1992–2022

1992–2022

Thirty years is not so long to the subjective mind with twice that number clocked up in actual years lived. But of course the experience of time in the subjective mind makes many, often inexplicable, impressions. I write this on a computer. A window is open behind this Word document. Ten minutes ago, I was at that window reading that Princess Diana, 1990s upper-class superstar, would have turned 60 today. I felt an unexpected temporal connection with her – we are (were) almost the same age.

Time and memory bears thinking about in terms of mediated events and the mental inscriptions they leave. Many who experienced 9/11 recall where they were and what they were doing upon seeing the news. Such is the imprinting effect that shock, or drama, or sentimentality can have upon memory and consciousness. And so millions can recall their position in time and space when Diana died in a car crash in Paris in 1997.

Then, Time & Society was new, exploring fields of knowledge, mapping the lie of the land and chronicling the scattered thinking about time. Time-gathering of this sort had not really been done before. Philosophers, sociologists, postmodernists, anthropologists, critical theorists, psychologists and many others had been thinking about time for a century or more, but these disciplinary lines of inquiry intersected haphazardly, if at all. There were few places within the academy where relatively siloed thought could find a common home to share and develop richer perspectives.

The world entered a new era 30 years ago. The Soviet Union disappeared suddenly, and a New World Order based upon US neoliberalism, leadership and technology determined to fill the vacuum. The ‘neoliberalism’ feature had been underway since the 1970s, and ‘globalisation’ a term specified to describe the broad contours of the expanding geographic reach of capital, the reduction of regulatory ‘constraints’ on businesses and a general opening up of access to labour and resources in the cheaper and less organised and regulated parts of the planet.

None of this would have been possible without US technology. Silicon Valley and its principal corporations such as Microsoft and Intel and Apple were already becoming everyday names due to the 1980s boom in ‘personal’ computing. However, the 1990s was to see the decisive technological leap, via the Internet, into what is now called ‘digitality’ – the digitalisation and networking of just about everything. Digitality was a mediated ‘event’ that gave time studies a vastly expanded horizon of interest. Not least was the idea that time could ‘speed up’ and that this could have consequences for much that previously seemed to be relatively stable and governed by the clock and the social rhythms that it had generated since the Industrial Revolution.

Digitality, temporality and acceleration

One element of the history of the Internet, the main vector for digitality, is familiar. It is a tale of chips and browsers and Webs 1.0 and 2.0 and is a technological and ideological story of unparalleled freedom-to-create and license to do so. At the level of society, the Internet turned the ‘personal’ revolution in computing into a global one through networking. Clock time administered the word processing and printing capacities of early MSDOS and Apple desktop computers. These were office ‘productivity’ tools. The connecting of office and home computers, however, rapidly became the connecting of hitherto unconnected and unrelated economies, cultures and societies. An unexpected consequence was that the clock mattered less in a global networked communications system freed of the constrains of a technology from another era.

In the 2000s, time and its purportedly heightened experience online became a focus for a growing number of thinkers. ‘Network time’, a time of data flows and the interaction of peoples and systems within these, was argued to be colonising almost every facet of life. It was colonising the institutions and the universities, too, both as an objective phenomenon and as the subjective experience of millions. This required fresh thinking to theorise and reckon with what was happening.

Older ideas began to resurface as a starting point. Ideas on the links between technology and time, such as E.P. Thompson’s (1967) histories of time and industrialisation, Heidegger’s (2006) philosophy of the ‘primordiality’ of time, and James Carey’s (1983) ideology and time. This journal published its first essay on the Internet in 2000. In it, Lee and Liebenau (2000) drew upon a range of time perspectives to fashion an important argument that sought to ‘temporalise’ the Internet phenomenon.

Paul Virilio (1995) did this somewhat earlier with his essay ‘Speed and Information Cyberspace Alarm!’, although with a characteristically dim view on the dramatic convergence of computers, networks and media. Even earlier, in 1989, David Harvey (1989) inflected a nascent globalisation with a centrally important temporality he called ‘time-space compression’ (p.242). This was a network-derived shrinking of the planet that demanded of us a new understanding not only of the network time that it was generating but also the modern time perspectives that it was beginning to eclipse.

Acceleration was a key trope in much of the new focus on the links between technology and temporality, with Time & Society at the leading edge of much of the research. Interdisciplinarity is an overused term in academia, but it has been a watchword for the journal, enabling and encouraging research into the effects of technological acceleration across a wide range of social science and humanities spheres. Since 2000, research articles, commentary and reviews on temporal acceleration were published in such diverse fields as academia, religion, social media, work–life balance, social theory, politics, asylum procedures, the learning process, domestic work, philosophical thinking, old age, science, foreign policy, workplace organisation and much more.

All this work is impressive. It displays a wonderful depth and scope that reflects a willingness to explore the temporal effects of digital technology on human life and the technical systems and social practices that sustain it. And as long as digitality shapes our world in these, and in ways still yet to be ascertained, then there will be a role for the creative application of such temporal thinking and critique.

Coda for a mentor

Thirty years on, we can see that Barbara Adam, founding editor of Time & Society, is a visionary. Her works in the 1990s were a sociologically based view of not just technicity and time but also of the philosophical, the transcendental, the historical, the pre-historical, the mystical and the scientific. Her key concept of ‘timescapes’ – mutually implicating temporal and spatial relations that permeate all of social life, and where ‘context’ is of the first importance – encapsulates the immensity of the realm of the temporal in human affairs. It was this wide-angled perspective and this farsightedness that saw also the need for a place to hash out the ideas and the frameworks that are so self-evidently needed today.

As a departing editor, I want to say a heartfelt thanks to Barbara. She was and continues to be a teacher for me. She entrusted me with the stewardship of Time & Society in 2011, and in that time, I have managed it alongside Carmen Leccardi, Harmut Rosa and Michelle Bastian. Moving forward, Helge Jordheim, Professor of Cultural History at University of Oslo, will co-edit with Michelle from the University of Edinburgh. As I live in Melbourne, this means that the axis moves back to northern Europe. However, the intellectual scope of the journal is, and has always been, planetary. And so it will remain. I am confident, too, that the study of time will continue to grow in popularity as its field of view becomes ever wider. And with Michelle and Helge at the helm, the journal that Barbara Adam founded in 1992 will be an important place for thinkers on time to share with us their knowledge and thereby deepen our understanding.