Digital Media and the Making of Network Temporality

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.

Philip Pond is Lecturer in Digital Media Research Methods at the University of Melbourne. He has written extensively about the relationship between digital technology, speed and informational crisis and his previous book explores the systemic causes of post-truth politics. He heads several research projects, including a multi-disciplinary effort to document political extremism online and an analysis of the influence of software in accelerating polarisation.