Whilst social theorists are no longer united in the belief that all time systems are reducible to the functional need of human synchro~is_ation and co-ordination they seem to have little doubt about the validity of Sorokin and Merton's other key point that, unlike social time, the time of nature is that of the clock, a time characterised by invariance and quantity. Despite significant shifts in the understanding of social time, the assumptions about nature, natural time, and the subject matter of the natural sciences have remained largely unchanged.

Explored in these multiple expressions, time emerged as a fundamentally transdisciplinary subject and necessitated an understanding that is no longer containable within the traditional assumptions and categories of social science. We now need to reflect on the implications of these findings for social theory. This entails refocusing on some issues and re-assessing a few of the classical social theory traditions in the light of our findings. It requires that we spell out the limitations of the classical practice of abstraction and dualistic theorising for an understanding of 'social time' and that we question the tradition of claiming time exclusively for the human realm by locating it in mind, language or the functional needs of social organisation. This involves us in a re-evaluation of the dualistic conceptualisation of natural and social time and the closely related idea that all time is social time. It necessitates further that we explore the role of metaphors and focus explicitly on the social science convention of limiting the time-span of concern to a few hundred years

phase-angle differ­ences simply refer to whether the phases, the parts of one rhythmic pattern,

Flaherty’s data and theory indicate that rather than the amount and nature of the objective experiences in a situation, what makes time seem to pass extra slowly or quickly is the extent to which the individual engages in conscious infor­mation processing during the time. When the amount of conscious information processing is about average for the individual, the individual experiences time as passing at what that individual has come to perceive as the usual rate, but when the amount of such processing is high, time appears to slow down (pro­tracted duration); when such information processing is low, time appears to speed up (temporal compression)

“Since one cannot distinguish a figure without a background, the present does not meaningfully exist without a past” (emphasis added; 2001, p. 608). As the background, the past provides a bench­mark for the present against which comparisons can be made. And such com­parisons indicate whether the present is the same as the past or different from it.

the idea of entrainment presented in Chapter 6—the adjust­ment of the pace or cycle of an activity to match or synchronize with that of another activity (Ancona and Chong 1996, p. 253)—does suggest a reason why faster could be better, but it also suggests that faster could be worse.

So connections and the meaning they generate are funda­The Best of Times and the Worst of Timesmental, which is why the loss of meaning is so troubling—the systematic loss of meaning even more so.

Put succinctly, these principles indicate that the definition of the situation guides human behavior, and according to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, lan­guage is a necessary prerequisite for defining any situation (see Chapter 1). Language provides the elements from which meaning is constructed—the names of things and their qualities and the manner in which they may be re­lated—and the definition of the situation combines these elements to con­struct sense-making explanations of events, definitions of the situation.

Lewin’s famous final clause, “there is nothing so practical as a good theory,” means that understanding (theory) can guide useful action (the practical), so theory (understanding) can be empowering. A lack of meaning and under­standing of events also makes it very hard to know what one should do (norm- lessness or anomie), because it is nearly impossible to know what to do in a situation if one cannot comprehend it.

“the dynamic weaving of events, interactions, situations, and phases that comprise those relationships” (2000, p. 27), the dynamic weaving of events, interactions, and situations being very similar to narrative.

A narrative consists of three essential elements: past events, story elements, and a temporal ordering (Maines 1993, p. 21).

Personal and organizational histories occupy prominent figure positions in the figure-ground dichotomy, and that such histories are used to cope with the future is indicated by several pieces of evidence.

Temporal focus is the degree of emphasis on the past, present, and future (Blue­dorn 2000e, p. 124).

The results presented in Bluedorn (2000e) and the Appendix consistently support the distinction between temporal depth and temporal focus. Concep­tually the two terms refer to different phenomena, and empirical measures of the two share so little variance in common that for practical purposes they can be regarded as orthogonal. Temporal depth is the distance looked into past and

However, Boyd and Zimbardo’s interest was not in comparing short-, mid-, and long-term temporal depths; rather, it was in examining the degree to which people were oriented to a transcendental future, and in exam­ining the extent to which this variation covaried with other factors such as age, gender, and ethnicity. This is a natural extension of the questions involved in research on general past, present, and future temporal orientations (e.g., Kluck- hohn and Strodtbeck 1961, pp. 13-15), orientations that at first glance appear similar to issues of temporal depth. However, as I have argued elsewhere in opposing the use of the temporal orientation label, these general orientations are more an issue of the general temporal direction or domain that an individ­ual or group may emphasize (Bluedorn 2000e) than the distance into each that the individual or group typically uses. The latter is the issue of temporal depth; the former, what I have called temporal focus (Bluedorn 2000e)

And if Weick has drawn the correct conclusion about how the past is used to enact the present, being able to note the differences may be even more im­portant than being able to see the similarities. This is especially so in equivocal enactments, which Weick (1979, p. 201) described as involving a figure-ground construction, one in which the ground consists of the strange and unfamiliar

Among the reasons this may be so is that the simple future tense is more open-ended than the future perfect tense, the latter seeming to con­vey a sense of closure and a focus on specific events, which is unlike the sim­ple future tense in which anything is possible (Weick 1979, pp. 198-99). It is well to note that although Weick did not explicitly frame his argument in terms of metaphor, it is really another example of the past-as-metaphor-for- the-future idea developed in this chapter, albeit a more precise manifestation of it. The precision comes in Weick’s conclusion that some futures are more like the past, are more similar to it than others. In his argument, the future described in future perfect terms is more similar to the past than the future de­scribed in simple future terms.

To consider the future, it may help to treat it like the past, that is, as ifit had already happened. This is the premise Weick proposed in his discussion of fu­ture perfect thinking (1979, pp. 195-200). Future perfect thinking is a gram­matical prescription instructing managers and planners and all who consider the future to do so in the future perfect tense. Thus rather than the simple fu­ture tense as used in a statement like “We shall overcome,” the future perfect128Eternal Horizonstense would have us say, “We shall have overcome.” Alfred Schutz believed that the “planned act bears the temporal character of pastness' (Schutzs emphasis), be­cause the actor projects the act as completed and in the past, a paradox that places the act in both the past and the future at the same time, something the future perfect tense makes possible (1967, p. 61). These were insights that Weick both noted (1979, p. 198) and built upon to explain why future perfect thinking may make it easier to envision possible futures.

Weick argued that the past was used to understand the present and the future, that neither could be understood without the past. And how the past can provide this understanding, this meaning, is a major insight

Unfortunately, the similarities, the likenesses, may overwhelm the differ­ences (see Morgan 1997, pp. 4-5). And according to Weick, “people who select interpretations for present enactments usually see in the present what they’ve seen before” (1979, p. 201). In terms of the past-as-metaphor perspective de­veloped in this chapter, “what they’ve seen before” implies the use of “an eye for resemblances,” the ability to see the similarities. But as Aristotle, Morgan, and Neustadt and May all noted, there is more to the mature use of metaphor than detecting the similarities between events and situations; the differences matter too. They matter, in part, because the ability to detect and deal with novelty may be a key to both organizational learning and performance (Butler т995> PP· 944-46)

And the determination of organizational age illustrates the constructed, enacted nature of the past, because what at first glance seems like a simple, even objective matter becomes ambiguous when mergers and acquisitions are involved. Is the founding date the date that the oldest of the merger partners began operations, or is it the date when the last partners merged? Families can face the same ambiguities when one or both spouses have been married previously and they and their children combine to form new families. As the definition of the situation principle teaches (see Chapter 1), the important is­sue is when the people in the organization or family believe it was founded.

the past generally being ignored in organization science (for excep­tions, see March 1999; Thoms and Greenberger 1995; Webber 1972; and others cited later in the chapter), not that the rest of the social sciences are much less deficient in this regard (see Zimbardo and Boyd 1999, p. 1272).

