The word “synchronize” is composed by the Greek prefix syn-, meaning “together”, and the word for “time”, chronos, and thus refers to actions or activities that cause something to happen together, coincide, to occur or unfold at the same time, to be in sync. Taken together, these synchronized activities and actions bring about, consolidate, and perpetuate forms of synchronized collective time, which belong to the basic infrastructure of human societies. In this way collective, homogenous, and singular time, for example progress, is produced by synchronizing practices, work of synchonization, making use of a whole set of tools and technologies, from calendars, and clocks, to concepts and narratives. See als Out of Sync. [HJ]
Further
►Jordheim,Helge. "Synchronizing the World. Synchronism as Historiographical Practice, Then and Now," History of the Present 7/1 2017, 59-95; and "Multiple Times and the Work of Synchronization," History and Theory 53 (2014), 498-518, as well as other articles in this Special Issue by Geoffrey Bowker, Lucian Hölscher, Shazad Bashir and others.
A descriptor for works that describe possible worlds that are materially different from the known everyday world. These differences are most often scientific and technological. Because the known everyday world is also subject to change, what is deemed to be possible, scientifically and technologically, in one generation may become reality or be falsified in another generation. Science fiction is only so with respect to its own time and place, based on a consensus between its producers and consumers as to what makes a certain imagined world different from the everyday world, and whether these differences belong to the natural (science) or supernatural (fantasy) realm. [BC]
Further
►Stableford, Brian, et al. (2015). "Definitions of SF." The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Online.
►Chattopadhyay, Bodhisattva. 2017. “Speculative Utopianism in Kalpavigyan: Mythologerm and Women’s Science Fiction.” Foundation 127. 6-19
From Sanskrit/Bangla. Used as an analogue of science fiction. Kalpavigyan distinguishes between the knowledge of phenomena or the material world and complete knowledge, which also includes transcendental knowledge. As opposed to transcendental knowledge, phenomena and the material world are open to transformation. In the kalpavigyan mode, both the world and its knowledge are in constant flux, which means that futures, presents, and pasts are always part of a multiplicity of possibles and there is no one fixed time. [BC]
Further
►Chattopadhyay, Bodhisattva. 2016. “On The Mythologerm: Kalpavigyan and the Question of Imperial Science.” Science Fiction Studies 43(3). 435–458.
Related terms and synonyms: 'alternate history', 'uchronia', 'counterfactual'. Descriptor of a type of narrative that deals with "what-ifs" based on altering the outcomes of perceived key moments in the past, and exploring the consequences of that alteration. [BC]
Further
►Stableford, Brian, et al. (2017). "Alternate History." The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Online.
► Doležel, Lubomír. "Chapter 5: Counterfactual Narratives of the Past." Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. 101-126.
The word describes an action where something - variously called meaning, information or content - is communicated by an agent or intermediary in a given environment or context. Mediation is enabled by technologies - digital, electronic and mechanic, at times also symbolic technologies in the form of for instance language, or human technologies such as the voice. In media theory, the processual, historical and contextual nature of mediation is often emphasised. In the relationship between the individual sender and receiver, mediation involves a split in time and space and an attendant element of uncertainty or alienation. At the level of the collective and social, mediation has often been associated with powers of unification, of dominance, more recently of synchronisation. [EY]
Further
►Swagato Chakravorty, “Mediation”, The Chicago School of Media Theory Keywords. Online
►J.W.T. Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen (2010) Critical terms for media studies. Chicago: University of Chicago University Press.
In the discipline of history, “event” is a foundational category, frequently placed in contrast or opposition to structure and process. This concept was traditionally applied to an narrow set of dramatic single episodes (e.g. wars, revolutions, conquests) but is now seen more as forms of narrative or representation that are symptomatic of wider societal forces. Within media studies there has been a tendency to characterise certain types of more recent events that are clearly shaped by electronic and digital media as “media events”. Mediation could also be seen as a basic dimension of historical events more generally, however. [EY]
Further
►François Dosse (2010) Renaissance de l’événement. Un defi pour l’historien: entre sphinx et phénix. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.
