Digital Time is my ongoing research project into how time and the temporal are critical underpinnings for the presentation and experience of popular social media platforms. Arguing that understanding and transforming the temporal is key to the operation of such platforms, the project showcases how plaforms variously privilege the new and novel, the old and forgotten as catalysts for participation, while disrupting temporality with algorithmic ordering. The book for this project is under contract with NYU Press.
Related talks:
Tim Highfield (2017). ‘Socially mediated moments and memories: Now, then, and the tangled temporality of digital media’, Mediatization of Time conference, Bremen, 7-8 December 2017.
Tim Highfield (2017) ‘ICYMI, while you were away: Temporal platformed interventions in the digital everyday’. ZeMKI, University of Bremen, 6 December 2017.
Tim Highfield (2017). ‘ICYMI, while you were away: The digital intimacy of temporal platformed interventions’, Digital Intimacies symposium, Melbourne 13-15 November 2017.
Tim Highfield (2017). ‘#BlackLivesMatter to #dogsatpollingstations (but not #CrookedHillary): Platform privilege and the affective politics of hashflags’, Affective Politics symposium, Turku, Finland, 12-13 October 2017.
Kate M. Miltner and Tim Highfield (2017) ‘Never Gonna GIF You Up: Analyzing the cultural significance of the animated GIF’, Columbia University. 14 September 2017.
Tim Highfield (2017). ‘The GIF and News Coverage: Remediated, Remixed, and Reimagined’. SCMS, Chicago, 22-26 March 2017.
Tim Highfield and Kate M. Miltner (2016). ‘The Trumping of the political GIF: Visual social media for political commentary in the 2016 US Presidential election’. Crossroads, Sydney, December 2016.
Tim Highfield (2016). ‘Smashed mouths: Internet cultures and the embrace and subversion of nostalgia’. Crossroads, Sydney, December 2016.
Tim Highfield (2016). ‘The politics of info-GIF-ics: Animated maps and graphs on everyday social media’. Culture and Politics of Data Visualisation, Sheffield, October 2016.
Tim Highfield and Kate M. Miltner (2016). ‘Interrogating the reaction GIF: Making meaning by repurposing repetition’. Social Media and Society, London, July 2016.
Tim Highfield (2016). ‘The conceptual blurriness of perpetual motion: Challenges of studying looping visual social media’ (poster presentation). ICA Visual Communication preconference, Fukuoka, June 2016.
Tim Highfield (2016). ‘On (the) loop: The animated GIF and cultural logics of repetition’. Theorizing the Web, New York City, April 2016. [watch online]
Tim Highfield and Stefanie Duguay (2015). ‘“Like a monkey with a miniature cymbal”: cultural practices of repetition in visual social media’. IR16: Digital Imaginaries, Phoenix, October 2015.