about 20 years ago francisco varela introduced a completely new idea in cognitive neurosciences he said that in order to progress in the understanding of the mind 00:08:24 science cannot rely only on the study of cerebral activity but has to create a rigorous method to study human experience

You listen to their stories, and if you take them seriously, you think nothing could be more dramatic than being a writer. But I am a writer and I don’t believe a word of it.

For that matter, he admits, “It’s struck me that, actually, polemic very rarely changes people’s minds about anything.” He says so as a former columnist? “A recovering former columnist, yes.” He laughs. “It’s not just that polemic doesn’t change people’s minds. It says nothing about the texture of lived experience. People are complex and nuanced, they don’t live polemically.”

The statement helped set in motion a way of thinking that places the struggle for justice within the self. This thinking appeals not to reason or universal values but to the authority of identity, the “lived experience” of the oppressed. The self is not a rational being that can persuade and be persuaded by other selves, because reason is another form of power.

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?

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

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?