Continuous Production and New Forms of Labour: A Case for Reclaiming Public Time

Abstract

This article makes two arguments. First, that advanced information and communication technologies (ICTs) have created multiple parallel flows of consumption that allow us to be productive continuously, in the sense of generating value for the economy. Second, the struggle over social time poses emergent challenges for planning and urban design. After introducing the relevant themes, this article explains how value is derived from labour and the process through which time is made economically productive. Next, it is posited that advanced ICTs, especially mobile devices and associated services, create possibilities for multiple flows of time, freeing consumption from territorial and temporal restrictions, and opening up new forms of labour. This discussion elicits some concerns for those interested in communities and urban space. The article concludes with suggestions for adopting a socio-spatial-temporal outlook to urban planning and design, including designing ‘polyrhythmic’ places and planning for public time.

Keywords

Time community labour consumption public space

Time in the Study of Space

In fields dealing with the planning and design of urban habitats and the built environment, the relationship between space and time has most often been theorized in terms of speed—of travel, communication and industrial production. The ‘present’ is seen also as an arena of action on which the ‘past’ (history, memory, heritage, etc.) and ‘future’ (trends, demographics, projections, etc.) exert influence. Indeed, Myers (1997) considers planning a quintessentially future-oriented activity. The management of flows (of traffic, freight, pedestrians, etc.) is based on their temporal patterns. Longitudinal studies of communities and places examine their evolution over time and may be used to measure the success of policy interventions. Time and temporalities, then, are crucial for understanding the urban condition.

Given the intimate connections, time, per se, not only in terms of its effects, but also in terms of its own nature and politics, appears to be a somewhat less appreciated subject in planning theory. David Harvey highlights the tendency for time not to be examined critically:

Space and time are basic categories of human existence. Yet we rarely debate their meanings; we tend to take them for granted, and give them common-sense or self-evident attributions. We record the passage of time in seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, decades, centuries, and eras, as if everything has its place upon a single objective time scale. Even though time in physics is a difficult and contentious concept, we do not usually let that interfere with the common-sense of time around which we organize daily routines. (Harvey, 1989, p. 201)

In a similar vein, Barbara Adam, who has written extensively on the relationship between time and society argues that time is a taken-for-granted concept that remains largely unexplored and unquestioned even when it is the focus of social science attention. As a quantity to be measured, as a resource and as a variable parameter within which actions are organized and structured, the dominant common-sense time of clocks and calendars forms the unquestioned core of much of social science analysis (Adam, 1992, p. 176).

Citing Augustine (from the third century), Hans Ruin (2011) argued ‘that Time is a creation of human intellect’ (p. 55). Drawing on a variety of philosophical streams, Ruin suggests that time is a relative entity, which serves to periodize human existence and thus make sense of it. ‘[O]ne should not say that time is anything at all, or, in other words, that it belongs to the realm of being in a material or physical sense’ (Ruin, 2011, p. 57. original emphasis). As Harvey states plainly, ‘[s]pace and time are social constructs’ (Harvey, 2010, p. 210). Although, in an abstract sense, time does not have a material or physical existence, socially produced time, in a lived everyday sense, is subject to all of the struggles and contestations of human society. Social time acquires a material character when its use by individuals becomes a part of the process of production and accumulation.

Even though we ‘spend’ our time at our discretion, everyday lives are mediated by social temporalities, often beyond our immediate control. These include, among others, the ordering of clock time, wage rates (exchange rates for labour time), labour laws, interest rates, pricing structures (e.g., ‘red-eye’ flights versus daytime flights), ‘primetime’ television, ‘peak hour’ traffic and apparel ‘seasons’. Regarding the socially produced nature of time, Harvey argued:

[t]he class, gender, cultural, religious, and political differentiation in conceptions of time and space frequently become arenas of social conflict. New definitions of what is the correct time and place for everything as well as of the proper objective qualities of space and time can arise out of such struggles. (Harvey, 2010, p. 225)

Carmen Leccardi (1999), who begins her analysis with Durkheim’s departure from Kant, argued persuasively that time is ‘produced by and an expression of societal organization….[T]ime is also a crucial regulating element of collective activity’ (pp. 3–4). The structuring of society via the organization and administration of time has been studied by Adam (2003, 1995, 1992), Nowotny (1992, 2005), Boulin (1993) and Lewis and Weigert (1981), among others. This literature contains numerous and varied insights regarding the relationship between time and society. The most important lesson to keep in mind is that the human experience of time is socially produced and eminently contested. Further, human time has long been regulated through regimes of production and accumulation.

