Machinology

This is a chapter from a couple of years back but reading something today on queuing (as ordering, waiting, allocating, as Celia Lury puts it in her wonderful new book Problem Spaces) made me return to it and also post here. The chapter on “Underpinning Time” focuses on questions of microtemporality that creates publics or collectives as being modulated through cultural techniques of of temporality in networks. While the chapter is far from a full-fledged take on queuing, of standing in line and waiting for ones turn, it starts with the core scene that defines also a certain moment of network time/allocation of packets in traffic.

“The Underpinning Time” came out in the collection Digital Memory Studies edited by Andrew Hoskins.