Steve Ferris and I found that organizational age was positively correlated with both past and future temporal depths, and that these relationships per­sisted after controlling for several organizational and environmental variables (Bluedorn and Ferris 2000). The older the organization, the further its mem­bers looked into both the past and the future, and the positive temporal depth correlations with the organization’s age may suggest why

The past leads to and influences the future, but the future does not influence the past.Thus El Sawy s research provided a second clue that past and future are re­lated, and it even added a causal direction (i.e., “A connection to the past fa­cilitates a connection to the future” [March 1999, p. 75])·

the result is a statistically significant positive correlation (see the Appendix). The proposed connection is accurate: The longer the respondent’s past temporal depth, the longer the respondent’s future temporal depth.

Perhaps the most noteworthy of the differ­ences is that each of the future regions extends much further into the future than their past counterparts extend into the past. The short-term future ex­tends about five times further than does the recent past; the mid-term future, about three-and-one-third times as far as the middling past; and the long­term future, about twice as far as the long-ago past. So although the steplike pattern is similar for both the past and future regions, the future depths extend over substantially larger amounts of time than do those in the past

the temporal distances into the past and future that indi­viduals and collectivities typically consider when contemplating events that havehappened, may have happened, or may happen.

Drawing on the theory of distributed cognition [5], we utilizerepresentational physical artifacts to provide a tangible interface for task planning, aural cues for time passage, and an ambient, glanceable display to convey status

Since time elapses in a linear fashion and users may switch between tasks during the course of a day, the “elapsed” marbles roll into a track below the storage cylinders.

The design principle of the Time Machinefollows the stage-based model of personal informatics systems proposed by Li, Dey and Forlizzi

Figure 2. The stage-based model of personal informatics systems (after [6]).

We have introduced a novel approach to time management using a device embodying characteristics of both an ambient display and a tangible user interface.

Thus, people have historically relied on visual or auditory signals to estimate, determine, or track time. Initially, these time signals were derived from nature: theposition of the sun in the sky orthe sound of a rooster in the morning. Eventually, these time signals became technology-based. Many people now rely on displays, or signals, of time that derive from our world of pervasive devices: digital time displayed on a device screen, a notification sound from a calendar application.

Because time is not physical, the human perception of time is subjective: the passage of time can seem slower or faster depending on factors liketask

This conjecture leads us to promote the ideal of a “balanced TP” as most psycho-logically and physically healthy for individuals and optimal for societal functioning. Balance is defi ned as the mental ability to switch fl exibly among TPs depending on task features, situational considerations, and personal resources rather than be biased toward a specifi c TP that is not adaptive across situations. The future focus gives people wings to soar to new heights of achievement, the past (positive) focus establishes their roots with tradition and grounds their sense of personal identity, and the present (hedonistic) focus nourishes their daily lives with the playfulness of youth and the joys of sensuality. People need all of them harmoniously operating to realize fully their human potential.

A further limitation of the generalizability of our scale may lie in its cultural relevance to individualist societies and their ambitions, tasks, and demands rather than to more collectivist, interdependent societies in which time is differently val-ued and conceptualized (Levine 1997 ). Obvious cross-cultural adaptations of the ZTPI are called for.

Our scale also has dem-onstrated predictive utility in experimental, correlational, and case study research.

The scale is based on theoretical reflection and analyses, interviews, focus groups, repeated factor analyses, feedback from experiment participants, discriminant validity analyses, and specifi c attempts to increase factor loadings and internal consistencies by item analyses and revisions.

State of Research on TP

Thus, we conceive of TP as situationally determined and as a relatively stable individual-differences process.

Such limiting biases contrast with a “balanced time orientation,” an ideal-ized mental framework that allows individuals to fl exibly switch temporal frames among past, future, and present depending on situational demands, resource assess-ments, or personal and social appraisals. The behavior of those with such a time orientation would, on average, be determined by a compromise, or balancing, among the contents of meta-schematic representations of past experiences, present desires, and future consequences.

In both cases, the abstract cognitive processes of reconstructing the past and constructing the future function to infl uence current decision making, enabling the person to transcend compelling stimulus forces in the immediate life space and to delay apparent sources of gratifi cation that might lead to undesirable con-sequences.

More recently, Joseph Nuttin ( 1964 , 1985 ) supported the Lewinian time-fi lled life space, where “future and past events have an impact on present behavior to the extent that they are actually present on the cognitive level of behavioral functioning” ( 1985 , p. 54). Contemporary social–cognitive thinking, as represented in Albert Bandura’s ( 1997 ) self-effi cacy theory, advances a tripartite temporal infl uence on behavioral self-regulation as generated by effi cacy beliefs grounded in past experiences, current appraisals, and refl ections on future options. Behavioral gerontologist Laura Carstensen and her colleagues (Carstensen et al. 1999 ) have proposed that the perception of time plays a funda-mental role in the selection and pursuit of social goals, with important implications for emotion, cognition, and motivation.

TP is the often nonconscious process whereby the continual fl ows of personal and social experiences are assigned to tem-poral categories, or time frames, that help to give order, coherence, and meaning to those events.

Lewin ( 1951 ) defi ned time perspective (TP) as “the totality of the individual’s views of his psychological future and psychological past existing at a given time” (p. 75).

he two patterns—monochronic and polychronic—form a continuum, because polychronicity is the extent to which people prefer to engage in two or more tasks simultaneously, and the complete absence of any simultaneous involvements, engaging tasks one at a time, is the least polychronic position on the continuum.

The retention of “many problems in their minds simultaneously” speaks direcdy to the definition of polychronicity, men­tal activity being a component of polychronicity as well as overt behavior (Per­sing 1999)

Demographic Characteristics.