The mutually constitutive relationship between the spatial organization of cities and the control of social time has also been explored at length. A number of disciplines and perspectives are represented in existing literature. These include (among many others) studies on the urban hardware of information and communication technologies (ICTs) (Graham, 2001), the night-time city (Eldridge, 2019; Dimmer, Solomon, & Morris, 2017; Shaw, 2015, 2018; Tadié & Permanadeli, 2015; Thomas & Bromley, 2000; Lovatt & O’Connor, 1995), social impacts of mobile technologies (Hampton, Goulet, & Albanesius, 2015; Paiva, Cachinho, & Barata-Salgueiro, 2017; Hatuka & Toch, 2016; Green, 2002; Townsend, 2000), the relationship between time, space and community (Stephens, 2010; McCann, 2003; Calhoun, 1998) and spatial effects of temporal politics (Kitchin, 2019; Charbgoo & Mareggi, 2018; Moore-Cherry & Bonnin, 2018; Mulíček and Osman, 2018; Simone & Fauzan, 2013; Stavrides, 2013). These scholars have examined in great depth the processes through which social and political forces contest the meaning of time and act upon it—causing it to be compressed, sped up, broken, divided into fractions, reorganized as rhythms, appropriated, revalourized and invoked strategically. Few, however, have attempted to theorize the effects of advanced ICTs on the productive nature of social time. This article examines the role of time in the production of space, particularly with regards to its relationship with labour and consumption.

Productivity, Wages and Clock Time

Human time is ‘productive’ in an economic sense. ‘Productivity’ here means that measurable and accumulable economic value can be derived from individuals’ time. The most common method to monetize the value of human time is in terms of wages earned in exchange for an hour of work. The clock has long been used as a means of measuring commodified labour. A basic understanding of these processes can be understood through Marx (1974 [1867]) and some relevant readings of his work (Heydebrand, 2003; Tucker, 1978). According to Marx, the conquest of time began with the formalization of the ‘work-day’ (Marx, in Tucker, 1978, p. 204). Marx makes this argument by tracing the social production of a day of labour, which at the time, was 12 hours in most factories. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the working day in English factories was reduced to 10 hours for most workers. The workday was even shorter for minors, which triggered a manufacturers’ movement to reduce the age of childhood. Barbara Adam, too, highlights the role of clock time to explain the process of commodification of time.

The transformation of lived time into a resource that we can use, allocate, control and exchange on the labor market has to be understood with respect to a very specific development…. [t]he fact that we have created a non-temporal time, an unchanging, static, fixed quantity to which we orient and organize our social life, has transformed this natural phenomenon into a commodity that permeates every aspect of western existence. The objectified time of the clock…. enables us to convert a variable quality into an invariable, abstract exchange value. (Adam, 1992, pp. 179–180, original emphasis)

Similarly, Vito Acconci’s (1990) account of the changes to time begins with the manufacture of wristwatches. ‘There was… no need for time to be set in place, to be in the place where you happened by, when all the while you were on your own time, you wore time on your sleeve’ (Acconci, 1990, p. 900). Struggles over work time endure to this day, seen clearly in terms of access to leisure time, the length of the working day (and week), rules regarding overtime work and associated wages, age of retirement.

