Infrastructuring Leap Seconds : The Regime of Temporal Plurality in Digitally Networked Media

Abstract

The chapter pursues the hypothesis that the plurality of time in an age of digital interconnectivity imposes itself as a time regime to human and nonhuman entities. By looking at user practices, conventions of time measurement, and temporal operations of digital technologies it is argued that an infrastructural/infrastructuring process consists of the continuous weaving of a relational assemblage between different temporalities, which does not harmonize them, but makes them relevant to each other in their heterogeneity. Thus, the time regime of digitally networked media does not consist of the power constellation of an absolute, “true,” measurable time, but of a fundamental plurality, which becomes visible on the basis of invisible processes and by that challenges all practices of temporal ordering.