Such questions not only point the direction for expanding our knowledge of polychronicity but also suggest the likelihood of various social and psycholog­ical determinants of it. One such determinant seems especially intriguing, and it is the individual’s breadth of attention. Breadth of attention is “the number and range of stimuli attended to at any one time” (Kasof 1997, p. 303). This concept is used to describe screeners, people who focus on a small range of stimuli and filter or “screen out” other stimuli. Conversely, nonscreeners attend to a large range of stimuli and are aware of a much larger range of potentially unrelated stimuli (Kasof 1997)

So does polychronicity scale? Or is it a nested phenomenon whereby someone might be monochronic within hour- long intervals but polychronic when the frame enlarges to a month? And if so, what might be the consequences of different nesting combinations?

figure 3.4. Forms of polychronic and monochronic patterns of behavior

June Cotte and S. Ratneshwar (1999) have certainly documented the ability of some people to vary their behavior radically along the polychronicity continuum as they moved between work and leisure activi­ties. Hall suggested the facility to make such shifts may be related to what he called a “high adaptive factor” (Bluedorn 1998, p. 114), such people being more flexible along the polychronicity continuum than others. In a life context of varying polychronicity demands, perhaps an individual whose own polychro­nicity lies near the average of the varying environmental demands might be able to cope most readily with them because the largest adjustment required would be smaller, hence less potentially uncomfortable or stressing than from any other position on the polychronicity continuum

Brown and Eisenhardt studied change and project management in com­puter firms and found that firms with less successful project portfolios demon­strated very low amounts of communication across projects. This was part of the context in which projects were planned, divided into small tasks, and then executed in a “structured sequence of steps” (1997, p. 14). A structured sequence is, of course, a monochronic strategy, and the low amount of communication is consistent with the proposition that monochronic strategies generate less awareness of other activities and tasks. One of the managers in their study re­marked, “Most people only look at their part” (p. 14); another, “The work of everyone else doesn’t really affect my work” (p. 14). These responses contrasted with the pattern of work in the companies that managed their portfolios of projects more successfully, which Brown and Eisenhardt characterized as “it­erative” (p. 14). Iterative (repetitive) patterns are suggestive of the back and forth flow of polychronic strategies

Group Effectiveness

So individual polychronicity is related to several individual variables. Rela­tive to less polychronic people, more polychronic people appear to have more of the following:• Extraversión (extroversion)• Favorable inclination toward change• Tolerance of ambiguity• Formal education• Striving for achievement• Impatience and irritability• Frequency of lateness and absenteeismThose same people appear to have less of the following:• Conscientiousness• Stress (only in some jobs)But, as will be revealed in the following section, these are not the only in­dividual variables to which individual polychronicity is related

Both studies reveal a positive correlation between polychronicity and speed values: The more polychronic the organization, the more doing things rapidly is valued in its culture. Although these consistent findings about the speed-polychronicity relationship support the explanation of the size- polychronicity relationship developed in this discussion, they are not a direct test of this explanation, which is, admittedly, speculative. More direct tests must await studies deliberately designed to investigate this explanation

in a more polychronic culture, people would stand closer to each other while talking. So time and space are related in the social as well as the physical world.

At the level of individual beliefs and behavior, the nature of polychronicity as either a trait or a state becomes an important issue. Ifit is a trait, individu­als will be much more consistent, even habitual, in the polychronicity process strategies they follow, more consistent than if polychronicity preferences are a state. But if polychronicity is a state, it will be affected much more by the con­textual factors in an individual’s environment, leading to much greater vari­ability in patterns of polychronicity behavior. So the degree of stability or its converse, the amount of variability, would provide important clues about poly­chronicity’s statelike or traitlike identity.

At the group level—group referring to all potential culture-carrying aggre­gations larger than a single individual (e.g., departments, organizations, soci­eties, etc.)—polychronicity is a value and belief complex that manifests itself in overt process strategies. Although the strength with which it is held may vary, as a fundamental process strategy—it is fair to say the fundamental process strategy—whichever position along the polychronicity continuum is normative in a culture is apt to be held strongly. This is because such process strategies are mainly learned unintentionally, usually unconsciously. Such learned knowledge is retained at the level of culture Edgar Schein (1992) labeled basic underlying assumptions. This deepest of cultural levels normally contains beliefs and val­ues prescribing behaviors that are so taken for granted and institutionalized that they seldom rise to the conscious level for extensive examination and dis­cussion (Schein 1992, p. 22). Consequently, they are difficult to change, and in this sense they are strongly held.

From the beginning (Hall 1981b), polychronicity has been analyzed at both the group and individual levels. As such, it has been seen as both a cultural and an individual phenomenon. And values about the same phenomenon can and do occur in both cultures and personalities, but this does not mean that rela­tionships involving them are the same across levels of analysis (e.g., Dansereau, Alutto, and Yammarino 1984; Robinson 1950). Relationships found at one level of analysis, individual or group, are suggestive of those relationships at another and are reasonable justifications for hypothesizing their existence as a prelude to their empirical investigation, such investigation clearly being necessary to establish the existence of relationships across multiple levels of analysis

Although it is easier to see this distinction in terms of a dichot­omy—polychronic or monochronic—polychronicity is a variable that reflects an underlying continuum of engagement preferences and practices, and a po­tentially infinite set of gradations distinguish one individual’s preferences from another’s, as well as one culture’s from another’s

Moreover, the correlations between the preference-for-engaging-two- or-more-events-simultaneously dimension and the other dimensions in the best-fitting model were very low, so Palmer and Schoorman concluded, “The three dimensions of time use preference [ preference-for-engaging-two-or- more-events-simultaneously], time tangibility, and context do not represent . highly correlated measures and should be considered separately” (1999, p. 336).

Following Blue­dorn et al. (1999, p. 207) and Hall (Bluedorn 1998, p. no), polychronicity is the extent to which people (1) prefer to be engaged in two or more tasks or events simultaneously and are actually so engaged (the preference strongly implying the behavior and vice versa), and (2) believe their preference is the best way to do things.

The “going back” is indicative of the back-and-forth pattern of polychronic behavior, because it is another way of engaging several activities during the same tim

And although an infinite number of patterns are possible, all strategies for engaging life’s activities fall along a con­tinuum known as polychronicity, a continuum describing the extent to which people engage themselves in two or more activities simultaneously. That this choice is fundamental is revealed by the fact that most people most of the time are unaware that they are even making it. This is because the choice of strategy results from a combination of culture and personality, both of which store these choices and preferences at deep levels, very deep levels. Nevertheless, a choice or a decision made unconsciously is still a choice or a decision

A concept in Anthony Giddens’s structuration theory explains how pat­terns like these are maintained with such regularity and precision. The concept is “duality of structure,” by which Giddens meant that “the structured proper­ties of social systems are simultaneously the medium and outcome of social acts(Giddens’s emphasis; 1995, p· 19)·

Thus for meaning (significance) to be attributed to events, behaviors, and objects, to things in general, they must be seen in their relationships with other things. They can have no meaning as isolated phenomena.

Barbara Adam said it well: “Much like people in their every­day lives, social scientists take time largely for granted. Time is such an obvi­ous factor in social science that it is almost invisible” (1990, p. 3).

Less explicit and less emphasized in the literature is time’s role in the creation of meaning. Malinowski and Adam hint at this capability in their statements: “sentimental necessity,” “orientation,” and “symbol for the conceptual organisation of natural and social events,” the last of the three phrases most directly indicating time’s role in generating meaning. So both capabilities increase with the development of greater temporal expertise.

Bronislaw Malinowski addressed the functions of time as fol­lows: “A system of reckoning time is a practical, as well as a sentimental, ne­cessity in every culture, however simple. Members of every human group have the need of coordinating various activities, of fixing dates for the future, of placing reminiscences in the past, of gauging the length of bygone periods and of those to come” (1990, p. 203). Sixty-three years later Barbara Adam would state it thus: “As ordering principle, social tool for co-ordination, orientation, and regulation, as a symbol for the conceptual organisation of natural and so­cial events, social scientists view time as constituted by social activity” (1990, p. 42).

