What percentage of your life have you spent in a pandemic?
As someone who just turned 36, the pandemic has occupied around 4.5% of my life.
The suspended futures of Covid-19
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the temporality of the Covid crisis. There was a suspension of time during lockdown, in which a national unit attempts to stop to the greatest extent possible without self-destructing, constituting a pretty unique act of (partial) demobilisaiton. However this was just the first act, leading […]
Žižek on Covid temporalities
This is the last thing I’ll post about Žižek’s Pandemic! eBook but I thought these observations about what I’ve come to think of as Covid temporalities, the distinct temporal experiences of crisis and lockdown, were very useful. On loc 396 he considers the inevitability of ‘dead time’ during those who […]
A really interesting cfp on media and time
This looks excellent! CALL FOR PROPOSALS Special Issue of Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies Back to the Future: Telling and Taming Anticipatory Media Visions and Technologies Guest editors: Christian Pentzold (University of Bremen, Germany), Anne Kaun (Södertörn University, Sweden), and Christine Lohmeier (University of Salzburg, […]
Stafford Beer, Reflexive Poise and Human Flourishing
I came across the following extract in the Stafford Beer archive at Liverpool John Moores University. It is from a letter which Beer writes to his children, offering insights into the character of existence as a Christmas present to them. His use of the term poise caught my attention. I first used the term poise in […]
The existential challenge of changing tempo
After the busiest few months of my life, I’ve spent the last couple of days doing what feels like nothing. I’ve been for a shave, bought a graphic novel, seen a (crap) film, had a walk, been out for dinner and had a massage. But otherwise I’ve just read, slept […]
The Mediatization of Time
ZeMKI international conference „The Mediatization of Time“ December 6-8, 2017 Conference venue: Swissôtel Bremen Hillmannpl. 20, 28195 Bremen, Germany Organizer: University of Bremen, ZeMKI, Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research http://www.zemki.uni-bremen.de Topic: Recent innovations in the digitalization and datafication of communication fundamentally affect how people conceptualize, perceive and evaluate […]
The chronopolitics of consumer anxiety
From David Frayne’s Refusal of Work, pg 173-174: When today’s affluent workers come home after a hard day’s work, they find themselves in their homes, surrounded by objects that all represent invitations for action. In my own home I find a Netflix account bursting with viewing choices, a set of […]
Zygmunt Bauman’s Chronopolitics
From Wasted Lives pg 104. Power is expressed chronopolitically through the capacity to electively withdraw from temporal regimes (or evade them all together) while influencing the way others are subject to them: The drama of power hierarchy is daily restaged (with the secretaries and personal assistants, but ever more often […]
The Escalation Dynamics of Social Media
One of the crucial ideas for my new book are the temporal implications of the escalation dynamics which characterise social media platforms. In his Social Media in Academia, George Veletsianos identifies precisely the dynamic that interests me. From loc 834: [R]emaining visible on a social networking and fast-moving platform such as Twitter means that one has […]
ten post docs (!) on temporality
ht Su Oman. Wish I could apply for this. Shared in the hope others can. ERRANS, in Time ICI Fellowships for 2016-18 The ICI Berlin announces ten post-doctoral fellowships for the Academic Years 2016-18 Conceptions of time and varied modes of temporal experience seem more at odds now than ever. […]
the emergency as a tool of labour discipline
From The Boy Kings, by Katherine Losse, pg 191. It’s interesting to compare accounts of working life in social media companies to those of early tech giants like Microsoft. What were once exceptional states, in which people devoted themselves 24/7 to work in order to ensure the success of a […]
the multiple time regimes within facebook
From The Boys, by Katherine Losse, pg 146: My career upgrade from dungeon department to quasi- technical role meant, along with a better salary and more respect from the technical echelon of the company, that I was now on engineering time. This meant that while I could come to work […]
time use event in oxford
This looks really interesting. I wish I wasn’t already committed that day, as I’d like to understand time use data much more than I do at present. Its deployment in parts of the acceleration literature is something that interests me more and more, the further I get into my current […]
the synchronised society
I went to see an excellent exhibition about children’s television yesterday afternoon, intended to explore “how the magical programmes of our childhood have created memories and nostalgia in adults and children alike”. The possibility of such explanation presupposes some degree of collectivity. The exhibition was ambiguous at points but there […]
Ghosts of Sociologists Past in the Accelerated Academy
I’m currently reading Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures by Mark Fisher. It’s an interesting book which explores a condition in which “life continues, but time has somehow stopped”. His claim is that this “stasis has been buried, interred behind a superficial frenzy of ‘newness’, of perpetual […]
Time is always running out
I got briefly obsessed last year by the observation that at a rate of one book a week between the ages of 5 and 80, it will only be possible to read 3,900 books in a lifetime. This is a little over one tenth of one percent of all the books […]
