The Embodiment of Time (original) (raw)

Chronology and Chronometry, Time in Modern Life

Giuseppe Marino, 2022

The development of information technologies requires reviewing both subjective and collective behavioral models to adapt them to the complexity of the interconnected digital reality. In this context, time measurement techniques become increasingly necessary, shared and sophisticated. We have gone from simple instruments such as sun dials, to more complex instruments such as mechanical, pendulum and atomic clocks. From time measured in days to time measured in nanoseconds, from local to universal time, from chronology to chronometry and at the timekeeping, from analog clock to digital timer. Time is no longer marked by a ticking, but is timed in infinitesimal quantities. Time measurement is an assemblage of various cultural and technological components. Change affects both the personal and individual sphere as well as the social and economic one. A basic understanding of these new tools is necessary to use them with greater awareness.

The Problem of Time from the Perspective of the Social Sciences

Czech Sociological Review

This article presents a critical review of ideas about time in modern societies and especially in the social sciences. Man in modern society perceives, reflects and registers time in a series of contexts, whether this involves questions of thought, the physical body, nature or society. Current studies that address the question of time in many cases do so through a comparison of archaic temporal awareness and modern temporal awareness, and attempt to describe when and how this historical shift came about. According to O. Rammstedt four distinct historical types of understanding time can be distinguished: (1) occasional awareness of time based on a distinction made between 'now' and 'not-now'; (2) cyclical awareness of time; (3) linear awareness of time with a closed future, and (4) linear awareness of time with an open future. In contemporary social sciences four main theoretical perspectives can be observed. The first one assumes that the basic principles of order are or should be considered as unchanging. These principles express themselves as invariants. In the 20th century we can find it in structural linguistics, and in social sciences with a structuralist orientation. The second approach resembles the previous one in that it also considers the existence of unchanging principles of order. However, it differs through the assumption that these principles reveal themselves in time. The third approach can be considered de facto a sort of special degree of the second, i.e. closed historical concept. Unlike the teleological characterof the latter, however, it considers human intervention as a necessary condition for the achievement of a future aim. The fourth concept is founded on the idea that the basic principles of order can be revealed only in time. Unlike the second, however, it does not consider the main organising principles to be unchanging, but rather concludes that in each contemporary period they are open to change. This fourth approach, which can be described as 'temporalised sociology' and which is expressed in works of such authors as G. H. Mead, A. Schütz, N. Elias, N. Luhmann or A. Giddens is stressing a relatively open future, emergence, novelty and the concept of discontinuity. In the opinion of the author of this study another concept should be added to our understanding of time: i.e. 'irreversibility'. It is a feature of those systems that are far form being balanced and in which, in order to be able to predict future states, it is not enough to know the laws and the initial conditions.

The changing role of time and social reality

2020

Differently from Philosophy and Natural Science, time has always been an important component in Social Research as human cognition tells us that the world is constantly changing in one temporal direction guided by the arrow of time. However, social time does not stand on its own. It connects to what is happening in the natural world as well as human individual psychological time. Classical conceptions ofKant and Husserl help to address the problem from its very foundation. It may well be that irreversibility is an objective natural phenomenon not just a subjective impression of living creatures. We must adopt an interdisciplinary view on time. The acceleration of speed in communication may have less significance for our lives than is normally expected, i.e. in the case of taking legal decisions. The only change we are currently experiencing in the context of application of Information Communication Technology in many spheres of social life may just be that many things happen more qu...

The two faces of time

European Review, 2001

Speaking of a "lack of time", do we mean the same "thing" as the variable "t" in a graph of some time-dependent development? The following article tries to show that both concepts are extreme examples of the two sides, or faces, of the single phenomenon of time, as common and trivial as it is mysterious. Scientific, numerical time is considered first, followed by the time of the common human experience, the time in the present. It is on the basis of this curious ability to "keep in presence" various events that follow one another, that the scientific concept of linear time has been established and, with it, the possibility to measure the time for scientific and practical purposes.

Temporality and Its Discontents or Why Time Needs to Be Retold

Retelling Time: Alternative Temporalities from Premodern South Asia, edited by Shonaleeka Kaul, 2021

What is time? Reams of scholarship have long concluded that time, like one's shadow, may be that which most eludes the grasp of comprehension the more one tries to capture it. It cannot be known by either its affirmation (time is this) or its negation (time is not this). It is a point but also a duration. It is measurable but measureless. It finishes but does not end. It is absolute but relative. Objective but subjective. One could go on. Something so elusive has also, however, along with space, attained in the modern world the status of a fundamental dimension of existence-a measure and frame of all action and inaction, of change and of movement, of progress and growth and thereby of life and vitality itself. A first principle, if ever there was one. And yet-is time even real? Unlike space, does it have an existence, not to say substance, in and of itself, independent of experience or even apprehensible through the five forms of sensory perception? It may be reasonable to assert that it does not. In other words, there is no clarity about the ontological status of time. And this, together with the large number of paradoxes or aporia about it, only some of which are listed above, suggests that it is highly likely that time has been little more than a human construct. Further, the same qualities undermine the assumption of its given-ness. Not counting natural cycles and rhythms, time, as a human construct, may well be, as Norbert Elias put it, "first and foremost the medium of orientation for the social world, regulating it in relation to human life" (1988 : ix). Indeed this is precisely the awareness that thinking with the term 'temporalities' has effected: namely, the inseparability of time from human, rather than natural, configurations. But which social world or human configuration do we speak of? As such, and as this volume will also argue, it may be productive to think about time through its functions, its fields of operation, or its contextualization (Lebovic 2010 : 282)-and thereby through its multiplicity. However, while some have influentially argued that the discovery of this subjective multiplicity of time is itself a product of modernity (Koselleck 2002 : 110-11), Retelling Time contests this, demonstrating

Globital Time: Time in the Global digital Age

Challenges the idea that time is simply compressed within digital cultures and shows instead how with the combined dynamics of globalisation and digitisationit we have 'globital' time which we experience as multiple, contradictory and uneven temporalities

Time Out of Joint: Synchronizing Time in a Desynchronized World

What does it mean to 'be of your time'? Cast adrift in a technological society that can hardly keep up with its own tempo, people increasingly experience the sensation of lagging one step behind the times in which they live. In the grip of this acceleration, it has been argued that we humans have become anachronisms in the sense that we are no longer in sync with our time. This experience, of no longer being in sync with the time in which one lives, forms the starting point of this thesis. By focusing on the synchronous discontinuities that exist within a given timeframe, this thesis holds that what is stake when the experience of time becomes problematic seem to be the conditions of a culture to achieve a coherent sense of self. It appears that we have lost the ability to unify the multiple times into a homogeneous whole, leading to feelings of fragmentation and disintegration.