As with the geological epochs and archeological ages, human times become more epochal as they become more homogeneous within themselves and more differentiated from other periods, units, or types. In analysis of variance (anova) terms, the times become more epochal as the within-unit variance decreases and the between-type variance increases. Movement toward more epochal times is illustrated by phrases such as the “New York minute.” This metaphor for the fast pace of life in New York City (see Levine 1997; also see Chapter 4) is so effective because it violates a tacit understanding about min­utes:

Thinking in terms of degrees of difference rather than just two extremes allows more precise statements to be made about the form of time under consideration than if one’s conceptual portfolio contained only the two extreme forms

Epochal time is defined by events. The time is in the events; the events do not occur in time. Events occurring in an independent time is the fungible time concept that Newton described so influentially as absolute time and Whitehead described so critically as a “metaphysical monstrosity.” When the time is in the event itself, the event defines the time. To take an everyday example, is it time for lunch or is it lunchtime?

I have written elsewhere that time “is a collective noun” (Bluedorn 2000e, p. 118). That pithy statement summed up the belief that there is more than one kind of time. For example, Paul Davies thought long and hard about time, es­pecially as it is conceptualized in the physical sciences. Yet despite those labors, he felt time’s mystery still: “It is easy to conclude that something vital remains missing, some extra quality to time left out of the equations, or that there is more than one sort of time” (Davies’ emphasis; 1995, p. 17). So in the physical sciences just as in the social, the possibility is explicitly recognized that there may be more than one kind of time.

Several of the distinctions drawn by Joseph McGrath and Nancy Rotch- ford (1983, pp. 60-62) to describe the dominant concept of time held by West­ern industrialized societies in the twentieth century seem to describe this type of time well. This temporal form is homogeneous, which means that one tem­poral unit is the same as any other unit of the same type, and this means that such units are conceptually interchangeable with each other.

So the vital point is that all conceptions of time are and always will be social constructions, which is, in Barbara Adam’s words, “the idea that all time is social time” (1990, p. 42). After all, all human knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is socially constructed knowledge. But this point does not ipso facto invalidate any or all concepts of time. Their validity rests, instead, on their utility for various purposes, such as prediction and understanding. And as societies and cultures evolve, it is likely, perhaps even incumbent, for their concepts of time to evolve as well. So it would be well to understand how concepts of time differ in order to understand them and their differences better.

Temporal RealitiesSome theorists have taken the multiple-types approach further and pro­posed multiple types of time that are arranged in hierarchies. It is interesting to note that these approaches all seem to rely on a hierarchical view of reality itself.

Another way of saying this is that there is no imperative to see such categories as mutually exclusive. Neither partner is the true, real, or even preferred time; instead, they may coexist, in­termingle, and even be tightly integrated in specific social systems.

a binary classification system exacerbates this tendency, with one choice receiving the imprimatur of “real time” and the alternative being condemned as a “perversion” of it, if it is perceived at all

metaphor is a potentially powerful tool for understanding human beliefs and behavior, and the meta­phors people hold about organizations (which encompass much of the way they define organizational reality) explain much about the decisions they make and the actions they take (see Morgan 1997, especially p. 4).

The possibility that time can explain other phenomena, especially human be­havior, is the scientific raison d’être for studying time and caring about it: If times differ, different times should produce different effects. And an impor­tant mechanism through which differing times affect human behavior is thedefinition of the situation

Time is a social construction, or more properly, times are socially constructed, which means the concepts and values we hold about various times are the prod­ucts of human interaction (Lauer 1981, p. 44). These social products and beliefs are generated in groups large and small, but it is not that simple. For contrary to Emile Durkheim’s assertion, not everyone in the group holds a common time, a time “such as it is objectively thought of by everybody in a single civilization” (1915, p. 10). This is so because in the perpetual structuration of social life (Gid­dens 1984) individuals bring their own interpretations to received social knowl­edge, and these interpretations add variance to the beliefs, perceptions, and val­ues.

However, as Mark Poster points out, 'the new level of interconnectivity heightens the fragility of the social net­works. '·50 The source of control now undermines its execu­tion. For clock time to exist and thus to be measurable and controllable there has to be duration, an interval between two points in time. Without duration there is no before and after, no cause and effect, no stretch of time to be measured. The principles of instantaneity and simultaneity of action across space, as I have shown in chapter 3, are encountered in quantum physics; they have no place in the Newtonian world of causality and bodies in motion, the world chat we as embodied beings inhabit. The control of time that has reached the limit of compression has been shifted into a time world where notions of control are meaningless. More like the realm of myths and mysticism, the electronic world of interchangeable no-where and now-here requires knowledge and modes of being that are alien to the industrial way of life. Other modes of temporal existence, therefore, may hold some viral keys, their 'primitive' understanding of time point­ing not ro control but to more appropriate ways of being in the realm of insrantaneity.

I propose that we think a bout temporal relations with reference to a cluster of tem­poral features, each implicated in all the others but not nec­essarily of equal importance in each instance. We might call this cluster a timescape. The notion of 'scape' is important here as it indicates, first, that time is inseparable from space and matter, and second, that context matters.

This control clusrer of the five Cs of time, I have suggested, needs to be differentiated from both time tempering and transcendence, on the one hand, and time knowledge and know-how, on the other, since only in the control cluster is time objectified, externalized and con­structed to specific design principles.

Once time is disembedded, that is, extracted from process and product, it becomes an object and as such subiect to bounding, exchange and transformation.40 It is in this form that time is colonized,, as distinct from the time embedded in events and processes, which has been subject ito cultural efforts of transcendence.

It shows thar irrespective of the diverse temporal uses of time in the political, scientific and economic spheres, a unified clock time underpins the differences in ex­pressions. All other forms of temporal relations are refracted through chis created temporal form, or at least touched by its pervasive dominance

This industrial norm, as I suggested above, is fundamen­tally rooted in clock time and underpinned by naturalized assumptions about not just the capacity but also the need to commodify, compress and control time.

There are two sides to the colonization of time: the global imposition of a particular kind of time which is colonization with time, and the social incursion into time -past and future, night-time and seasons, for example -which is the colonization of time. Colonization with time therefore refers to the export of clock and commodified time as unquestioned and unquestionable standard, colonization of time to the sci­entific, technological and economic reach into time -most usually of distant others who have no say in the matter.

'Interconnectivity', Hassan suggests, 'is what gives the network time its power within culture and society.'32 It is worth quoting him at length here. Network time does not 'kill' or render 'timeless' other tem­poralities, clock-time or otherwise. The embedded nature of the 'multiplicity' of temporalities rbat pervade culture and society, and tbe deeply intractable relationship we have with rhe clock make this unlikely. Rather, the process is one of 'displacement'. Network time constitutes a new and powerful temporality that is beginning to displace, neutralise, sublimate and otherwise upset other temporal relationships in our work, home and leisure environments

This network time transforms social time into two allied but distinct forms: simultaneity and timelessness. 29 Simultaneity refers to the globally networked immediacy of communication provided by satellite television and the internee, which makes real-time exchanges possible irrespective of the distances involved. Timelessness, the more problematic concept, refers to the lay­ering of time, the mixing of tenses, the editing of sequences, the splicing together of unrelated events. It points co the general loss of chronological order and context-dependent rhythmicity. It combines eternity with ephemeralicy, real time with contextual change. Castells designates timeless time as 'the dominant temporality of our society'

In Castells's analysis, time is not merely compressed but processed, and it is the network rather than acceleration that constitutes the discontinuity in a context of continuing compress10n.

