Problems of Temporality in the Digital Epoch

Abstract

This essay approaches the question of time by considering how digital media have reconstructed the relations between past, present, and future. It proposes that the past and present are becoming more and more determined by future events that have not yet happened but are paradoxically already there. Building on Bernard Stiegler’s analysis of primary, secondary, and tertiary retention, it argues that the missing term in current understandings of time is tertiary protention, or the phenomenon of preemption.