[Cancelled] “Making, Managing and Experiencing ‘the Now’: Digital Media and the Compression and Pacing of ‘Real-Time’” – Rebecca Coleman (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK)

** Cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances **

This seminar will focus on a recent article that reflects on an ongoing project called Mediating Presents: Producing ‘the now’ in Contemporary Digital Culture (funded by the Leverhulme Trust). The project examines the significance of the temporality of the present to how social worlds are felt, experienced and lived out today, concentrating on the role that digital media play in organising and arranging these presents. It takes seriously, but critically analyses, how digital media are frequently described as ‘live’, ‘real time’, ‘instantaneous’ and ‘always on’, asking whether these ‘now times’ are coherent or unified. The journal article, ‘Making, Managing and Experiencing the Now: Digital Media and the Compression and Pacing of “Real-Time”’ (2020, New Media and Society), explores how UK based digital media professionals discuss these ‘now times’, and how these temporalities are stretched and condensed according to entangled relations between humans and non-humans (such as platform conventions and institutional expectations).  

Suggested readings: 
Coleman, Rebecca. “The Presents of the Present: Mindfulness, Time and Structures of Feeling.” Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 11 September 2020, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2020.1810730.

Rebecca Coleman is Reader in the Sociology Department, Goldsmiths, University of London, where she researches and teaches across sociology, media and cultural studies and feminist theory. She is currently working on research projects on temporality, including on digital media presents and the temporal experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic. Recent publications include Glitterworlds: The Future Politics of a Ubiquitous Thing (2020, Goldsmiths Press) and a special issue of Sociological Review on ‘Futures in Question: Theories, Methods, Practices’ (2017, edited with Richard Tutton). She is currently preparing a special issue of the open access online journal Media Theory on ‘Mediating Presents’ (forthcoming 2020, edited with Susanna Paasonen). A co-written blog post on the collaborative Covid-19 and time project, A Day at a Time, is here.