In a systematic analysis Castells contrasts the clock time of modernity with the network time of the network society.

Virilio suggests that we can read the history of modernity as a series of innovations iu ever-increasing time compression. He argues that, through the ages, the wealth and power associated with ownership of land was equally tied to the capacity to traverse it and to the speed at which this could be achieved.

From the above we can see that Virilio understands human history in terms of a race with time, of ever-increasing speeds that transcend humans' biological capacity. To theorize culture without the dromosphere, that is, the sphere of beings in motion, he therefore sugges,ts, misses the key point of cul­tural activity and the uniqueness of the industrial way of life. Without an explicit conceptualization of the contemporary dromosphere -or in my terms timescape -it is thus difficult to fully understand the human-technology-science-economy­equity-environmenr constellation. Moreover, it becomes impossible to appreciate that people are che weakest link when the time frames of action are compressed to zero and effects expand to eternity, when transmission and transplan­tation are instantaneous but their outcomes extend into an open future, when instantaneity and eternity are combined in a discordant fusion of all times.

the potential capacity of exterrirorial beings to be everywhere at once and nowhere in particular is inescapably tied to operators that are bounded by their embodied temporal limits of terrestrial existence and sequential information processing. The actual capacity for parallel absorption of knowledge, therefore, is hugely disap­pointing. Equally, the electronic capacity to be now-here and no-where has brought the body to a standstill.

The over­load of information, for example, is becoming so extensive that taking advantage of only the tiniest fraction of it not only blows apart the principle of instantaneity and 'real-time' communication, but also slows down operators to a pomt where they lose themselves in the eternity of electronically networked information.

The intensive {elec­tronic) present, Virilio suggests, is no longer part of chrono­logical time; we have to conceptualize it instead _as chronoscopic time. Real space, he argues, is making room for decontextualized 'real-time' processes and intensity takes over from extensity.11 This in turn has consequences and, similar to the time compression in transport, the compression in transmission has led to a range of paradoxical effects.

With respect to twentieth-century transmission Virilio has in mind the wireless telegraph, telephone, radio and subse­quent developments in computer and satellite communica­tion, which have once more changed the relationship between time and movement across space. Together, these innovations in transmission replaced succession and duration with seeming simultaneity and instantaneity. Duration has been compressed to zero and the present extended spatially to encircle the globe: it became a global present.

In economic production, time compression has been achieved by a number of means: by increasing the activity within the same unit of tifYle (through machines and the inten­sification of labour), reorganizing the sequence and ordering of activities (Tay!orism and Fordism), using peaks and troughs more effective!�· (flexibilization), and by eliminating all unproductive times from the process ( the just-in-time system of production, delivery and consumption).

A third paradox is only hinted at by Vmho, when he suggests that conflict is to be expected between democracy and dromocracy, the politics that take account of time and the speed of movement across space.20 It concerns the sociopolitical and socioeconomic relations associated with advances in transport speed, which affect dif­ferent indivi�uals, groups and classes of society in uneven ways.

Rifkin and Howard point out, 'the faster we speed up, the faster we degrade

In the light of this evidence, which is fully supported by transport research, 17 Virilio formulated the �romological law, which states that increase in speed mcreases the potential for gridlock.

the relations of time and their socio-environmental impacts, underlying assumptions and their material expres­sions, institutional processes and recipients' experiences, hidden agendas and power relations, unquestioned time pol­itics and 'othering' practices.9

While interest and credit had been known and documented since 3000 BC in Babylonia, it was not until the late Middle Ages that the Christian Church slowly and almost surrepti­tiously changed its position on usury,6 which set time free for trade to be allocated, sold and controlled. It is against this back�round that we have to read the extr�cts from Benjar1_1in Franklin's text of 1736, quoted at length m chapter 2, which contains the famous phrases 'Remember, that time is money ... Remember that money begets money.'7 Clock time, the created time to human design, was a precondition for this change in value and practice and formed the perfect partner to abstract, decontextualized money. From the Middle Ages, trade fairs existed where the trade in time became commonplace and calculations about future prices an integral part of commerce. In addition, internatio�al trade by sea required complex calculations about pote�ual profit and loss over long periods, given that trade ships might be away for as long as three years at a time. The time economy of interest and credit, moreover, fed directly into the monetary value of labour time, that is, paid employme�t as an integral part of the production of goo?s and serv_1ce�. However it was not until the French Revolunon that the md1-vidual (�eaning male) ownership of time became enshrined as a legal right

The task for social theory, therefore, is to render the invisible visible, show relations and intercon­nections, begin tbe process of questioning the unquestioned. Before we can identify some of these economic relations of temporal inequity, however, we first need to understand in what way the sin of usury was a barrier to the develop­ment of economic life as we know it today in industrial societies.

Marx's princi­pal point regarding the commodification of time was that an empty, abstract, quantifiable time that was applicable any­where, any time was a precondition for its use as an abstract exchange value on the one hand and for the commodification of labour and nature on the other. Only on the basis of this neutral measure could time take such a pivotal position in all economic exchange.

Clock time, the human creation, as I have shown, operates accord­ing to fundamentally different principles from rhe ones ��der­pinning the times of tbe cosmos, �ature and the spmt�al realm of eternity. It is a decontextuahzed empty ume that nes the measurement of motion to expression by number. Not change, creativity and process, but static states are given a number value in the temporal frames of calendars and clocks. The artifice rather than the processes of cosmos, nature and spirit, we need to appreciate, came to be the object of trade, control and colonization.

The creation of time to human design m an atemporal, decontextualized form, as outlined in chapter 5, was a nec­essary techno-material condition for the use of time by indus­trial societies as an abstract exchange value and for the acceleration, control and global imposition of time.

This is so because all cultures, ancient and modern, have established collective ways of relat­ing to the past and future, of synchronizing their activities, of coming to terms with finitude. How we extend ourselves into the past and future, how we pursue immortality and how we temporally manage, organize and regulate our social affairs, however, has been culturally, historically and contex­tually distinct. Each htstorical epoch with its new forms of socioeconomic expression is simultaneously restructuring its social relations of time.

the Reformation had a major role to play in the metamor­phosis of time from God's gift to commodified, comp�essed, colonized and controlled resource. These four Cs of mdus­trial time -comrnodification, compression, colonization and control -will be the focus in these pages, the fifth C of the creation of clock time having been discussed already in the previous chapter. I show their interdependence and id�ntify some of the socio-environmental impacts of those parttcular temporal relations.

The Quest for Time Control

er. Each of these choices reflect power dynamics and conflicting tensions. Desires for ‘presence’ or singular focus often conflict with obligations to be responsive and integrate ‘work’ and ‘life

How do we understand such mosaictime in terms of striving for balance? Temporal units are rarely single-purpose and their boundaries and dependencies are often implicit. What sociotemporal values should we be honoring? How can we account for time that fits on neither side of a scale? How might scholarship rethink balance or efficiency with different forms of accounting, with attention to institutions as well as individuals?

