On the 25th March (2019) edition of the BBC’s Today programme, a contributor to a segment on Apple’s entry into the video streaming market made a distinction between live-time coverage of traditional public interest programming and the user-oriented time of streaming services such as Netflix. Listen here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0003jq8

Though this distinction was primarily made in order to stress the value of a traditional linear broadcaster such as the BBC since it provides a kind of news and current affairs coverage that the browse based content of the streaming giants, this also raises an interesting point as to the different experiences of information and culture when conveyed in these ways.

That is, between a time based on the desires, selections and attention of the user; and that defined by scheduling and ongoing, live events. This is obviously complicated by social media news feeds such as on twitter, which funnels user-attention in a different way. In the present example however, we might make a distinction between the speed, urgency and anxiety of real time — and its demands for a sort of crisis footing (see Wendy Chun, “Crisis, Crisis, Crisis, or Sovereignty and Networks,” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0263276411418490) — and the isolation of the asynchronous time of the user. The sovereignty of the user is both total and entirely limited to that choice.

Reflecting on the work of Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities, it is clear that the shared experiences of asynchronous time created by the coming together of the multi-character novel and the national newspaper in the imaginary community of the nation, become much more complicated if not entirely privatised, atomized and individuated.