Real Time/Zero Time
摘要
Like hard-core pornography, about which U.S. Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart notoriously said, know it when I see it, the phrase may be much easier to spot than to define.1 What digital media scholars see as evidence of real time-the copresence, for instance, of an event and its live stream on the Web-is different from what computer scientists refer to when they talk about real-time computing, which is a system's mission-critical aspect: for example, an air bag inflates before a driver is thrown through the windshield. Or consider the phrase itself: real time is not real-time or realtime; the noun refers to a certain temporality, while the adjective form can refer to speed, rate of change, or interactivity; real time can be a synonym for virtuality, or even its putative opposite, realness.The trouble with real time is not the proliferation of definitions, which should be welcomed; the trouble is that we too often confuse real time with the medium that manifests it. Whereas digital media scholars see real time as synonymous with the temporality of computer networks, television scholars might see real time in terms of the liveness of television broadcasts, while film scholars may find it in the moving image's seeming continuity, a motion simulated twenty-four frames a second. This leads to confusion between cause and effect. Consider, for example, art historian Michael Newman, who invokes the term when writing of the ethical stakes of analog cinema in the face of digitization. For Newman, digital technology leaves in its wake interchangeable media in the simultaneity of time.2 The words he uses to discuss the regime of the digital are striking, because 'real' aptly describes the very thing he opposes to digital media: analog cinema.Quoting a character of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who exclaims that by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, Mary Ann Doane has suggested that electricity produced instantaneity roughly a hundred years before di