Synthesizing TimeDan Faltesek, Fall 2014

And Foucault, the last historian or the first archeologist, merely had to look things up. The suspicion that all power emanates from and returns to the archives could be brilliantly confirmed, at least within the realms of law, medicine, and theology. A tautology of history, or its calvary. For the libraries in which the archeologist found so much rich material collected and catalogued papers that had ben extremely diverse in therms of addressee, distribution technique, degree of secrecy, and writing technique—Foucault’s archive as the entropy of a post office. Even writing itself, before it ends up in libraries, is a communication medium, the technology of which the archeologist simply forgot. It is for this reason that all his analyses end immediately before that point in time at which other media penetrated the library’s stacks. Discourse analysis cannot be applied to sound archives or towers of film rolls.

Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film Typewriter, 1999, p. 5

If we stick with points, we can vary aspects of their appearance - brightness, hue, transparency, size or shape of points - to carry additional information. So if we want to see how feature values change over time, we can vary one of these visual variables in accordance to dates (or image position in a sequence). This simple trick allows us to add a third dimension of time to a 2D style space visualization. We can now trace evolution of image sets regardless of their size in a 2D style space. (If we want to follow the evolution in a space of multiple features, we can simply make multiple 2D plots.)

Lev Manovich, Style Space, 2011, p. 28

Twitter is a mess. There is nothing resembling a viable research base for social

media aside from the most ham-handed of experiments. This is an untenable situation.

Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, and many other platforms are supposedly important as the

lifeblood of public relations professionals across the country. If you aren’t on Twitter you

are not fully leveraging your potential, at least if that potential is intelligible through the

distribution of the sensible inherent to a corporate manager. When I turn to read a social

moment on Twitter I can find almost no trace of the signal, of the moment, only the

noise. This is surely an artefact of the means of Twitter itself - layers of processing,

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inadequate capacity, and rampant sock-puppetry. To prove the impact of social media,

contagion, and social change we are asked to accept the result of experimental

methods and end-user creativity. Of course social media is powerful, it is measuring the

power of the network within the optics set by the network.

One of the major reasons why popular media coverage of #gamergate is so poor

is that the primary source material is a soup of unstructured data. Disordered, artificial

cacophony is ventriloquized as a public sphere. This is the opposite logic of the postal

system vision of publics espoused by Ron Green or the logic of mere attention of

Michael Warner. Wrote mechanical actors blasting messages behind synthetic pictures

with the facially neutral call for neutrality and ethics as modes of calling of the erasure of

difference - as a form of doubling this is profound meaning is to be obliterated in this

framework. Routinely, Twitter has excused itself from dealing with disorder by

explaining it as a result of the structure of a timeline driven social network.

Facebook is less of a mess. Order in a massive network is a result of the

decisions of powerful insittutions. In building an archive of Ebola social media posts the

real risk of erasure once again became apparent - once a media organization removes

a post from the timeline it is gone. Not necessarily lost, but hidden from all those who

lack access to that moment. As major media organizations organize their own history,

the network becomes more coherent. The signal is curated. False starts are erased.

Endings become clear, even if endings are only temporary. Unlike Twitter the time flow

of Facebook is coherent if only because in coherence the narrative is stabilized on the

terms of the machine. The signal can be detected.

Both gestures are ways of synthesizing time. For Twitter an impossible flood of

synthetic time, for Facebook a plastic time-axis undergoing constant editing. This is an

age of automated discourse analysis - software has allowed the production of meta en-

masse. Time stamps are the sine qua non of a new era of automated discourse

analysis. Of the most provocative new analysts of social media, Manovich’s style

spaces and montages are little without a reliance on time as a persistent x-axis.

At the time of writing this essay has two distinct purposes - one to make the case

for the synthesis of the timestamp and the possibility of synthetic time as the next

evolution of the time-axis plasticity theory apparent in the work of Kittler. The second

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purpose of this essay is to make sense of the methods for another research project on

the Ebola panic. This second purpose has seen this essay in flux as a stream of

fragments. This project is situated between two other writing projects with similar

themes, Golden Tweet, Camera Raw an article published last year colliding1 Kittler and

Habermas for understanding image vernaculars in crisis, the other #Time, a forthcoming

book chapter that argues that the sense of time inherent in the flow of Twitter should be

understood in post-structural terms as a supplement that produces the body of time.

First, I will try to make sense of the idea of the time stamp as a form of logistical

media. Logistical media demand attention as much as the attention to logistics offers an

alternative to the excesses of a number of sorts of media research. Second, I will apply

this theory of logistical media to understand issues in social media research.

Social media research is a mess.