The management and organization of time have changed as technology and modes of production have evolved. Pre-industrial time, for example, was used as needed. One slept and worked according to the rhythms of nature—the waking of animals, needs of tending to agricultural produce and livestock, the heat of the midday sun, time taken by animals to graze, etc. Sleep was often broken up into more than one period. Time spent on leisure activities could occur at different periods during the day and could also overlap with work. Certainly, there were variations between genders, cultures, age groups and between those in different positions in social hierarchies. The assertion is not that all humans had a single uniform ‘pastoral’ experience of time, but rather that the use of time was flexible, and its organization loose and relatively unregulated. For Mumford (1934), the ringing of bells at regular intervals by monasteries in the thirteenth century marked the beginning of the imposition of diurnal routines. Similar arguments could be advanced regarding rhythms of worship and rituals established by faiths globally.

During the industrial age, human time came to be ordered according to the cycles of production (Hassan, 2003, Castells, 2000 [1996], Lash & Urry, 1994, Boulin, 1993). Workers had to convene at the factory at the same time and work in coordinated shifts. Sleep time was consolidated, and work time, paid by the hour, was organized for efficiency. Leisure, unequally divided among classes of workers, was regulated as a component of workers’ wages. Once again, the point here is not to say that all human beings around the world began to experience time in the same way. There certainly were exceptions. The labour of women, children, the enslaved and indentured, for example, was unacknowledged and undervalued. It was, however, a moment of significant change for a large number of industrial workers, who became subjects of the new time order, designed to maximize the productivity of their time. The creation of the consumer economy enabled individuals to continue to be productive, that is, generate value (surplus) for the economy, during non-work time. Later, television brought swathes of leisure time, too, under stable rhythms of consumption/productivity.

Technologies of production, with increasing degrees of automation, contributed to speeding up industrial processes, even as financial tools of credit and mortgage made it possible to accumulate the future value of individuals’ labour. Moreover, from early days of flexible accumulation, the ‘work day’ has undergone a diversification of temporalities for many kinds of jobs (Boulin, Cette, & Taddéi, 1993). But all of this innovation was imagined and expressed in terms of discrete portions of the traditional Cartesian timeline. The 24-hour day remained an insurmountable constraint for industrial technology and scholarly analysis alike. Advanced technologies, however, have ensured that the flow of time is not only multivalent, but also multilayered.

This article claims that the linear progression of time that we see in clocks is no longer an accurate measure of the potentialities for generating surplus from time. Socio-temporal effects of the internet and advanced ICTs must be interpreted in this context of successive techno-economic innovations that organized and monetized labour and social time. Crucially, as is argued in the following sections, today’s ICTs allows individuals to inhabit and create economic value in parallel flows, within any given moment of clock time. Emergent forms of labour have produced new contestations over human time, with specific consequences for space and community. This study deals with time and space in this very specific and limited sense. As mentioned above, the literature on ‘space and time’ is extensive and traverses many fields and specializations. Only a few threads, that are most relevant to this article’s arguments, are being discussed here.

ICTs and New Forms of Labour

Multiple Parallel Temporalities of Consumption

The effects of technology on time, and in turn on space, have received considerable attention, perhaps most famously in Harvey’s (1982) restatement of Marx’s phrase ‘annihilation of space by time’, and the further postulation of the idea of ‘time-space compression’ (Harvey, 1989) as a quintessential part of the postmodern condition. ‘Compression’ and ‘acceleration’, according to Harvey, have ‘had a disorienting and disruptive impact upon political-economic practices’ (Harvey, 1989, p. 284). The work of Paul Virilio (1995, 2000, 2002) merits special mention in this context. Writing on themes of technology, information and culture, he frequently engages the concept of time and speed, particularly with regards to a culture of ‘instantaneity’. The arguments forwarded in this article share an affinity with Virilio’s thoughts on the pervasiveness of technology and society’s obsession with speed. But there are at least two major differences as well. Firstly, unlike Virilio, this article is concerned primarily with effects on space and community. And secondly, the arguments presented here are based on the contests over the productive value of human time, not one of Virilio’s primary concerns.

