Adding time todigital social contracts is an anticipated future extension

But in thinking about providing a permanent home for my writing on the web, this kind of chronology isn’t very useful. Who cares that I wrote this post in 2015, and this one in 2017? Organizing posts that way is only useful if someone is reading along as the collection is being written. For a permanent writing home, with writing from a year ago as well as writing from ten years ago, chronological order isn’t that useful. Who’s going to sift through a hundred pages of old posts?

Publication Dates are not important to Digital Gardeners. Posts are connected via references or common themes.

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.

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.

Furthermore, and differentiating digital time from clock time, he suggests that a lack of adherence to chronological time is compounded by the fact that digital technologies connect with a flow of information that is al-ways and instantly available. He argues that continual change, which is bound up with web services such as social network sites, blogs and the news, is central to the experi-enced need for constant connectivity.

Research in HCI has illustrated how this notion of immedi-acy is upheld through the social conventions associated with technologies, as well as through their design. For ex-ample, Harper et al. [16] have described the lived experi-ence (or durée, following Bergson [6]) of Facebook as be-ing located firmly in the now, and have noted that this ne-cessitates a particular approach to the performance of iden-tity on the site by its users. They observe that interactions privilege the present and underpin an impression of events unfolding as they happen (even if this is not the case in terms of spatial time, or Bergson’s temps). Because of this, the performance of identity is one of the moment: users reported feeling it inappropriate to post old content, and were similarly aggrieved when others uploaded photos that surfaced ‘out of time’.

Research by narrative theorist Ruth Page [35] (a co-author on the above paper) considers fur-ther how Facebook users learn to interpret social media posts when reading the newsfeed. While the series of snip-pets of ‘breaking news’ posted by a variety of members of one’s social network do not offer a typical narrative, readers nevertheless draw their own story-like experience, using their knowledge of those posting content to build a backsto-ry, whilst imagining what may happen next.

A related, but richer, argument is made by the sociologist John Tomlinson [55], in his account of the ‘condition of immediacy’. Tomlinson argues that speed is central to modern cultural practices, experiences and values, and he focuses on immediacy in particular because it has three connotations.