Technics of Time: Values in Future Internet Development

Abstract

To understand how time can be considered both a technical and sociocultural design value, this chapter investigates named data networking (NDN), a new networking protocol conceptualized to replace addressed-based internet protocol and promises to increase both the speed and the efficiency of the internet. Bernard Stiegler’s technics and time framework guides the analysis of time-based values articulated by the NDN project principals to demonstrate how collective temporality is built into technical systems as engineers reconcile social and cultural concepts of temporality with computational and architectural time and resource constraints in network design. This chapter shows that although efficiency is a timebased technical value driving NDN development, the sociocultural values of information temporality is much less understood by project principals.