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The article engages with the notion of the smart prison to develop an understanding of emerging temporalities of digital technologies. The prison context serves here as a magnifying glass that makes certain contradictions and paradoxes of the digital imperative visible. Starting with a brief discussion of smart technology discourses, the article explores the temporalities of real-timeness, prediction and pre-emption that are entangled with digital technologies. Analysing the Spartan RFID tracking tool, the use of algorithms in prison administration and a mobile phone application used in Swedish probation, the article identifies a desynchronization between the temporalities of the incarcerated individuals' lived experience and the (imagined) temporalities of the smart prison. The findings point to developments that are relevant for the smart, digital society beyond the prison walls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text reflects on conceptualizations of media and time, and it introduces the articles of the special issue on the "Mediatization of time." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protest movements have successfully adopted media technologies to promote their causes and mobilize large numbers of supporters. Especially social media that are considered as low-cost and time-saving alternatives have played particularly important roles in recent mobilizations. There is, however, a growing concern about the contradictions between long-term organizing for progressive, social change, on one hand, and the media technologies employed, on the other. Hartmut Rosa has argued that the current culture of accelerated capitalism is characterized by a growing desynchronization between political practices (slow politics) and the economic system (fast capitalism). This article traces the increasing social acceleration related to (media) technologies employed by protest activists and asks whether there is an increasing desynchronization with their political practices discernible. Furthermore, the article investigates strategies of resistance to overcome the growing gap between ‘machine time’ and political time. Empirically, the article builds on archival material and in-depth interviews documenting the media practices of the unemployed workers’ movement (1930s), the tenants’ movement (1970s) and the Occupy Wall Street Movement (2011/2012) and argues for the need to re-politicize media infrastructures as means of communication in order to tackle democratic problems that emerge from the divergent temporalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media technologies are crucial for the experience of time and temporality. Hence, changes in the technological configurations of the media ecology have far-reaching consequences for temporal experiences and practices. At the same time, social practices are shaping media technologies in diverse ways. One way the dialectical relationship between time and technology is expressed is the current preservation of the past for future generations. In that context the notion of the archive as practice and institution has long been central to discussions of social organization and cultural production. However, archival practices are changing with digitization. This article explores the changes in temporality of the archive through the lens of protest movements that are both objects of archiving and subjects of self-archiving practices. Combining experiences with different kinds of archives ranging from the institutional physical archive to digital archives including born-digital materials, I ask after the consequences of the changing temporalities and time regimes of the archive in terms of its politics and, ultimately, after the historicity of protest movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People are spending increasingly more time on social media platforms, with Facebook being the biggest and most successful. Historically, media technologies have for long been considered of importance for the structuration and the experience of time in general. In this article, we investigate the technological affordances of Facebook for the temporal experiences of its users. Relying on a case study of a Facebook page dedicated to media memories, we link user experiences to technological and institutional affordances. By doing so, we seek to answer the question of how a business model and an infrastructure that largely build on immediacy and newness are experienced and negotiated by users that engage in a multiplicity of durations and time layers in their everyday lives. Drawing on a platform analysis, in-depth interviews and a survey among the users of the page “DT64—Das Jugendradio der DDR,” we develop the concept of “social media time” while considering notions of the archive, flow, and narrative, which contribute to shedding light on how specific media technologies afford specific temporalities. We conclude by discussing the consequences for the users and society at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]