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ABSTRACT
Digital media are frequently described as producing a ‘real-time’, ‘live’, ‘always-on’ temporality. While seemingly referring to similar processes and experiences, these descriptions indicate a temporality that is diverse, multiple and changing. This paper proposes that it is necessary to develop theoretical approaches to this temporality, and that it is productive to understand this temporality in terms of the present; a temporality that is both ‘now’ and on-going. It sets out one framework for theorizing the present and conceptualizing the temporal qualities of digital media, drawing on Raymond Williams’ influential work on structures of feeling and the (pre-)emergent qualities of media culture. It focuses on Williams’ definition of a structure of feeling as attending to the ‘active’, ‘flexible’ ‘temporal present’, and the importance he places on pre-emergence in grasping this present. Discussing various examples including social media platforms, devices, streaming services and apps, I suggest that pre-emergence is an especially prevalent quality of today's media culture. I develop Williams’ notion of structures of feeling to offer the concept of infra-structures of feeling. This concept helps to account for the amplified significance of pre-emergence, its affective quality and how digital media work across each other in complex architectures of texts, textures, platforms and devices. To flesh out this concept, I analyze the present temporalities that are produced by and productive of the social networking site Twitter and the streaming service Netflix. I argue that these media produce the present differently; creating a real-time, live, connected present in the case of the former, and a suspended or expanded present in the latter. These distinctions are significant; however, in both, pre-emergence is central. The paper therefore concludes by inquiring into whether pre-emergence may define today's structure of feeling and, if so, what this implies for a politics of the present.
Acknowledgements
Discussions with Carolin Gerlitz, Celia Lury, Liz Moor, Carolyn Pedwell, Ruth Raynor and Ben Anderson have been influential to this paper; thank you. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers whose comments have, hopefully, helped me to clarify some aspects of my argument.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Rebecca Coleman is Reader in the Sociology Department, Goldsmiths, University of London, where she researches and teaches on bodies, images and sensory culture, temporality (especially presents and futures), cultural and feminist theory and interdisciplinary inventive methods. She is currently working on a book project called Engaging futures: methods, materials, media (under contract, Goldsmiths Press) and has recently co-edited a Special Issue of Sociological review on ‘Futures in question: theories, methods, practices’.
Notes
1. This paper is the first step in a larger research project, which seeks to examine the present temporality produced by contemporary media through close analysis of promotional materials, platform conventions and techniques and interviews with users and designers/managers of different digital media platforms (‘Mediating Presents: Producing “the now” in Contemporary Digital Culture’, funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, 2018–2019). The focus on promotional materials of Netflix and Twitter in this paper is therefore a first step in beginning to develop an account of the present and how it is produced similarly and differently in these two case studies. Furthermore, this paper concentrates on proposing a conceptual framework for understanding the production of the present, which may be further developed through more detailed empirical research.
2. While I recognize that the majority of the examples I discuss in this article are digital media, it is also important to note how analogue and broadcast forms of media work together with digital media to constitute an infra-structure of platforms, devices and content. I develop this idea below.
3. These quotations are taken from the official websites of Twitter, Snapchat, Netflix and Apple respectively, accessed 1st November 2016.
4. It is therefore not my aim in this article to conduct a close analysis of these different examples. Rather it is to point to how together they may indicate the significance of the present temporality and, as I discuss below, a particular kind of structure of feeling.
5. It is important to note that here I indicate that media is involved in the production of a present temporality. This is to avoid the kind of technological determinism that Williams critiques where technology is seen in a vacuum and as the driver of social change.
6. For similar arguments that refute the idea of the annihilation of time through a focus on the future, see Adkins (Citation2016) and Coleman (Citation2016b).
7. For more detailed discussions of these temporal modes and registers, see Coleman (Citation2012, Citation2016a, Citation2016b).
8. Indeed, in this essay, Williams develops his argument about emergent culture in terms of class consciousness and identity, and the possibility of a change in the social order.
9. For the purposes of this paper, I am not distinguishing between affect and feeling. In this sense, the connection that I make here between Williams’ cultural materialism and what might be called new materialist research deviates from the argument made by Hands (Citation2015). While noting some links between the two traditions of cultural theory, and identifying what he terms a ‘digital structure of feeling’, Hands sees the new materialisms as failing to account for the social and cultural contexts in which technologies emerge (which Williams’ argues for). He also makes a distinction between affect in the new materialisms as pre-conscious and feeling in Williams’ work as sub-conscious. My point in this paper is that in both Williams’ and more recent approaches to the temporality of media, sensation and sentiment are identified as important, and that pre-emergence is a productive means of exploring them. The resonances and distinctions between pre-emption, prehension, premediation and pre-emergence and the significance of the ‘pre’ to understanding the present are beyond the scope of this paper, but I aim to explore them in further publications.
10. Although their approaches are articulated through different vocabularies, it is worth noting here that both Clough and Williams posit the affectivity of pre-emergence in contrast to ideology, preferring to focus on the embodied and sensory living of/with media.
11. Examples of celebrities doing this in 2016 include Leslie Jones, the Ghostbusters 2 actor who left Twitter in July 2016 following racist abuse, non-binary transgender food blogger Jack Monroe who has taken multiple breaks after homophobic, sexist and right-wing abuse, and Normani Kordei from American pop group Fifth Harmony, due to racist abuse from fans after reports of a rift within the group.
12. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to go into further detail, Williams’ work on television and ‘flow’ is important here, not least in terms of his argument in the 1970s that there has been
the replacement of a programme series of timed sequential units by a flow series of differently related units in which the timing, though real, is undeclared, and in which the real internal organisation is something other than the declared organisation. (Citation1974, p. 87)
13. There may also be a productive connection to be made here between the sensuality of binge-watching and sex. Originally describing the act of binge-watching after a hard day or week, more recently the term ‘Netflix and chill’ has become an euphemism for sex (see Urban Dictionary).
14. Indeed, this will be the focus of the larger research project mentioned above.
15. These ideas regarding data, pre-emption and nextness are beyond the scope of this paper, but will be explored in the larger research project.