Data centers and the infrastructural temporalities of digital media: An introduction

Abstract

While data centres are predominantly studied via their spatial and territorial dimensions, we investigate this critical part of the contemporary Internet infrastructures via its temporalities and their multiple mediations. With this introduction and the articles of this special issue, we collectively complement existing scholarship on critical data studies and media infrastructure by investigating the role that data infrastructure plays in shaping the temporalities of data. Focusing on data centres, the contributors analyze the vast infrastructural assemblage that supports such temporalities. The concept of timescapes (after Barbara Adam) guides us to organize the contributions to this special issue along the analysis of three infrastructural timescapes of data—socio-economic, elemental, and transitory—to reveal new facets of the politics of time in the data economy.