ABSTRACT
Through their deployment of interactivity, virtualization, and simulation, video games are prime examples of the contemporary form of what philosopher of technology Bernard Stiegler has termed the “industrial temporal object” (2009, 241). This is his term for mass produced media works designed to provide experiences that unfold over time through the user’s provision of his/her conscious attention. From the phonograph’s replaying of musical performances, to editing together film shots and the compilation of longer sequences of experience in television scheduling, to the design of systems for user-configured perceptions in newer media forms, industrial temporal objects have played an increasingly significant role in the formation of individual and cultural identity since the launch of industrialization in 19th century Europe. In Stiegler’s view, “industrial temporal objects” amount to much more than novel forms of entertainment or communication. The experiences produced by these media are constituted in the course of the flux of the interior consciousness of the individuals engaged in following – and in the interactive era, in co-producing – the flux of their unfolding. The very nature of experience, as what is lived by the individual in and as a necessarily shared milieu of mediated, collective experience, is to a significant degree determined today by industrial temporal objects. In this our “postindustrial” moment, the influence of digital industrial temporal objects tends to outweigh that of the other, older forms of mediated experience as they are integrated into the convergent paradigm of the “being digital” of mediation in general.
