Seminar with Lucas Introna on The Sociomateriality of Time: Repetition and time making practices in high frequency trading and real time bidding

The renowned scholars seminar is hosted by the IT Management department and organized by Professor Michel Avital. Location: Howitzvej 60, 4th floor. The seminar are open to all. Registration is not required but would be much appreciated. To sign up, please send an email to registration.itm@cbs.dk

Friday, January 17, 2014 - 10:00 to 12:00

The Sociomateriality of Time:  Repetition and time making practices in high frequency trading and real time bidding

Lucas D. Introna – Lancaster University

Time is a sociomaterial accomplishment. Central to this accomplishment is the notion of repetition of an exact quantity.  Making time ‘exact’ is perhaps one of humanities greatest sociomaterial achievements. Temporality, on the other hand is historical, it is not about repetition. It is rather an iteration in which the past pours into the present in anticipation of the future, it is a qualitative duration as Bergson would suggest. If time is a sociomaterial accomplishment we are not only making time, time is also making us. All sociomaterial accomplishments are ontologically constitutive in its becoming (as was proposed by Whitehead, Latour and Barad, to name but a few). In this seminar I want to consider particular time making practices by looking at high frequency trading (in the financial markets) and real time bidding (in online advertising). 

I want to try and show how these sociomaterial time making practices attempt to accomplish repetition (or perfect timing) whilst still incorporating the most immediate contemporary past and the most immediate contemporary future, to produce a new sense of time. Finally I want to consider how this new sense of time is constitutive of the beings/subjects we are becoming (as organisational actors) – especially in terms of our sense of temporality.

The page was last edited by: Communications // 06/02/2017