►Espen Ytreberg, “Toward a historical understanding of the media event”, Media Culture & Society 39(3): 309-324. Link
This is 10-18 seconds. The degree of precision in computer time format is 500 attoseconds – or about a tenth of the time light take to pass through an atom. Half an exa number of seconds since big bang and runaway inflation first began. In datestamp format, the second can be represented to about 500 attoseconds, or about a tenth of the time light takes to pass through an atom. Although this is still fast for a computer, a network switch made by the firm Metamako allows a stock trade order to be placed in the time it takes light to travel 90 feet. To play the powers of 10 game, only half an exasecond (1018 seconds) has passed since the putative big bang. Thus one can imagine roughly a calculation a second since the origin of the universe as we know it to be equivalent to one second in contemporary computing. [GCB]
This is a core concept of Friedrich Kittler. For him the core moves in the history of media have been from the invention of the alphabet and musical notation (with the space being crucial; as is the zero in mathematics), to the codex (the first random-access device), and then bypassing the printing press to get to analog film and then the computer. For the computer, time access manipulation, in Lacanian language, gets us beyond representation through the symbolic to direct representation of the real (that which exceeds the symbolic). The core trick is the Fourier transform, which allows us to take the continuous flow of time and then map it onto space and then chunk into ones and zeroes. When Kittler seemingly wildly asserts that: “Only that which is switchable is at all”, he is merely pragmatically saying that the ‘real’ is that which exceeds the symbolic. [GCB]
Further
►Friedrich Kittler, "Real Time Analysis, Time Axis Manipulation." (1990) Cultural Politics, 13(1). March 2017. 1-18.
►Sybille Krämer, “The Cultural Techniques of Time Axis Manipulation: On Friedrich Kittler’s Conception of Media”, Theory, Culture & Society 23(7-8). December 2006. 93-109.
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Further
►Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay (2018). “The Urban in Posthuman Science Fiction.” Defining The Urban. Eds. Deljana Iossifova, A. Gasparatos, & C. Doll. Routledge. 266-279.
Term used by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to refer to a new kind of relationship to the planet in Death of a Discpline (2003). In this relationship, the planet is something that both houses us and exceeds our control. Planetarity thus invokes the problem of scale in our relationship to the planet: we belong in the planet but the planet does not belong to us. This is opposed to the Enlightenment rationale behind globalization where the globe belongs to us and is subject to our control as rational agents. Planetarity has been evoked in other discussions, including anthropocene and climate change discussions, where such a new relationship is being registered and conceptualized. The term can be productively compared with Walter D. Mignolo's 'critical cosmopolitanism' (2000), Donna Haraway's 'chthulhucene' (2014). [BC]
Further
►Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2015. “'Planetarity' (Box 4: WELT).” Paragraph 38(2). 290-292.
►Gray, Ros. 2015. "Planetarity." MFA Fine Art Lecture, Goldsmiths College. Online.
A vague term, genre in our use refers to a container that can hold many different kinds of objects. The container can exist irrespective of what is put into it, but is relevant only to the extent that something is put into it. The similarity or differences between the objects in the container may be completely incidental. The container determines how we classify what we see and see what we classify. This description of genre accounts for form based definitions, rhetorical definitions, and historical definitions. The container can be used to contain “forms” such as prose, poetry, drama, novel, short story, encyclopedia, etc., as well as to contain more specific uses for genres such as “science fiction”, “detective fiction”, “fantasy” etc, as well as different types of media. [BC]
Further
►Kathleen M. Jamieson “Antecedent genre as rhetorical constraint” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 61:4 (1975), 406-415.
►Määttä, Jerry. “Commercial Market Arrangement: Defining Science Fiction.” Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction 37.103 (2008): 96–115.
►Rieder, John. Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System . Wesleyan University Press, 2017.
►Chattopadhyay, Bodhisattva, et al. “Indian genre fiction: languages, literatures, classifications.” Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories. Routledge 2018.
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Further
►Helge Jordheim, & Einar Wigen (2018). Conceptual Synchronisation: From Progress to Crisis. Millennium, 46(3), 421–439. Link
