Streaming and Presentism

While I was reading for the other paper I am doing this semester, Time and the Moving Image, I came across the historian François Hartog and anthropologist Marc Augé who both explore the concept of “presentism”. The article, “Temporalities of Video” by Christine Ross, related this concept to issues of time and temporality in video art, but it immediately made me think of last week’s class about protocol and cloud computing. Ross outlines how Augé argues that architectural ruins allow you to experience a sense of the passage of time, and that our current society is unable to produce ruins. Our buildings and structures are made for the present, to be replaced. And Hartog argues that “the prevailing regime of historicity characteristic of our times” (Ross, 85) is presentism. Which is a turning of the present into the most important value, at the expense of a connection with the past and future.

Ross herself mentioned “information technologies” in passing, referring to their “logic of instantaneity and transparency” (85) as another form of blocking ruin-making. And I feel like this relates closely to cloud computing, where files, software, and even hardware is provided remotely, and only exactly when the user needs it. In particular one of the cloud’s methods of delivery, streaming, seems particularly redolent of “presentism”. You are not even accessing one file at a time, but receiving it byte by byte, for it to disappear again. Absolutely no ruins are left in this case, not even a single file on some forgotten external hard-drive. Since I have jumped ship on my previous essay topic, I’m hoping to explore this idea in my essay instead.