(Not) in sync – digital time and forms of (dis-)connecting: ethnographic notes from Kinshasa (DR Congo)

Abstract

Based on ethnographic research, this article explores the temporal politics of ‘electronic modernity’ in one locale in the Global South, in particular Kinshasa, capital city of the Democratic Republic of Congo. A major experience of digital connectivity in Kinshasa is one of unexpected and undesired disconnection, that is, the involuntary logging off of the Internet due to political interference, lack of battery time, or credit time (phone credit). This undesired mode of being disconnected is only one, albeit very familiar, way in which people participate (or not) in electronic modernity. This material allows me to revisit the notion of ‘global coevalness’ in electronic modernity, i.e., the idea that people can live in a shared world by participating in the same temporality due to the sheer fact that they are electronically and digitally connected. I thus want to think through how various materialities of digital media – in particular mobile phone batteries, optic fiber networks, and software – interact with the urban experience in the Global South, and how these entanglements produce not only temporal sameness, simultaneity, and synchronicity but also temporal difference and disjuncture. Ultimately, I argue that technological synchronicity does not always lead to social synchronicity.