Leshed and Sengers’s research reminds us that calendars are not just tools for the management of time, but are also sites of identity work where people can project to themselves and others the density of their days and apparent ‘success’ at doing it all[26]. These seemingly innocuous artifacts can thus perpetuate deeper normative logics a

. When creating tools for schedulingandcoordination, it is crucial to provide ways for people to take into account not just the multiplicity of (potentially dissonant) rhythms [22, 46], but also the differential affective experiencesof time rendered by such rhythms.

rid. The apparent equivalency of thesetime chunksmask the affective experiences and emotional intensities of lived temporality

Our rendering of porous time imagines a newperspective on time, in whichthe dominant temporal logic expandsbeyond ideals of control and mastery to include navigation(with or without conscious attention) of that which cannot be gridded or managed: the temporal trails, multiple interests, misaligned rhythms and expectations of others.

Taken together, an orientation to time as spectral, mosaic, rhythmic (dissonant),and obligatedsuggestsa possible alternate understanding of what time is and how it can work.An initial typology ofporous time honors the fluidity of time and its unexpected shifts; it also acknowledges novel integrations of time in everyday practice. Addressingthese alternate temporal realities allows us to build on CSCW’s legacy of related research to questionthereach and scope of thedominant temporal logic.

Yet, thepromise of social control affordedby information and communication technologies belies the inadequacy ofthe dominant temporal logic.

A close look at the ways that people continually navigate the expectations and rhythms of those around them reveals how much the rhetoric of time management and control, built on the assumption that one is a solo temporal agent,is a fiction.To be considered a success in various social arenas (either via internal assessment or external validation) means that individualsoften cannot choose whether or not to attend to certain temporal obligations.

This social state obligatesindividuals to navigate a temporal web of moral and professional expectations, and accountabilities to others. These temporalobligations affect tempora

In contrast to the assumption oftime as linear, with ordered chunks progressing ina straightforward manner, people often negotiate time rhythmically, arranging timein patterns and tempos that do not always co-exist harmoniously.

In contrast to the assumption oftime as linear, with ordered chunks progressing ina straightforward manner, people often negotiate time rhythmically, arranging timein patterns and tempos that do not always co-exist harmoniously. In line with earlier CSCW findings [e.g., 4, 9, 45, 46], we term thisrhythmic time, which acknowledges both the rhythmic nature of temporal experience as well a potential disorderliness or ‘dissonance’ when temporal rhythms conflict.Like mosaic time, bringing dissonant rhythms into semi-alignment requires adaptation, work, and patience.

Thinking abouttime as mosaic raises numerous questionsabout:when the mosaic is and is not obvious; what forms of interaction (or tiles) are given priority in any one moment; what skillsareneeded to engage in mosaic time with more or less effort; and what the effects of mosaic timeareon concentration, stress, and affect. Mosaic time appears mostsuccessful when people engage in attention switching in order to enact multiple social roles at once.

By mosaic, we mean that time is often simultaneouslyinhabited by multiple types of interaction that are forced to form a coherent whole. Unlikeconcepts like multi-tasking(doing multiple tasks ‘at once’) or polychronicity(a reported preference for doing multiple tasks at once) [44], mosaic timerefers to the negotiated merging of multiple social spheres into a layered or fitted set of simultaneous interactions

. Notably, this lack of predictability had large social, rather than individual, implications—a finding that strongly echoes prior CSCW research [1, 4, 13, 15, 20, 22, 34, 35, 36, 38, 45, 46, 59]

In alignmentwith Reddy and Dourish’s concept of temporal trajectory [45], spectral time suggests that temporal experience is more than a grid of accountable blocks; multiple temporalities create flowsthat often defy both logical renderingand seamless manipulation

Our data reveal that not every temporal experience is easily articulated, planned for, measurable orable to be renderedinto a schedule.We call these temporal experiences spectral time,to capture howtime trailsor ghostsin ways that cannot always be expected, planned, or accounted for.Spectral time referencesmoments that do not lend themselves to scheduling(i.e. chunking), either because the act seems toomundane to justify articulation (i.e., getting dressed), because it is difficult to assess (i.e., travel time) or simply because it cannot be anticipated (i.e., creative phases).

bels. To date, we have found that our subjects have a minimal ability, and almost no language, to discuss the vagaries of time. In general, people attempt to negotiate their subjective experiences of time through the assumptions of the dominant temporal logic outlined a

In witnessing how people struggle toorient to the dominant temporal logic,we find it isinsufficient to encapsulate temporal experiences. Thus, we now theorizea set of expanded notions, an initial typology that we call ‘porous time’.

One of the ways that a temporal logic becomesvisible for analysis and critique is through the tensions that emerge when its assumptions and norms do not align with daily experience. In our collective fieldwork we have observedmultiple examples of mundane dailypractices coming into conflict withthe logic that time is, or should be, chunk-able, singular purpose, linear, and/or owned.These tensionshelp bring to the fore the extent of the dominant temporal logic and showcase the inadequacy of this narrow set of assumptions to fully describetemporal experiences.

We call this prevailing temporal logic ‘circumscribed time.’ We use this label to highlight the underlying orientation to time as a resource that can, and should, be mastered. A circumscribed temporal logic infers that time should be harnessed into ‘productive’ capacity by approaching it as something that can be chunked, allocated to a single use, experienced linearly, and owned. In turn, the norms of society place the burden on individuals to manage and ‘balance’ time as a steward, optimizing this precious resource by way of control and active manipulation.

Finally,time is understood asaresource that is owned by an individual and thus needs to be managed and apportioned by that individual.Like personal income, time is a resource that the individual has both the burden and responsibility to manage well. This vision of time reflects an assumption there are ‘better’ or ‘worse’ ways to use, spend and save time and it is up to the individual to engage in practices of temporal ownership. Controlling time doesnot suggest thatan individual can speed up or slow down time, but rather,suggeststhat timecan be personally configured to meet individual aims or goals.

Thedominant temporal logicalso conceptualizestime aslinear. In other words,one chunk of time leads to another in a straight progression. While chunks of time can be manipulated and reordered in the course of a day (or week, or month), each chunk of time has a limited duration and each activity has a beginning and an end. An hour is an hour is an hour, and in the course of a day (or a lifetime) hours stack up like a vector, moving one forward in a straightforward progression.

Aligned with chunk-able time is the assumption that each chunk of time, or its particular gridded arrangement, is allocated to a single purpose.

appointment. Time chunksopen up the possibility for future-oriented temporal manipulation and valuation; they assumethat we are able to know, in advance, the duration of tasks and experiences.

The expectation that time is chunk-able is conditioned by an understanding that time exists in units (a second, a minute, a year) and that temporal units are equal–that can be swapped and exchanged with relative ease.

the nature of timethat reflect a dominant temporal logic –specifically that timeischunkable, single-purpose, linearandownable

A temporal logicoperatesat multiple levels. It is perpetuated insocialand cultural discourse; is embedded in institutional expectations and policies; drivesthe design and implementation of technologies;establishes resilient social norms; and provides a cache of normative, rational examples to draw on when individuals needtomake sense of their everyday engagements with time. When a tool like Microsoft Outlook is designed, presented, and justified in a marketing campaign it is both reflecting and perpetuating atemporal logic.

