Time in Digital World

While now we’ve entered into a digital era, the meaning of time has become more complex and truly
abstract for me. The question of the nature of time is one of the oldest debates there is. Some people
believe that time is a thing that exists in measurable form, while others think it is alive, and that we are
made of time. This debate is gaining new momentum in the digital society, now that the Internet,
mobile devices, and other digital artefacts offer us new ways to experience and understand time.

Imagine it is an ordinary weekday. You leave work mid-afternoon and walk to the bus stop, chatting on
your mobile with a friend that you’ve arranged to meet. You check the time on your watch and mentally
count the number of stops to work out how late you’re going to be. But you decide to double-check and
open an app that calculates it for you with a processor running at Godspeed. Near the crossing, you
estimate how fast the cars are travelling on the next street, and try to guess whether you will get a
green light. You look at the phone and see that your friend sent a message 3 minutes and 2 seconds ago
to ask how long you will be. You start running because you know she hates waiting. The information
panel at the bus stop informs you that your bus is due in 3 minutes and 10 seconds. You are 17 minutes
and 3 seconds away from your meeting place, 6 hours and 18 seconds from bedtime, and you have 7
hours and 23 seconds of battery left. This coexistence with time makes us do wonders.

Living in society means constantly interacting with various indicators of time and different time scales,
which mix with our own individual experience, memory, intuition, and ever-changing sense of the
passing of time, on which we base our present and future plans. In 2004 book Time, Barbara Adam, a
leading theorist of contemporary approaches to the study of time, used the term “timescapes” to
describe the complex mix of different biological and mechanical rhythms, with different speeds and
tempos, in which we live. These timescapes now coexist with the rhythms and times of the digital
ecosystem that runs parallel to the “real” world, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in conflict. Time
becomes more “present” to us, it flows, expanding and contracting, behaving in the way French
philosopher Henri Bergson theorized the time: as a continuous flow that has a duration, and constantly
moves from the present to the past. According to Bergson, time is not an indivisible whole and cannot
be reduced to quantifiable discreet units. Instead, it is an internal, subjective state that often clashes
with its technical representations: digital time is reproducible, reversible, and infinite, while human time
is irreversible, limited, and subjective.

I think technology was supposedly created to help us do our work more efficiently and productively, so
shouldn’t the fact that we feel trapped by work through digital devices be considered a collective failure
to manage work and said devices, rather than as a merit? The more time-pressed we are, the more we
consume digital devices, as if they were a drug.
 References

http://lab.cccb.org/en/rethinking-time-in-the-digital-age/

https://mobilitybehaviour.eu/2017/07/28/concepts-of-space-time-in-the-digital-world/