The concept of real-time, the promise of immediacy and the ever-increasing acceleration of exchanges are recurrent in the foundational discourses about new information and communication technologies. However, they are far from having disposed of time. Instead, the different ways in which we relate to time have multiplied, and structure the contemporary experience of our digital world: “revolutions” in technology follow one another uninterrupted, embedded in a long-term perspective, while the permanence of duplicated data lies behind the ephemeral discussion threads, and the complexity of events remains hidden behind the turmoil of the Net and its socio-digital networks.
This symposium wishes to bring to light and interrogate this variety of time(s) and temporalities, by means of analyses of the Web in its past, present and future dimensions, both individual and collective, social and technical, economic and political. Particular attention will be paid to practices that – from hyperconnectivity to cyber-flânerie, from data flows to Web archives – contribute to make the Internet a new experience of both instant and duration.
Five thematic axes will structure how this interdisciplinary symposium – organized by the team of the ANR Web90 project (http://web90.hypotheses.org) – addresses the temporalities of the Web, those it originates and those in which it participates, both in a diachronic and a future perspective.