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UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Time Constructs: The Origins of a Future Internet Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/133926p6 Author Paris, Britt Publication Date 2018 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Time Constructs: The Origins of a Future Internet A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Information Studies by Brittany Paris 2018 © Copyright by Brittany Paris 2018 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Time Constructs: The Origins of a Future Internet by Brittany Paris Doctor of Philosophy in Information Studies University of California, Los Angeles, 2018 Professor Leah A. Lievrouw, Chair Technological time has been a topic of much theorization and dread, as both intellectuals and laypeople fear that human life is increasingly becoming secondary to the technological world. Feelings of despair and nihilism, perhaps attributable to social, political and economic upheavals brought by the synchronization of human life with technology, have been theorized by numerous scholars in a plethora of overlapping disciplines. What is left undertheorized is how technology develops in ways that might or might not actually foster these sensations of synchronicity, or speed. Technological development includes patterns of social coordination and consumption, as well as individual use and goals, that all relate to a sense of lived time. But what of the ways that technical design fosters these relations? What is the discourse of time in technological projects? This dissertation investigates the aforementioned questions in the context of NSF-funded Future Internet Architecture (FIA) projects—Named Data Networking (NDN), eXpressive Internet Architecture (XIA), and Mobility First (MF)—which are currently underway. Architecture engineers and developers for these projects are building new global Internet networking protocols that are intended to challenge many of the features of, and indeed replace, ii the longstanding Internet Protocol (IP). To answer the question above, I gathered data from over 100 project documents, 30 hours of interviews with project principals, and application code from each of the protocol projects. The analysis of this data focuses on three main categories of technical discourse surrounding real-time applications: temporal representation, technical time, and speculation on the future of the project itself, each with many subcategories. The ways that the project data fits into, exceeds, and overlaps with these categories and subcategories illuminate a “discourse of time” that reveals the processes by which concepts of “time” are built into these FIA projects. iii The dissertation of Brittany Paris is approved. Christopher M. Kelty Jonathan Furner Geoffrey Bowker Leah A. Lievrouw, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2018 iv This dissertation is dedicated to my grandmother, Walda Paris. v Table of Contents Chapter 1: The Importance of Technological Time...................................................................... 1 Time and Coordination ................................................................................................................................ 5 Methods ........................................................................................................................................................15 Site Description: Future Internet Architectures (FIAs)............................................................. 16 Data Gathering ........................................................................................................................... 22 Analysis ....................................................................................................................................... 24 Chapter Organization ................................................................................................................................30 Chapter 2: The History of the Future Internet Architectures .................................................. 33 The Internet, Past, Present, and Future ..................................................................................................33 Named Data Networking (NDN) ...............................................................................................................37 eXpressive Internet Architecture (XIA) ..................................................................................................42 Mobility First (MF) .....................................................................................................................................44 Values in Design Directives .......................................................................................................................48 Language Problems and Translation Solutions ......................................................................... 51 Directing Research and Articulating Tradeoffs ......................................................................... 57 Anticipating and Sustaining Engagement with VID .................................................................. 64 Discourse of Past, Present and Future Values in Design ......................................................................66 Chapter 3: Spatializing Time .......................................................................................................... 71 Modes of Revealing Time ...........................................................................................................................72 The Relationship between Applications and Time ................................................................................74 Time Representation at the Level of Applications .................................................................................79 NDN Flume ................................................................................................................................. 79 XIA Vehicular Video demo ......................................................................................................... 88 MF Content-Oriented Naming Service (CNS) for Managing Disasters .................................... 98 Spatialized Time in the Future Internet ............................................................................................... 103 Chapter 4: Technics of Time ........................................................................................................ 110 Computational Time and Technology .................................................................................................. 111 Solving Technical Problems ................................................................................................................... 114 Code........................................................................................................................................... 114 Hardware .................................................................................................................................. 118 Protocols .................................................................................................................................... 121 Efficiency ................................................................................................................................................... 129 Latency and Speed .................................................................................................................... 133 Materiality and Cultural Coordination of Technical Time ............................................................... 136 Chapter 5: The History of a High-Performance Future .......................................................... 141 Facing the Future ..................................................................................................................................... 143 Speculation and Past Experience ........................................................................................................... 147 Engaging with the Will of the Public ........................................................................................ 147 Understanding the Competition ............................................................................................... 155 Scrambling for Funding............................................................................................................ 158 Carrying Values Forward ......................................................................................................... 161 Manifesting the Future ............................................................................................................................ 163 Chapter 6: Time Constructs ......................................................................................................... 169 Contributions to Information and Science and Technology Studies ............................................... 176 Appendix .......................................................................................................................................... 181 vi Preliminary Interview Question Guide ................................................................................................ 181 Consent Form 2016-18 ............................................................................................................................ 182 References .......................................................................................................................................