Article:

Happy Birthday from Skype. Zur Darstellung von Temporalität in einer Online-Werbekampagne

The article analyses advertising as a predestined location for the presentation of synchronisation and collective temporality. The online campaign «Say it with Skye», which the company Skype Technologies launched in 2012 to announce its group video call, is taken as a case study for the staging of the smooth attunement of human and technical ‹proper times› under the condition of digital networked media. It is argued that the advertising videos of this campaign are an enhancing a yet improbable imagination of technical and social synchronised simultaneity, which is however stabilised in terms of theory of time, media culture, and technical history. The central assumption of the article is that the investigated advertising campaign thus takes on the processes of a procedural interface between human and technical entities and translates them into a stabilised form, which however obscures the complex processes of attunement in favour of a depiction of undisturbed synchrony.