Making Real Time

Making Real Time investigates how globally distributed information systems produce the conditions experienced as “real time.” Web 2.0 and big data depend on information being generated, replicated, cached, processed, and retrieved across machines and facilities separated by physical distance. That distance imposes a physical limit that engineering can reduce but never eliminate, since information cannot travel faster than the speed of light. Apparent simultaneity must therefore be produced by coordinating distributed processes and managing the delays among them. The project distinguishes physical propagation limits from network latency, application response, and perceived delay to examine how these different layers of time are coordinated into the experience of a shared present.

Current case studies examine content-delivery networks, real-time communication, and the transnational routing of digital services. Computational experiments measure how replication, caching, routing, and proximity affect the delivery of information; videoconferencing brings network delay into relation with human perception and the persistence of local time. Documentary research examines how jurisdiction and corporate decisions shape the location of infrastructure and the routes along which information travels. The project asks how globally distributed systems approximate simultaneity, where that approximation encounters physical and perceptual limits, and what those limits reveal about the construction of “real time.”