According to Egger and Wagner, this orientation, which we refer to as circumscribed time,holds that”time is homogeneous, objective, measurable, and infinitely divisible” [11:249].It is this conceptualization of time—and its implications—that we analyze, critique, and try to reframein this paper

In previous temporalities research,scholars have drawn productively on Zerubavel’s similar concept of a sociotemporal order–an orientation to time that is shared amongst a social group and thusly produces coordinated rhythms and temporal alignments [15, 53]

In particular, by temporal logicwe mean the socially legitimated, shared assumptions about time that areembedded in institutional and societal norms, discourses, material and technological processes, and shared ideologies. A temporal logic defines what is rational, normal and expected, andimbues a society with a definitionof what time is that directsindividuals in how they should operate in and through time.It provides an understanding of time that becomes so embedded that it seems to define reality.

While some of this research has been aimed at building technologies to better support multi-tasking, other research has been critical, pointing out the negative consequences of distraction and task-switching [29]. A parallel line of thinking, called ‘presence bleed’ [16], articulates the way that multi-tasking and extended temporal boundaries blur individuals’ professional and personal identities as work bleeds into and throughout multiple spheres

CSCW has been investigating the relationship of time and work practically from its inception as a scholarly fiel

What would it look like to more explicitly acknowledge power dynamics in information and communication technologies? In the tradition of critical and reflective design [50], how might CSCW scholarship think about designing technologies that ‘protect’ users from temporal obligations and render messiness and disorganization a possible way of engaging with time?

The temporal logic of circumscribed time falls short of describing, let alone organizing, the complex temporalities that govern American lives today. As an expansion of the dominant logic, porous time aims toprovide a more nuanced account of howtemporality shapes interactions among people, technologies, and the

We find and name an emergent set of temporal elements–spectral, mosaic,rhythmicand obligatedtime–which implicitly challenge the assumptions of the dominant logic. We call this collective set ‘porous time.’

s ‘circumscribed time.’This logic, which is embedded in many popular tools, current scholarship,and especially in the discourse of time management, is characterized by assumptions that time is chunk-able(i.e. unitized and measurable), oriented to a single purpose, experiencedlinearly, and owned by individuals

temporal logic–a particular orientation to time that manifests in time-related social norms, moral judgments, daily practices, and technologies for scheduling and coordinat

Cooperation and collaboration, both core activities within this domain, require attention to temporal patterns almost by definition, whether it be in the sequential ordering of interdependent tasks or the particular rhythms of subgroups. Despite this core focus, Steinhardt and Jackson [53] suggest that time continues tobe a fertile topic to explore within the field of CSCW. A richer understanding of the ways that time animates the multiple overlapping domains of contemporary professional and social—and now highly mobile—lives is needed. We respond to this call by returning to our field’s legacy of interrogating the design, use and resistance to temporal technologies such as calendars and scheduling softwareto showcase how certain logics of time pervade everyday sociotechnical practices, both inside the office and out.

One of the foremost contributions of Saussure to semiology was his claim that indi- vidual signs are always part of larger systemic wholes and that the meaning of any particular sign is essentially a function of the way in which it is related to other signs within the same system of signification. Finding out the meaning of any particular sign thus is possible only within the context of the entire symbolic system within which it is anchored, since it is necessary to first examine its relations to other signs wit

Along similar lines, while the sequential order in which we arrange items is usually indicative of their relative priority to us, the essence of such a symbolic relationship is by no means unproblematic

The degree of rigidity with which we schedule events is also indicative of their relative importance

The degree of firmness and finality with which we schedule events is usually also indicative of their relative i

Given the association of access to private time with intimacy, consider also the symbolic implications of ever-availability (Zerubavel 1981, p. 146). Admittedly becom- ing increasingly anachronistic with bureaucratization (Zerubavel 1981, pp. 153-166), the quality of being always accessible nevertheless remains a powerful symbol of a rapidly dying traditional social order and is still strongly cherished and admired within traditional domains of social life such a

venings and weekends. Given our association of exclusivity with intimacy (Simmel 1950, pp. 126-132; Zerubavel 1982b, pp. 100-102), we usually attach particular significance to contacts that take place at times that are socially defined as more private. Since people are generally expected to be less accessi- ble during such time periods, contacts that do occur within them tend to acquire a special meaning (Zerubavel 1

The negative connotations of long stretches of waiting time also become apparent once we examine the symbolic implications of the frequency at which social contacts occu

Shorter waiting time entails greater speed, the symbolic implications of which become quite apparent when one considers urgency a

Consider also the symbolic dimension of lead time (Hall 1959, p. 17). Essentially defining themselves as less accessible, the powerful and eminent usually also demand longer advance notice when being approached, occasionally making others wait longer before they can reach them for the mere sake of displaying the r

ard them. Being on time, on the other hand, is symboli- cally indicative of the respect we feel toward others, the extreme form of "ritual wait- ing" being an explicit symbolic display

cance. Waiting, for example (which, given the modern utilitarian approach to time [Zerubavel 1981, pp. 54-59], is generally regarded as an ordeal), is normally associated with worthlessness, and making others wait is often regarded as a symbolic display of deg

The amount of time we are willing to devote to the various relations in which we are involved and organizations to which we belong clearly reflects the level of our commit- ment to each of them

While only few of us may have been formally sensitized to it, we all seem to be tacitly aware of the way in which the amount of time we allow an event or activity to last is symbolically associated with the degree of significance we attach

Timing as a

article, time clearly constitutes a quasi-linguistic nonverbal system of signification that deserves the full attention of students of symbolic communication. As we have seen, both individuals and societies use this "language" in their "speech," essentially manipulating various dimensions of temporality as virtual semiotic codes through which they manage to convey critical social messages without ha

In short, the "language of time" identified here is by no means a merely intellectual phenomenon invented by sociology. Not only are we all aware of its existence, we also use it quite actively in our own "speech."7 The manipulative use of temporality is quite evident not only at the macrosocial level of societal politics, but also at the microsocial level of interpersonal relations. We employ the language of time quite strategically in our every- day "speech" and, quite often, what appears on the surface as entirely spontaneous behavior may actually involve a deliberate manipulation of temporal circu

Temporal contrasts can be used not only to substantiate abstract conceptual contrasts but also to help accentuate actual social and political ones (Zerubavel 1985, pp. 47, 71-7

It was Bergson (1960, pp. 98-128, 226-240) who first sensitized us to the qualitative dimension of time by noting how we often experience mathematically identical dura- tions as having quite different feeling tones. Ho

implies the virtual inseparability of semantics from syntactics, and, indeed, Saussure's followers are often quite appropriately called structuralists, as they view signs not so much in terms of their substantive "content" as in terms of the ways in which they are formally related to other signs (i.e., in terms of the structure of the symbolic system to which they belong). More specifically, they tend to focus particularly on the formal relation of opposition or contrast, because, "in any semiological system, whatever distin- guishes one sign from the oth

Given our tendency to reify social reality (Berger and Luckmann 1967, pp. 89-92, 134-136), we often regard the association of particular "signifiers" with particular "signifieds" (Saussure 1959, p. 67) as inevitable. Such symbolic relations, however, are essentially conventional and, quite often, arbitrary (Durkheim 1965, pp. 261-265; Mead 1934, pp. 117-125; Peirce 1932, Vol. 2, pp. 165-169; Saussure 1959, pp. 67

Culture, according to semiotics, is a communicational system consisting of various messages conveyed by and to members through the use of certain codes (Leach 1976; Lvi-Strauss 196

ticulate them verbally. Examining the symbolic relations between the temporal and the social within the contexts of both interpersonal relations and societal politics will reveal an intricate semiotic system that seems to operate at both the microsocial and m

Extending such endeavors to the domain of temporality, the present article attempts to develop a distinctively semiotic perspective on time. Aiming at laying out the rudi- mentary foundations of a semiotics of temporality, I shall examine the way people practically manipulate time as a virtual code through which they manage to convey many important social messages without having to a

This point ties into the conceptualisation of time as collec-tive [29] and entangled [43]. The infrastructure that sup-ports a 24/7 society is one that relies on people as well as technologies, the conventional nine-to-five work rhythm, for example, being underpinned by people working shifts outside of these hours.