Making Time or ISO8601In his history of clock synchronization, John Durham Peters argued that the

creation of a unified time has been a central concern of logistical media2. This is

obviously apparent in the creation of modern means of manufacturing. Without accurate

clock technology it is impossible to operate a Fordist economy or accurately project a

bomb track. Logistical media make this possible in as much as they produce a sense of

time - clock towers signal times for prayer and clocks when properly configured produce

a sense of this current moment. We make time when we use these devices, or at least

we make temporality. This distinction matters.

It is no accident that there is a community of people interested in playing older

computer games that need help with time. In the late 1980s computers were slow, so

slow in fact that game play dynamics could be tied to the clock speed of a processor.

Hit, thrust, parry, dodge at the speed of the power supply. This is not an unusual

situation. Older forms of time-axis media depended on physical motors and

transmissions to literally move strips or disks. The transmission is not often given its due

1 Ron Green, “Rhetorical Pedagogy as Postal System: Circulating Subjects though Michael Warner’s ‘Publics and Counterpublics,’” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 88 (2002).2 John Durham Peters, “Calendar, Clock, Tower,” paper at MiT6, Cambridge, MA, 2009.

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as a major part of media history. Angular velocity determines linear velocity, or a

spinning thing only goes as far as it might spin at any particular rate. The time axis is

literally created by a motor. This does not explain the profound transformation that is

inherent in the timing functions of a digital system.

The lack of scholarly attention to ISO8601 is in itself fascinating. I can scarily find

a critical analysis of the work of the ISO committee that has standardized the timestamp

aside from some larger critiques of chronopolitics. The idea of these critiques is that the

regime of time itself is a political program - this should not be a particularly surprising

argument. Although it was not as catchy as the metric measuring system, there was

metric time in the French Revolution.3 The evolution of the ISO policy on time is

surprisingly unremarkable given that the technical regime of temporal production has

become increasing tied to the idea of a universal time. Documentation on the

universalization of timestamps on the Internet makes it quite clear that interoperable

time requires a shift away from periodization.4 The International Organization on

Standardization era has run roughly with the era of atomic weaponry. As a form of

neoliberal governance, the ISO system creates access barriers and standards that

produce a free flowing stable time for capital. The standards that are used to set the

clocks are often more important than the clocks themselves. New atomic clocks based

on Strontium are sensitive to the point that mere centimeters might change the flow of

time as time moves faster in stronger gravity.5 This gets at the point of time producing

technologies as they are not measuring the movement of electrons, protons, neutrons

and various quarks, but that the time stamp is an artificial quality produced by technical

means. True standardization of time is impossible because of the instability of time

itself. Even with distant clocks in solar orbit the frame of reference on those clocks will

never be entirely on point with those across earth.

3 Alasdair Wilkins, “The Short, Strange History of Decimal Time, ion, 2012. http://io9.com/5886129/the-short-strange-history-of-decimal-time4 Klyne and Newman, engineers with Sun, 2002. http://www.hjp.at/doc/rfc/rfc3339.html5 Geoff Brumfriel, “New Clock May End Time as we Know it,” NPR, 2013. http://www.npr.org/2014/11/03/361069820/new-clock-may-end-time-as-we-know-it?sc=17&f=1001

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The technologies that we use to mark time are then those that make time.

Harmut Winkler following Kittler does such an important job of isolating the idea of time-

axis manipulation as the core of modern digital media. As discussed in Golden Tweet,

the use of filmic evidence in courts has declined.6 Without particular sorts of chips, the

timestamp on a digital image is considered unreliable, and further with the

transformation of the aura in the digital world the veracity of the image itself collapses.

Even with a provisional time-stamp, the power of the time making apparatus is clear: the

time we deal in across physical spaces is not the time of carbon-14. Scale, speed,

territory, and communication collide. This is not a story about acceleration, but one of

production. We manufacture time itself, the acceleration of that time is important, but

secondary. Plasticizing the time-axis allows for the production of new artifacts and a

new reality - this is not exclusive digital as it could be accomplished to some degree

with an optical printer, but we would be remiss to see this as something other than the

production of a new stock of available reality.

Y2k Revisited The construction of new time is nothing new. Timestamps have been important

for decades, if not longer. In the distant past full timestamps were not economical, or at

least they were truncated. Instead of a full year such as 2004 in a record the last two

digits were used instead. As the physical basis of the millennial crisis of Y2K this is not

particularly sexy. Missing digits in a timestamp. Most of the Y2K references I hear are

now framed as if the bug was a hoax - that Y2K wasn’t real thing, that it was a figment

of the imagination of the mass media. Everything would have been fine, just like the

Ozone hole, or the spotted owl. The public sphere is haunted by the afterimages of

successful public appeals. The perversity of the problem of public culture of the

resolved crisis and the affective persistence of the public appeal is an interesting

question for another time.

