Infrastructural temporalities: Facebook and the differential time of data management

Abstract

Facebook presents itself as a tool in the service of humanism: it connects people through the sharing of information and experience. This article contests these assumptions about the innate humanness of Facebook’s connections through an examination of its information management and network architecture. It argues that Facebook depends on a number of radically different milieus expressed by way of different, competing conceptualizations of time that it does not or cannot negotiate. Consequentially, Facebook should not be imagined as a single network of human connectivity that will somehow realize newly identified human rights through technology. Facebook should be thought of as a multiplicity of incommensurate networks, not all of which can be brought into human experience. The time of infrastructure directs us to an uneven ‘social’ that emerges from the negotiation of multiple, often obscured forms of temporal difference, managed through multiple, often obscured systems of hardware and software that forever remain beyond the conscious experience of most Facebook users.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Grant Bollmer is a lecturer in the Digital Cultures Program, Department of Media and Communications, at the University of Sydney. He is currently completing a book titled Inhuman Networks: Social Media and the Archaeology of Connection and working on another titled Theorizing Digital Cultures. His work can be found in journals such as Cultural Studies, The Information Society, Cultural Studies Review, Digital Culture and Society and Memory Studies. His current research examines the intersections between the digital encoding and storage of the body, the history of psychology and the visualization of affect.