Paper short abstract:

This paper considers fractal time in the digital world of social media, experienced by users as a continual series of instantaneous overlapping presents. How this impacts on the wellbeing of users and why this form of time is at the root of the addictive nature of online worlds will be explored.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will consider how time can be conceptualised as fractal in the digital landscape, by drawing on ethnographic research conducted with the social media platform Instagram. Building on Dilley's (2014:2-3) notion of chronologies, and the associated variety of presents experienced in historic letter writing, this paper will reassess how notions of time and the present can be understood in a digital age. I will suggest that the multiple presents experienced in the digital landscape can be conceptualised as one infinite kaleidoscopic simultaneous set of presents. This cyclical yet amorphous sensation of temporality experienced by users of social media will form the basis for a discussion of self making, temporal manipulation and imagined spaces. The digital landscape is a place where all these potentialities are occurring simultaneously, and this paper will question what affect fractal time has on the wellbeing of its users. This will draw on Miller's (2011:78) notion of "time suck". Finally this paper will question whether our increasingly digitized modernity is a developing utopia, or more akin to Haraway's (1986:8) "apocalyptic telos" as time becomes fractal and the offline become increasingly enmeshed with the online.

References: Dilley, R. (2014). Nearly Native, Barely Civilized: Henri Gaden's Journey through Colonial French West Africa (1894-1939). Leiden: Brill. Haraway, D. (1984). A Cyborg Manifesto. Macat Library. Miller, D. (2011). Tales from Facebook. Cambridge: Polity.