Y2K was very real to the chagrin of Y2K7 truthers. Programmer wages surged in

the years running up to the crisis and in the post-non-crisis wages have been stagnant

6 Louis-Georges Schwartz. The Mechanical Witness. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

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even through a supposed shortage of programmer talent. This was perhaps the first

crisis of manufactured digital time. This was not merely about the flow of objects or

money, but about a particular issue in auto-poetic process.

Time crises have happened before, ultimatums, deadlines - both speak to the

finality of linear time. Ultimately, you will be dead.

Time crises are the product of the political nature of time.

The time crisis of the early twenty-first century is not one of technical standards

but a question of mapping the mechanical world of the timestamp onto the world of

human sense perceptions. Unfortunately, to this point the turn has been to the human,

and to the subjective experience in particular.

Kairos Ascendant Of course the idea of Kairos is important. Context expressed in the form of a

moment structures rhetorical possibility. A speech act performed out of place is the

raving of a madman. When communication researchers ask - where are the people -

they are asking for the impression of the story in a particular moment or in the Proustian

space of the remembrance of things past. What this interlude to find the human does so

effectively is to the focus on perception as the figure and to call for a cross-sectional

investigation. Even in the most diachronic sort of register the human interface is

synchronic. An inventory of human consciousness exists only in a diachronic approach

if it has been inventories in a diary or other inscription surface. The Real is expressed in

the Symbolic. This has been an issue with the construction of privilege driven

arguments in communication research - how can a synchronic sensibility apprehend

diachronic or divergent temporalities?

Beyond offering a sort of narrative lever, the appearance of Kairos offers a place

where the particular might be topologically above the universal. Instead of historical

flows and interactions we have a sea of people in unique situations. Instead of a

coherent history of power and information we get a particular kind of soup of factors and

valences that are always in an interplay. Reality is after all complex and complicated.

Kairos in a strong form dispenses with the critique of metanarrative like a hot knife. The

7 Mike Friese, “Y2K Hoax,” http://www.traffictrak.com/

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more unique the resources in this moment, the more powerful the idea of Kairos

becomes and the less we are able to make claims across and beyond the idea of that

cross-section. This can be seen in the simultaneous cut of ideograph through both

synchronic and diachronic awareness. Here McGee tracks the history of a term rather

than the history of a moment. The expansion and application of the ideograph out of this

trans-temporal context is problematic - it does not matter of a term stitches meaning

together for a particular group or causes synchronic pain - without something like history

on the level of a network the idea collapses. Ideograph becomes one more term for

term. As Kairos retreats away from the broad, stage setting, modernist mode it loses

explanatory power. McGee’s later dissatisfaction with the ideograph is understandable.

Ideographs rarely live up to their billing. They float and fail and flail about. Fragmentary

understandings seem more empirical and grounded because of the structure of the

public sphere. Getting a handle on a fragment is less methodologically fraught.

Fragments are a concession that the modernist view is impossible. The turn toward

Benjamin and Agamben in critical research should be understood in the context of the

theory of temporality.8 Agamben is willing to declare differences in time, and in this

declaration he provides the argumentative resources that critics need to distinguish

between times and figures. In a similar vein, the turn toward iconic visual rhetoric does

similar work in that the focus on the iconic image itself as the object of critique offers a

diachronic move away from the personal.9 By centering the image in circulation as the

site for analysis the theory of the iconic image escapes from the synchronic field and

enters into a particular diachronic context.

What this has meant for the study of social media is not immediately tied to a

discussion of McGee. Most social network site researchers are allergic to anything that

looks like public sphere theory and canards about the ideal speech situation. As van

Osch and Cousaris argued in Communication Monographs the world of social media

research is not healthy, my brief restatement of their conclusion: the field is too cross-

8 Turn toward Benjamin and Agamben in recent years is not about dignity but about time. This is also why a positive method from a benjaminian perspective is impossible.9 Lucaties and Harriman focus on circulation, this is very similar to the direction I am going. The problem is that the creation of a social moment and social network systems are radically plastic in as much as they are edited and constantly evolutionary.

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sectional, too dependent on unrelated ethnographic fieldwork, too abductive (reasoning

from short stories), and largely too dependent on a single hub.10 This is a strong

indictment. Van Osch and Cousaris see this as evidence of an immature field in need of

additional development without ascribing causes. I want to go further to argue that the

problem is that Kairos or temporality has been ascendant. We only ever read through

individual minds, eyes, tongues, ears, noses, and thoughts. To read the top book of the

year in the field is to learn about what it feels to be after school with a football player

using Myspace in 2009 - not about the ways that Myspace’s network protocols shaped

discourse networks in 2010. Temporality eclipses time.

