Asynchronicity: The Temporal Dimensions of the Information Crisis

Asynchronicity is a study of the information stress and its genesis in the accelerative dynamics of computation and automation. In simple terms, this volume illustrates how anti-democratic communication has become characteristic of our present social and political reality. This book is significant in two respects. By fully realising a general theory of social time, it advances temporal analysis as a mode of social enquiry. Grounding the production of time within the event-dynamics of media systems, it establishes a framework for analysing the temporal logics of digital media, and shows that they may be fundamentally incompatible with the requirements of democratic communication.

Philip Pond is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, where he convenes the Fighting Harmful Online Communication research initiative. He specialises in the study of software, time and informational crisis and is author of three books.