Time constructs: Design ideology and a future internet

Abstract

This article engages the politics of technology as it examines how a discourse of time is framed by engineers and project principals in the course of the development of three future internet architecture projects: named data networking, eXpressive Internet Architecture, and Mobility First. This framing reveals categories of a discourse of time that include articulations of efficiency, speed, time as a technical resource, and notions of the future manifest in each project. The discursive categories fit into a time constructs model that exposes how these projects were built with regard to concepts of speed and how different notions of time are expressed as a design ideology intertwined with other ideologies. This time constructs framework represents a tool that can be used to expose the social and political values of technological development that are often hidden or are difficult to communicate in cross-disciplinary contexts.