(NOT) IN SYNC – Digital Time and Forms of (Dis-)Connecting. Ethnographic Notes from Kinshasa (DR Congo)

I want to think through how various materialities of digital media – mobile phones’ batteries, optic fiber networks, and software – interact with urban experiences in the Global South, and how these entanglements produce temporal sameness, simultaneity and synchronicity, but also temporal difference and disjuncture. Media scholars increasingly pay attention to the way in which digital infrastructures like social media platforms and design and material conditions produce digital time (Leong et al. 2009, Fuchs 2014, Kaun and Stiernstedt 2014, Scannell 2014, Poell 2019); this research shows, for example, how the inherent principles of a platform like Facebook fosters a sense of immediacy; constant updates and a personal flow of data inhibit the sense of duration and memory work, in contrast to radio and television (Kaun and Stiernstedt 2014). While attention to the temporalities of individual users allows us to understand personal experiences of digital media, as an anthropologist my analytic interest resides on a social level. I try to understand how personal experiences of disconnection and “being out of sync” in a city as Kinshasa shape and are informed by state-citizen interactions, the urban economy, and strategies of achievement. I thus argue that the modality of “being out of sync” – a familiar reality in Kinshasa – relates to political, economic and social time. Ultimately, and here resides the originality of this article, the ethnographic material problematizes a too simplistic notion of “synchronicity”. It shows how technologically mediated synchronicity (as in “immediacy” and “live”) does not always lead to social synchronicity, i.e. whether and how (non-)users partake in the same time on an urban and/or global scale.edition: Special issue on "Media & Time"status: Published onlin