Orlikowski and Yates [34], working in the field of organization studies, build on this point. They argue that time is plural; it can be experienced as objective, quantitative and independent of humankind, but also as subjective, situated and socially constructed.

Designing for an alternative temporal experience means understanding the ways in which multiple temporali-ties intersect, whether these frame a person’s working day, or allow a family to spend time together. While scheduling technologies do of course have a role to play here [see e.g. 31], many of the temporal structures that frame everyday life are not so much scheduled as unfold in a way that isunremarkable [54], or are so firmly established that they are no longer seen as alterable.

In his analysis of the concept, Southerton [45] identifies quality time as a contemporary concern, and uses it alongside an analysis of diaries written in 1937 and 2000 to examine the impression that everyday life is speeding up. His findings lead him to argue that the feeling of time pressure that seems inherent to modern life is due to difficulties in coor-dinating practices, rather than the sheer density of events that need to be accomplished.

Yet, Grosse-Hering et al.’s findings make clear the need to ad-dress multiple temporalities, and prior research in CSCW has emphasised how understanding the ways in which dif-ferent temporal structures intersect is essential to designing for the felt experience of time.

In these analyses of plasticity we see how, like clock time, digital time is not simply a property of technologies, nor does it straightforwardly emerge as a sociotechnical con-vention associated with their use. Rather, it has coevolved with broader shifts in the temporality of everyday life, such as the emergence of fractured rhythms, and the associated need to fill the gaps between them.

While Rattenbury et al. highlight web browsing as the per-fect plastic activity, the concept has also been applied to television watching by Irani et al. [20].

Plastic time is described as unanticipated, un-reflexive and fluid, as the “experience of temporal ‘scraps’, of gapsin the schedule”, and as “the negative space of busyness”[p. 233]. Plastic time flies under the radar, being unplanned and non-immersive, and associated with neither productivi-ty nor leisure. It is interruptible, but can also expand until some other activity presents itself.

Accord-ingly, and in the interests of exploring how broader shifts in time use have may coevolved with digital technologies, we now look to work by Rattenbury et al. [37], which relates the always-on quality of digital technologies to more gen-eral shifts in the organization of everyday life. These are changes that have resulted in a temporal experience that they describe as plastic, a temporal experience that is both shaped by and shapes the use of digital technologies.

The temporal experience is as much a product of the ways in which the technologies are used as it is a feature of their design. This points to how, just as has been argued for the case of clocks, digital technologies and practices have coevolved to underpin particular experiences of time.

Instead, technologies and the uses made of them are positioned as coevolving, with new temporal knowledges being gradually accumulated and integrated into the practices of everyday life.

For example, in his classic analysis of the his-tory of the machine, Lewis Mumford [30] notes that, “Abstract time became the new medium of existence. Or-ganic functions themselves were regulated by it: one ate, not upon feeling hungry, but when prompted by the clock: one slept, not when one was tired, but when the clock sanc-tioned it.” [p. 17]

For them, clock time is best understood as sets of practices, which are bound up with time-reckoning and time-keeping technologies, butwhich vary and are shaped by different times, places and communities. This view of clock time is quite different to that often de-picted in the literature, where it is positioned as abstract and mechanistic.

We then detail a position outlined by Glennie and Thrift [12], in which clock time is described as a series of practices rather than a concept created by new timekeep-ing technologies.

This leads us to argue that ‘redesigning’ the experience of time as me-diated by technologies necessitates a broader way of deal-ing with the rhythms and routines that frame their use. We consider what role technology might play in this, through shaping temporal infrastructures and shifting reified tem-poral patterns. We conclude by noting the considerable challenges that this entails, especially in view of recent ac-counts that position time as collective and entangled.

sregarded. Temporal Design attempts to counteract these effects by drawing attention to social practices of time. Time is a social process, tacitly defined through everyday practices. It is rehearsed, learned, designed, created, storied, and made. This aspect however is often overlooked not only by designers, but also by society in general. Designers can have a key role in unlocking the hegemonic narratives that restrict cultural understandings of time and in opening up new ways of making, living and thinking

As the original visions for Slow Design and Slow Technology suggest, the world is comprised of multiple temporal expressions, which play important roles in our lives, even if disregarded within dominant accounts of what ti

While the Printer Clock focused on emphasising the embodied and situated nature of time, pointing to the mesh of activities and characters that come together to create time, the TimeBots drew attention to personal rhythms and how they played out within the context of the classroom

e students. The TimeBots interacted with each other on a different level, revealing the subjective timescap

4.3.3 TimeBotsWhile the Printer Clock focused on emphasising the embodied and situated nature of time, pointing to the mesh of activities and characters that come together to create time, the TimeBots drew attention to personal rhythms and how they played out within the context of the classroom. The aim was to challenge the idea that the world is in a state of constant acceleration by inviting children to reflect on the multiple speeds of their day. In contrast to the slow movement, which assumes acceleration as a universalised condition and attempts to counteract this condition by promoting opportunities to slow down, the intention here was to invite the students to explore the variant speeds at which they l

ast. Moving from a quantitative time to a qualitative one, the Printer Clock tells time through the activities of others and the variety of pictures reveals the multiplicity of rhythms within that

Despite a clear social motivation, the alternative approaches to time in design described above have been constrained by dominant narratives of time. Further they have often only considered time in terms of pace, direction and flow rather than the more complex ways that it is involved in social life (e.g. Gre

evices. Similarly, Phoebe Sengers (2011) reflects on the way slower attitudes could be promoted by ‘‘making fewer choices, accessing less information, making productivity less central, keeping our lives less under formal control’’; she further considers how this attitude could be reflected in the design of communication technologies. Instead of reinforcing dichotomies, Fullerton (2010) and Sengers (2011) draw attention to practices that emphasise alternative expressions

The association of alternative approaches to time with a rejection of technology reinforces dichotomies that do not reflect the way people relate to artefacts and systems (Wajcman 2015). As a result, these proposals not only risk being interpreted as nostalgic or backward looking, but also leave little space for integrating more complex accounts of time (particularly those arising in the social sciences) or for discussing more nuanced rhythms, as well as more complex forces and consequences related to temporal decisions. As a result, instead of challenging dominant accounts of time, these proposals arguably reinforce the overarching narrative of universalised acceler

The information contained in the information system is notsufficient in itself; the temporal context within which it can be placed,organized according to the trajectory, helps makes sense of it.