Special Issue on “Making time in digital societies: Considering the interplay of media, data and temporalities” in New Media & Society

Guest Editors: Christine Lohmeier (University of Bremen), Anne Kaun (Södertörn University), & Christian Pentzold (University of Bremen)

Studying media and communication processes through the lens of time and temporality enjoys a long history. Waves of technological innovation such as mechanization and electrification have come with a profound reconfiguration of social time. This holds true for datafication too. Datafication – referring to processes of quantification and the transformation of evermore objects into data, as well as the automation of judgements, evaluations, and decision-making – requires us to rethink, once again, the relationship between media, data, and temporality.

The special issue of New Media & Society will address the continuities and disruptions emerging in the nexus of time and media. It addresses the challenges of acting in the present, acceding to the future, and mobilizing the past in increasingly datafied societies. We assume that the changing mediations of time leave their mark on the ways we process and order the pace, sequence, and rhythms of intersecting lives.

Contributions to this special issue will explore changes in the perception and conception of time that go hand in hand with technological change and provide a discussion on how to grasp these empirical variations theoretically. They are invited to scrutinize the frictions between a plurality of social temporalities and the tendencies to establish dominate modes of creating, keeping, and managing time. While the focus is on current developments, the issue also seeks to includecontributions that encompass a historically grounded and contextualizing discussion of the interplay between media, data, and temporality.

Papers could address but are not limited to the following themes:

• media use and the management of time
• mediation and the communicative organization of time (e.g., through clocks, calendars, timetables) • digital media technologies in relation to acceleration, (de)synchronization, or deceleration • data-based modes of time making and time keeping • embodiment, affect, and temporality • media, time, and material objects • power struggles around mediated time and temporalities in movements of resistance or social change; temporal insurgency • cultural and social negotiations of media and time • temporal and technological arrangements between the past, present, and future • interrelations between time, media, and other activities

Abstract submission: 1 May 2018

Notification of selected proposals: 1 June 2018 Full paper submission: 15 January 2019 Publication planned for 2020

Submissions:

Submissions should include name and affiliation of the author(s), an abstract of 500 words, and 3 to 5 keywords. They should be sent to the e-mail address no later than 1 May 2018: mediatizedtime@uni-bremen.de Invited paper submission will be due 15 January 2019 and will be submitted directly to the submission site for New Media & Society: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/nms where they will undergo peer review following the usual procedures of the journal. The invitation to submit a full article does not guarantee acceptance into the special issue. The special issue will be published in 2020.

In case you have any questions or suggestions, please get in touch: mediatizedtime@uni-bremen.de