For Marx (1974 [1867]), the ‘annihilation of space by time’ is a constant drive of capital—the use of technology to overcome geographic obstacles (both distance and topography), to reach distant markets and incorporate them into the process of surplus creation. ‘Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier. Thus the creation of the physical conditions of exchange —of the means of communication and transport—the annihilation of space by time becomes an extraordinary necessity for it’ (p. 539). The phrase also captures the motivation to ensure that accumulation is not obstructed (shortened or delayed) by time.

The consequent ‘compression’ of space converts larger portions of clock time into circulation time. As ICTs have allowed productivity to become delinked from location or distance, spatial barriers have been replaced by temporal-technological barriers. In a compressed world of flexible production, peripatetic capital and global supply chains, where distance no longer restricts reach and accumulation, speed becomes the threshold for growth and the focus of technological innovation. The continuous march of capital now challenges every temporal barrier. We are now in an era of the annihilation of Time by time, where the temporal obstacles to growth—speed, the reach of ICTs and access to them and also the 24-hour day—are being broken down.

The advent of contemporary ICTs (especially with 4G and later network speeds that allow seamless internet functionality or ‘smart’ devices) has brought about a radical change to how we interact with electronic content. Mobile ‘smart’ devices operate on the same economic logic of accumulating value from time, but they are able to do so in novel ways, and in a much more comprehensive manner than was possible earlier.

While the industrial ordering of time still remains in place, another rhythm has begun to control human behaviour, consumption and productivity. In the digitally connected world, time is rendered flexible by the ability to deterritorialize activities—especially work, entertainment and retail shopping—and to engage individuals in multiple activities at any instant of time. Hyper-mobility afforded by ever-faster network connectivity means that the long-standing relationships between location, activity and thought have been fundamentally destabilized. Contemporary ICTs have created a watershed moment, since they effectively allow us to be in two places (or more) at the same time. Presence is no longer tethered to location. Senses are being pulled in multiple directions, regardless of location, or the activity in which one is involved. New ICTs are not only powerful but also ubiquitous. It is with us not only at home and on the street, but also inside buses, offices, classrooms and homes. This creates the potential for continuous consumption.

Time has been compressed to an unprecedented degree by advanced mobile communications working together with high speed Internet. These technologies not only compress time, but also supersede the Cartesian timeline, as it relates to being productive. That is, they allow us not only to ‘do more’, but also consume simultaneously on multiple platforms, that is, in multiple temporal flows. A 24-hour cap no longer limits consumption and productive use of time. Individuals are now ‘logged in’ to multiple flows of consumption in such a manner that they can be productive, every day, for a cumulative total of more than 24 hours. Thus, the choate, immutable and infrangible character of the vector of clock time is fundamentally fractured.

There is a pressure for time not sold as labour in exchange for wages increasingly to be brought into the production process. Competition for exchange of non-work time intensifies since all waking time is potentially consumptive time. To facilitate extraction of value from time, time is fragmented—not only linearly (in segments of clock time) but also through a process of ‘layering’, that is, the creation of parallel flows of time (that are based on consumption of one kind or another and are potentially ceaseless). The term ‘layering’ here means that time is transformed from being simply ‘clock-time’ with various periods put to different uses (e.g., eight hours each, daily, for sleeping, working and everything else), to being organized and administered as various global and ceaseless flows. At any given moment, an individual can be plugged into several flows of consumption.

Parallel flows of consumption time, facilitated by the advances in information technology, open up a vast new market for goods and services. The potential for individuals to add value to production is liberated from the limits of the 24-hour day. That is, an individual can be working (buying and selling stocks), communicating with contacts (sending text messages), buying goods (downloading a song), reading a website and being subjected to visual advertising, all while sitting in a park or plaza. This individual, in the same moment of clock time, also consumes in various parallel flows of consumption-time.

