Digital Temporalities: Slow, Quick and Everything In-between

What happens to our understanding of the digital when we begin with time, rather than space?

For too long, digital studies has leaned on what Mark Graham terms “unhelpful spatial metaphors”—cyberspace, website, platform—grounded in the assumption of a homogeneous digital speed operating across an undifferentiated social field. This spatial framing often obscures the uneven, affective, and power-laden temporalities through which digital life unfolds, where anticipation, interruptions, delays and repetition are not side effects but central to digital experience. When embraced as an analytic lens and a methodological sensibility, temporality becomes a powerful thread through which the intricate entanglements of technological systems, lived experience, and socio-environmental transformation can be traced and creatively reimagined.

The symposium day will include keynote provocations by Dr Dang Nguyen (RMIT) and Dr TingTing Liu (UTS), as well as rapid papers from participants. Researchers from different disciplines, thematic groups and career stages are welcome to participate.

This symposium will take place on 12 August, 2025, from 9.30am to 4.30pm at The University of Queensland. The symposium is free and will be catered. Attendees are also invited to join an informal pay-as-you-go dinner.

Call for papers

This symposium invites participants whose projects explore the entanglements of digital technologies and temporalities, tracing the shifting contours of socio-environmental transformation, stagnation, impasse, crisis, hope, and the myriad states that emerge in between. We also welcome methodological reflections and experimental approaches that grapple with how time is written and conceptualized in digital contexts.

Possible themes might include, but are not limited to, explorations of digital temporalities in relation to: