure 7.2 The dynamic of dis connecting


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from the mother’s womb and the dis embodying dynamic of the timed foetus penetrates and tracks the growth of the organic body of the new human from just a few months after conception. Born perhaps with a polymorphous sense of time that is their own and their mother’s, the child’s experience of temporality at birth is still largely unmediated and lies between the durational experience of hunger, thirst and discomfort and the temporal shifts suggested by environmental changes of night and day. Globital time, however, is then developed and experienced within the degrees of incitement, interference and translation between the child’s dis embodied hunger and the various expressive mediations of time, including machine-embedded Clock time that says that it is not yet Dinner Time. By six or seven, a level of sophisticated understand-ing of the mediations of time has developed in relation to Clock time. The child of the digital media age understands that on a journey, the embodied durational time of static discomfort in the moving car in relation to Clock Time is always too slow, but that the experience of dis-embodied controlled time and space in a video game seems too short, hence the incitement of the dynamic of being dis embodied playing a DSin a moving car makes Clock time seem to pass quickly.

And, yet, finally it should still be remembered that this child of the digital media era is only in the digital hotspots of the planet: the dynamic of dis embodying in some geopolitical spaces may seem, in relation to such media and communication technologies, barely discernable. There the dynamic of dis embodying is between the geographical and eco-nomic gaps between electricity, internet and digital technologies where the incitements and adjustments may be between the interruptions of

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• Example: • Digital heart pace maker;• Medical imaging of fetus• Electronic strip searching• Mobile phone menstrual calendar

• Sun and moon, planets, stars• Earth’s different seasons in different places• Birth, growth, again, dying• Celebrations, calls to prayere.g. body clock

• Movement in the spaces where the digital is not, as well as where it is.• Immersive electronic time• Game time

Interferences andtranslations

Dynamic of incitementbetween where time is

folded most closely withwhere time seems

unruffled

Figure 7.3 The dynamic of dis embodying


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160 Globital Time

human fertility, birth, growth, death; with the hours of time as a call to prayer and marking of days experienced through the trajectories of the sun and the moon.

Conclusion

The chapter asks how time is to be conceptualised and understood in the ‘globalised’ digital media era in which mobile phones, comput-ers and electronic networked media intermediate and hypermediate a range of temporalities. The chapter sought to explain a little of how the synergetic dynamics of globalisation and digitisation are co-extensively reconfiguring the symbolic meaning of time, as well as the ways in which time is measured and experienced or perhaps weathered.

Building on earlier chapters that address the multivalences of time within specific media, we can begin to see particular patterns that suggest epistemologically how time needs to be reconceptualised to account for multivalent temporalities arising from the intermediation of the analogue with the digital, de-territorialised through different affec-tive temporal logics. Drawing on Serres’s idea of a topographical sense of different times ‘folding’ into each other, this then foregrounds the dynamics of movement in the spaces between, to which we need to give analytical emphasis. By then drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of ‘assemblage’, the chapter suggests that we seek to analyse time in the digital media era not so much in terms of the heterogeneous composi-tion itself, but in terms of the interferences, incitements and transla-tions between different axes. We can seek to analyse what dynamics become evident when we examine, for example, temporal material practices and formations, which may define the variable roles that the components of globital time may play.

Thus we may examine time in the digital age in terms of processes that work to consolidate the material practices and discursive forma-tions of globital time as a functional assemblage while also working to open the assemblage of time to change through the process of de- territorialisation. We may then analyse this in relation to the particular processes in which time is articulated through specialised expressive media (algorithmic, electric, genetic, linguistic, for example) which may intervene into the assemblages of globital time through coding and decoding them. What becomes evident then is that there are a number of characteristic dynamics of globital time that can be identi-fied, which include processes of dis embedding, dis connecting and dis embodying.

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This is not to assert that this is how time is, however. Rather, imag-ining time and temporality in this way is intended as a proposition to move beyond both teleological and network thinking into that of movement and trajectory. Globital time involves continual adjustments and translations in the spaces of incitement, of interference between the axes of the assemblages of time. For Mr Wolf and the players glo-bital time traverses the playground: time is in the interferences between the school bell ringing that playtime is over, as the summer sun in the northern hemisphere circles the sky, as a time-tagged text on the ten-year-old girl’s mobile phone arrives and she feels the pain of her period, while a security drone over London tracks her movements, as she runs like hell because the big bad Wolf howls it’s Dinner Time.

