They collect artifacts, I collect histories.

'I don't think it's anything—I mean, I don't think it was ever put to anyuse. That's what I like about it. It's a little chunk of history that they'veforgotten to alter. It's a message from a hundred years ago, if one knew howto read it.'

It may well be, as Edmond Wright has pointed out (personal communi-cation) that by leaving sui generis time to the physicists, i.e. by leaving it out of social theory altogether, there is the risk of losing sight of the 'real' temporal continuum which serves as standard reference for all other forms of times. It also impedes coming to terms with 'time embedded' in natural objects and technical artifacts, as Hagerstrand (1974, 1975, 1988) repeatedly emphasized.

The fundamen-tal question for Giddens then becomes how social systems 'come to be stretched across time and space' (i.e. how they constitute their tempor-ality (Giddens, 1984).

The claim to the existence of a concept of 'social time', distinct from other forms of time, was thus made early in the history of social thought. It continues to focus upon the claims of the peculiar nature of the 'social constitution' or the 'social construction' of time. These claims evidently put the category of 'social time' into the wider realm of 'symbolic time', a cultural phenomenon, the constitution of which has remained the object of inquiry of more disciplines than sociology alone, but which separates it from time in nature, embedded in things and artifacts.

It reveals that technology and artefacts not only shape our lives but our knowledge; that the dead things which are so conscientiously excluded from social analyses are not only implicated in our daily existence but constitute our social theories. They therefore need to be moved to the centre stage of social theory. We need to allow the implications of contemporary living to penetrate the depth of our understanding, to connect the complexity of our being to the meanings we impose on it, and to recognise our existing social theories as relics of a bygone age.

I am proposing that we need to take on board the time-scales of our technologies if our theories are to become adequate to their subject matter: contemporary industrialised, science-based technological society. Giddens's concept of time-space distanciation might prove useful here despite its association with the storage capacity of information Time for Social Theory: Points of Departure 167 which makes the present application of the concept primarily past, rather than past and future orientated. There seems to be no reason why the concept of time-space distanciation, with its link to power, could not be exploited to theorise influences on the long-term future. Such an extension would allow us to understand the present as present past and present future, where each change affects the whole.

The exclusion of non-symbolic expressions from social science analysis has not only resulted in a highly problematic conceptualisation of nature and natural time but it has also meant the omission of artefacts and technology from social science. As Carlstein ( I 982: 8-9) points out, 'social scientists have commonly refused to see 'dead things' as social or have left them aside for the natural scientists. Social scientists have also commonly Time for Social Theory: Points of Departure 157 refused to look upon artefacts as social in the sense that they impinge on how individuals interact with each other. These 'dead things' are, at best, seen as symbols and are not considered to be genuine ingredients in social situations and processes.' Yet, with respect to time, it is difficult to see how we can understand society without the time aspects of those 'dead things', those created artefacts and machines that shape our lives and our understanding of reality.

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

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

Notably, a practice-oriented treatment of digital time does open up avenues for research and design, one that resonates with Kuutti and Bannon’s [23] recent account of a practice perspective forming a new paradigm for HCI. They propose that a central issue in a practice-based research agenda is the need to develop the capability to transform practices through technology. Essential to this is understanding the role of computer artefacts in the emergence and transfor-mation of practices, and the possibilities for influencing these by changing the artefacts themselves.

Dervin (1999) describes information as aninteractionally created artifact, encouraging us to turn our analytic attentionaway from problems of ‘‘access’’ and towards the ways in which informationis created in the course of collaborative work. An aspect of work that playsan important role in the creation and use of information is temporality.

"it's not about the technology" because "the technology is neutral."

This common activity depended on a great many cultural artifacts, the things people shape or make from natural resources

When ethnographers study other cultures, they must deal with three fundamental aspects of human experience: what people do, what people know, and the things peo-ple make and use

Culture

Global fluctuations, originating presumably from such systemic effects as respiration and cardiac-induced pulsations, were accounted for individually by orthogonalizing the time-courses with respect to the first three principal components from the white matter voxel time course ensemble and the first three principal components from the time course ensemble of the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) voxels (Behzadi et al., 2007).