Reinventions of screens as temporal mixers: Post-phenomenological rhythms of a digitalizing street

Abstract

This paper advances a post-phenomenological approach to studying the digitalization of urban space and temporalities. Varying intentionality and subjectivation, post-phenomenology holds promise in how objects and digitality reorganize lifeworlds. Through digital mediations and techno-genesis, rhythms extend beyond human experiences to externalize and reconstitute temporality. Further, these rhythmic elements relationally form evolutionary organology between body and digitality, subject and object, retention and protention, being and becoming. This study deploys 10 months of online and local ethnographic research on the case of Laojie Street in Shenzhen that actively promotes digital urbanism and livestreaming by Douyin. Here, digitality orchestrates rhythms, and people are often subordinated to rhythmic patterns in the ambiguous metamorphosis between physicality and digitality. Analysis is centered on two dimensions: (i) direct and machinic rhythms enforced by screens and, (ii) reinvented rhythms mediated by the moving and altering screens. The former provoked compulsion and anticipation through repetitive performances and livestream battle, while machinic rhythms distort linear and cyclical rhythms with a series of undercurrents, short-circuits and automations. The latter marks both passive oscillation and active tactics between dynamic formations of physical circles, rhythmic patterns and digital flux. These machinic immersion and derivative reflections reveal how digitality transforms human experience and urban temporalities, highlighting rhythms that are intensified, emergent and difficult to trace.