Downloaded Directly, Or Burned to Optical Media Emerged in the 1970S
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UC San Diego UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Interactive Time Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8kg6q723 Author Moran, Chuktropolis Welling Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO Interactive Time A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Communication by Chuktropolis Welling Moran Committee in charge: Professor Brian Goldfarb, Chair Professor Jordan Crandall Professor Nitin Govil Professor Chandra Mukerji Professor Stefan Tanaka 2013 xxx The Dissertation of Chuktropolis Welling Moran is approved and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: __________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________ Chair University of California, San Diego 2013 iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page ............................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents ......................................................................................................... iv List of Images ............................................................................................................... vi Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................... vii Vita .............................................................................................................................. viii Abstract of the Dissertation ........................................................................................... ix I. Introduction ........................................................................................................ 1 Software .............................................................................................................. 2 Time .................................................................................................................... 6 Interactive Time .................................................................................................. 8 Overview .......................................................................................................... 10 Note on Methods ........................................................................................... 13 II. Time Theory ................................................................................................... 21 Temporality Functions ...................................................................................... 24 Time as Social Practice .................................................................................... 36 Conclusion: What Times Are ........................................................................... 47 III. Times Relating .................................................................................................. 54 How Times Relate ............................................................................................ 56 Time History ..................................................................................................... 69 Times Continue to Change ............................................................................... 87 iv Conclusion: Dominant Times and Undo .......................................................... 91 IV. The Historical Undo Command ...................................................................... 101 Computing into the 1960s .............................................................................. 109 Brown’s Hypertext Project ............................................................................. 119 Inventing Undo Again .................................................................................... 139 Undoing in Commercial Software .................................................................. 146 Conclusion: What Undo Does ........................................................................ 171 V. Architecture of Time ...................................................................................... 189 The Fast Cycles .............................................................................................. 197 Memory .......................................................................................................... 209 Network Connection ....................................................................................... 222 Conclusion: How Conventions Have Joined .................................................. 232 VI. Conclusion: Interactive Time ......................................................................... 243 … v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1 The Times They Are a-Changin’ .................................................................. 5 Figure 3.1 Christian Siriano ......................................................................................... 59 Figure 3.2 Time at one Mars site, dual faced Earth watch ........................................... 65 Figure 3.3 The Idle Apprentice .................................................................................... 72 Figure 3.4 The difference between local times was too small ..................................... 79 Figure 4.1 The computer as brain ............................................................................... 114 Figure 4.2 IBM 2250 monitor .................................................................................... 121 Figure 4.3 Using FRESS on a terminal ...................................................................... 129 Figure 4.4 Wang Word Processor’s keyboard ............................................................ 135 Figure 4.5 Microsoft Word advertisement in Byte magazine .................................... 150 Figure 4.6 The consumer market was large ................................................................ 157 Figure 4.7 The menu names the action that will be reversed ..................................... 163 Figure 5.1 The fetch cycle .......................................................................................... 200 Figure 5.2 A piece of flash memory ........................................................................... 211 Figure 5.3 How would you get data off these old disks? ........................................... 215 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Communication at UC San Diego, thank you for letting weird things grow. Chapters 2 and 3, in part, are reprints of material as it appears in “Time as a Social Practice,” Time and Society. Forthcoming. The dissertation author was the primary investigator and author of this paper. vii VITA EDUCATION Ph.D. in Communication, 2013 University of California, San Diego. B.A. in Gender Studies with Honor, 2005. University of Chicago. SELECT PUBLICATIONS Superactually: Micro-Essays on Post-Ironic Life. Zero Books. March 2013. “Playing with Undo: Besides the Lines of Game Time.” Fibreculture 16. July 2010. “Time as a Social Practice.” Time & Society. Forthcoming 2013. “Interactive Time and “Real Time” in Software and Society” Spectator 30(1). Spring 2011. “The Generalization of Configurable Being: From RPGs to Facebook.” In Dungeons, Dragons, and Digital Denizens: the Digital Role-playing Game, ed. Gerald Voorhees, Josh Call, and Katie Whitlock, 343-462. New York: Continuum. 2012 viii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Interactive Time by Chuktropolis Welling Moran Doctor of Philosophy in Communication University of California, San Diego, 2013 Professor Brian Goldfarb, Chair Computers have enabled new ways to act out time. Unlike times that make authoritative measures or keep everyone synchronized to the same pace, some software lets a person interact with time. The undo command is a good example of this. You can go backward to go forward. That empowers computer users. Interactive time is now a normal part of what it means to use a computer to do something. This is significant because people use computers to do many things. ix 1 I. Introduction I already knew, from a lifetime of using computers, that the time described by physicists, philosophers, and theologians did not describe the time I knew on computers. In different programs, action can start or stop in an instant, slow or reverse, be stored and reloaded, or left on pause indefinitely. In software, these are not impossibilities or even special cases of time. These are regular parts of using the machine. I knew this, intuitively. But, like many, I lacked the words to articulate it, to respond to it, to discuss it with others, or to build from it. How can time be one thing in one program but be so different in another, and different again outside the computer? Why do these times exist, how do they work, and what are their effects? These became my questions. In many cases, new computer-enabled times have had clear impacts. Digital video recorders have changed television by fragmenting the audience, concentrating viewer attention on favorite shows, and letting people skip the ads. For music, the trade of individual files has encouraged listening on shuffle, tuning out the world whenever in public, impulse buys of memorable songs, and an enthusiasm for tracks that sound good when they come