Kairotic description rules social media studies. Lacanian psychoanalysis insists

upon the Lack, the impossibility of symbolization to great effect in the description of

agency and absent heart of structure. The fantasy of the ego as the site for social media

critique is just as seductive as that of the over-simplified ideograph - it provides the

stability of the feeling over the reality of the unfeeling temporal apparatus that imprints

the future past. A turn toward the field is important, let me clear about that. Collecting

and analyzing discourse (and networks) is important. Collected discourses though do

not provide definitive answers. The feelings of one twitter feed about alternative

medicine do not make carbon chemistry different. Yet, the investigation of the moment

of the particular, situated individual in discourse is the new neuroscience.11 If the

answer isn’t in our brains it is surely out in the field.

One of the major benefits of ethnographic research is an attention to the

naturalistic scene. This is clearly a good idea in as much as a more complete archive

tends to be a better archive. But what does naturalism mean online? I am reticent to

sign-on to the idea that has predicated the social media literature to this point that

naturalism means ethnographic interviewing with people using devices in their particular

spaces and places. For Kittler this is once again an archival selection loop - the

thoughts of the users in their naturalistic contexts will validate those context as the site

10 van Osch and Cousaris, “Social Media Research: An Assessment” Communication Monographs, Spring 2014.11 Major problems in neuroscience especially as it relates to small number problems. The second level of problems in neuro comes from the issue of reliability - instruments are turned up causing many false positives.

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for the impact of social media. These uses are important, but what we need to know is

about network population and diffusion dynamics, and in the more radical sense, we

need to know about the synthetic time that exists within the network itself. Can this ever

be natural? Nature is a discourse. There is nothing about the configuration of organisms

that has not been affected in someway by the intervention of human actants, and in a

world with a more advanced field of actants it seems reasonable to argue that the

discourse of the natural has been stretched to the limit. Or is this the most profoundly

natural thing of all - once set into motion the machine should continue forever,

regardless of human input, scraping data from a decaying atom of uranium in a facility

far, far away. Of course ethnographic research has to this point been willing entertain

the field of discourse as the natural. Through a declarative speech act we make the

interaction between people in context into something akin to an untouched island. Kittler

can easily be imagined as something of an anti-Habermas - intersubjectivity never

escapes the condition of its possibility.

The imperative to periodize In the process of collecting the Ebola dataset and mapping social networks the

work of both Mouffe and Kittler have become important as the plasticity of the network

insists upon making some kind of cut for the purposes of research. This is also the truth

as it relates to temporality. The subjective experience of time is secondary to the time

producing media, the production of timestamps is the condition by which plasticity

becomes possible. If we don’t cut somewhere the scene will be impossible to reconcile,

and those demarkations are likely to be made by human selections outside of the time

producing apparatus.

For the purposes of the larger project on visualizing discourses on Facebook this

means that we need to think carefully about the impossibility of the archive and the

ways in which our ability to research in the first place is restricted by access to the flow

of time from the inside of the social network. We are unable to meaningfully research on

Twitter, are are limited to provisional slices of Facebook. Time-pasticizing media

production systems make research even more difficult. There is an alternative after all,

we could align our research agendas with powerful institutions. Once a Facebook Data

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Scientist is on your team you might experiment in real time on those using social

network sites. The preferred time even of these experiments is radically present, not

longitudinal or even macro on the scale of entire systems of publics. This granularity of

time poses a major risk for losing track of the operation of power. For Kittler, this

operation of power is reconfiguring society for preparation for total war. Optical networks

are after all, immune to EMP. It should be no surprise that the Department of the Army

is particularly interested in funding work on emotional modulation across social

networks. In my larger body of research I am more convinced that the engine of

determinism is likely the anesthetization of transactionality, but Kittler’s point remains.

Power is best analyzed on the level of the configuration of a network.

In our research the turn toward the style space allows a periodization that is both

anti-humanist (focused on actually existing data flows) and temporal. If we track the

style and the image we are not trapped by the humanistic, synchronic fetish that

compels both experimental and ethnographic research. But this does come with a cost,

the style space and the spectacle that it demands configure our research for a particular

sort of public consumption. As this is the only alternative that it sensible for the

academic community to the humanistic approach of social media.

ConclusionOr in concrete terms: yes we are making a style space for the evolution of

iconography of Ebola images on Facebook during the recent crisis. What we have found

so far is that the image vernacular seems tied to the production of images by

institutions. What is striking is that the way we structure space depends entirely on

timestamps and time flows. The production of linearity (or of the synthetic linearity of the

technical moment is the key. This is why for scholars of the visual, like Tufte, so much of

the research has depended on building time graphs, rather than collisions of other sorts

of meaning.

Until social media research comes to grips with synthetic time our research will

likely be trapped within the event horizon of the human subject. Discourse analysis after

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all cannot be applied to the operation of a code snippet that assigns timestamps, but we

can produce code snippets that parse other snippets.

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Notes