Idea
Time is a troubled terrain. For algorithmic media and users alike, how much time is spent online is of the utmost importance. The algorithms of social media platforms configure users through patterns of timings and tempos. Their operations aim to deliver content at moments that feel right. This means they add time parameters to their calculations, and personalization also works in the pacing and ordering of content. Time on platforms does neither happen naturally, nor is there a shared time for all. Categories like real-time or liveness are not simply given but exist in the interplay of algorithms and engagement data. To users, algorithmically sequenced content may sometimes be surprising and ingenious, sometimes boring and repetitive, sometimes overwhelming and frantic. It disrupts the sense of real-time connection and instantaneity but instead requires perpetual synchronization and opens opportunities for dissent and resistance (Coleman, 2020; Lupinacci, 2024). Users care about the time they gain or waste, enjoy or fritter away online as much as they care about the messages and (mis)information they encounter.
Research has only begun to understand algorithmic media temporalities and how they condition the rhythms, timings, and tempo of digital lives (Kaun et al., 2020; Kitchin, 2023; Pentzold, 2018). How they experience and manage the temporalities of algorithmically produced synthetic media (e.g., deathbots) is underexplored, too. This gap becomes most pronounced when moving away from Western contexts and their chrononormativity (Freeman, 2010).
This half-day workshop opens up a forum to think theoretically and empirically about digitally mediated temporalities. It features contributions that examine how and under what conditions users experience, assess, and deal with the ambivalent opportunities and constraints of having time and losing time that are an innate element of their daily engagement with algorithmic – or, algo-rhythmic – media (Miyazaki, 2012).
Goals of the Workshop
The workshop aims to bring together and connect scholars of temporality and algorithmic media so as to identify common ground, stimulate exchange, and initiate critical comparative research. Organizing the workshop in connection to this year’s AoIR will allow us to particularly involve researchers from Latin America and interconnect their work and insights with the research drawn out by colleagues joining from other parts of the Global South as well as Europe, Australia, and North America.
With this setup, the workshop will enable participants to engage with chronometric inequalities and chrononormative concepts and how they play out in shaping the experience, assessment, and management of time in an environment of pervasive algorithmic media. This is important and urgently needed because time use is a critical factor for well-being, mental and physical health, and relationship quality (Giurge et al., 2020), with algorithmic media being blamed for eating up excessive amounts of screen time thus inducing depression, anxiety, distress, and weak social connections (Vanden Abeele, 2021). Thus, next to fostering academic exchange and forging connections among researchers of time and algorithmic media, the workshop will serve to identify directions for advice and interventions of how to help users gain temporal agency vis-à-vis abundant, attention-hungry, and always-available algorithmic media.
Workshop Organization and Participants
The workshop is organized and will be facilitated by Ludmila Lupinacci (University of Leeds, UK), Christian Pentzold (Leipzig University, Germany), and Ignacio Siles (University of Costa Rica, Costa Rica). It includes 10 abstract-based short talks that alternate with two rounds of discussions and a world café format that are guided by a set of questions shared by the facilitators. They involve workshop contributors and participants. The workshop will explore possibilities for multilingual discourse.
Workshop Contributions
The speakers and facilitators are scholars at different career stages (from early-career researchers to full professors) coming from and working in various parts of the world. Contributions address the social experience of and affective responses to mediated temporalities, the time dimension of AI and automation, and the management of time with and through algorithmic technologies.
The contributions are:
Rebecca Coleman (UK): “Scroll, refresh, repeat: Temporal presentness as an algorithmic infrastructure of feeling”
Riccardo Pronzato (Italy): “Algorithmic selfing: An existential media analysis of time and identity”
Rodrigo Muñoz-González (Costa Rica): “Late every day: Time management, social experience and media technologies in Costa Rica”
Ludmila Lupinacci (UK), Vanessa Valiati (Brazil), & Felipe Soares (UK): “Time to move: #Xodus and the algorhythms of social media”
Taylor Annabell (Netherlands): “Wrapping, looking back: Temporal orientations during algorithmic events and with algorithmic media”
Peter Nagy (US) & Maria Goldshtein (US): “Time, time, time | see what’s become of me”: Remembering and reflecting through AI”
Esther Weltevrede (Netherlands) & Anthony Burton (Canada): “From swipe to signal: Unpacking the temporal dualities of user and machinic authentication in apps”
Bjørn Nansen (Australia): “The mediated temporalities of generative AI afterlives: design, industry, use”
Anne Kaun (Sweden): “Temporalities of welfare automation”
Ignacio Siles (Costa Rica) & Christian Pentzold (Germany): “Temporal agency reconsidered: Resistance, renunciation, reshuffle”