Notes

1. Serres (2000). 2. Negroponte (1996). 3. Harvey (1989: 54). 4. Huyssen (1995: 7). 5. Jameson (1991). 6. Caron (2007). 7. Jeanneney (2007). 8. Urry (2007). 9. Radstone (2007: 1).10. Rooney (2008).11. Deleuze and Guartarri (1988).12. Reading (2009); Reading (2011a; 2011b).13. Hassan and Purser (2007: 8).14. Ibid.15. Adam (2006: 119).16. Ibid. 120.17. Castells (2002: 1).18. Castells (2009: 450).19. Joyce and Weiss (2009: 587).20. Virilio (1995).21. Virilio (1995: 24).22. Bolter and Grusin (2000: 232).23. Harvey (2009).24. Grusin (2004: 28).25. Adam (2006: 116).26. Hassan and Purser (2007).27. Poster (1990).28. Cubitt (2002).29. Koselleck (1986: 283 in Leccardi 2007).30. Leccardi (2007: 25).31. Ibid.

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162 Globital Time

32. Ibid. (33).33. Hassan and Purser (2007).34. Hayles (2010).35. Linstead and Mularky (2003).36. Hassan and Purser (2007: 5).37. Boyn (1998: 52).38. Serres (1995: 46).39. Serres (1995).40. Latour (1995).41. Serres (2000: 64).42. Serres (1995).43. Serres (2003: 379).44. Conner (1996: my emphasis).45. Deleuze and Guartarri (1988).46. Adjust Date and Time Properties, Microsoft Windows, 2010.

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Query Form

Book Title: Keightley

Chapter No: Chapter 7

Queries and / or remarks

Query No. Query / remark Response

AQ1 Please can you clarify the meaning of ‘for all that can still be anytime’. Please could you also provide more of a link to the next sentence, as the flight/weathering connec-tion is not entirely clear.

AQ2 Are the spaces after <dis> intentional?

AQ3 Please check that punctuation edit does not affect meaning.

AQ4 Readers may not know that the French word for fold is ‘pli’. Is this edit OK?

AQ5 Should this be consistent with previous dis words (see comment MPS2 above) and those that follow in the chapter?

AQ6 Should this be 5?

AQ7 Please cite all figures in text. In figure 7.2, should it say <sender’s machine time, time code on email>?

AQ8 Should this be multivalences? Alternative spelling is used later in the chapter.

AQ9 Should this be ultrasound scan rather than DNA?

AQ10 Should this be < handheld console > instead of <DS> in case reader is not familiar with Nintendo DS.


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yes

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fine

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fine

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No, the brackets should remain

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yes - it should be 5

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yes

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yes - please change to multivalences

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yes - please change to handheld console

Emily

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This should read <Children delight most not in O’ clock Time but in weathering the consequences of the unpredictable Dinner Time. The enjoy the moment of devouring, of terror, of pleasure and fulfilment (for the wolf); of fearful transformation, of the process of becoming for the losing player, and of rapid movement that is not pinned to a particular time, but is experienced as anytime or perhaps all times folded together. This tumultuous, changing and dynamic sense of time, is perhaps why the philosopher Michel Serres delights in the fact that in French the word for time (temps) is the same word for weather (1995).>

Emily

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yes - please change

Query Form

Book Title: Keightley

Chapter No: Chapter 7

Queries and / or remarks

Query No. Query / remark Response

AQ11 In figure 7.3 should it say <most closely and where>?

AQ12 Please check and confirm the addition of author names in notes.

AQ13 Please add to references: Adam (2006); Castells (2002); Joyce and Weiss (2009);

AQ14 Please add Serres 2000 to references.

AQ15 Should this be <Caron and Caronia?

AQ16 Is it Reading 2009 a or b? Please specify for all instances of Reading 2009.

AQ17 Should this be Serres 1995?


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yes - please change

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Please change Adam 2006 to Adam 2004 to be consistent with reference list;

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yes - please change

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all are 2009b

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yes - it should be Serres 1995

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Globital Time: Time in the Global digital Age

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