Barbara Adam’s idea of ‘multitude of times’ (1995, p. 12) is somewhat similar to what is proposed here. However, though Adam’s terminology may seem to correspond to the arguments in this article, the two are working at different scales. Adam’s focus is on the ‘multifaceted’ (1995, p. 15) nature of time—the many different temporalities that intersect through each moment of time. Further, in Adam’s view, individuals have access to multiple clock times in the sense that technology brings multiple options (such as TV channels and options for spending time) within easy reach, all at the same time. ‘[C]ontemporary developments have brought about a shift of emphasis from duration and succession to simultaneity and instantaneity’ (Adam, 1992, p. 177). The condition of continuous production created by advanced ICTs may be seen as an intensification of the trends observed by Adam. Crucially, however, while Adam was observing technology that was still bound by the limits of the 24-hour day, contemporary technology has ushered in a post-diurnal mode of consumption/production.

The idea of ‘extensibility’, as conceptualized by Paul Adams (1995), is also relevant to this discussion. ‘Extensibility measures the ability of a person (or group) to overcome the friction of distance through transportation or communication’ (Adams, 1995, p. 267). Using vectors of power, resources, networks and transportation and communication technologies, individuals are able to develop and sustain different levels of ‘extensibility’. The concept of ‘extensibility’ corresponds to the ideas articulated in this article in that it challenges the assumed unity of geography, temporality and personhood. Although Adams takes into account the role of power (e.g., as reflected in varying degrees of extensibility in society), he does not examine the relationship between ‘extensibility’ and production-accumulation cycles.

As discussed above, we are now able to consume in multiple flows of time. Multiple activities, such as sharing information, posting comments, announcing one’s current location or disposition, checking e-mail, ‘following’ people, expressing interest in random pieces of information, watching videos, chatting and downloading songs, can now happen simultaneously. One is logged in to various sites at any given time, and this creates value for various service providers (of both connectivity and content). The technology for measuring one’s productivity is also remarkably accurate. YouTube, for example, measures success of a channel or video not only in terms of how many people watched it, but also in terms of the number of seconds for which it was viewed. Facebook measures not only time spent by individual users on its website and mobile platform, but also ‘likes’ and clicks, that is, the points in the ceaseless flow of information (not inconsequentially called ‘timeline’) where users made stops.

Continuous Exposure to Advertising

Advertising dominates the media and provides the funding necessary for its survival. Advertising contracts also constitute the bulk of the budgets for most public events. Consider for a moment why a soccer game (or any other major spectator sport) has advertising all around the field of play (and sometimes on the playing surface itself)—it makes the spectators doubly productive. Not only do spectators pay for tickets (or television subscriptions) to watch the game, but also they generate advertising revenue for the organizers. It has also become a common practice for advertising to occupy a portion of the television screen while regular programming is playing. The same mechanisms have quickly taken hold of websites. Popups and embedded advertising, often tied to cookies and malware, are rife.

Numbers reported by Facebook are instructive for understanding the value generated by time spent online. In June 2013, Facebook, for the first time, surpassed 1 million active advertisers (Facebook Inc., 2013). Revenue from advertising stood at US$1.6 billion (88% of the total quarterly revenues). In all, 41 per cent of the revenue from advertising came from mobile advertising. The fourth quarter report of 2018 (Facebook Inc., 2018) shows a ten-fold increase in advertising revenues—– US$16.6 billion—which represents 98% of all revenues). In sum, 93 per cent of the advertising revenues are derived from mobile advertising. It helps to keep in mind also that at the end of 2018, Facebook had 2.32 billion monthly active users, approaching 40 per cent of the total population of those parts of the world where the company is allowed to operate freely.

It is clear that Facebook is mainly an advertising platform deriving almost all of its revenues from this one primary function. The website’s entire design—layout, functions, terms of agreement, privacy policies, etc.—are based on maximizing advertising revenue. Facebook is paid not only for being able to expose more than a billion users to more than a million advertisers, but also for the rich and dynamic database of preferences and tastes it creates. The numbers are also useful in understanding what it means to receive a ‘free’ service on the Internet. Users actually pay for such services with their time.

Herman and Chomsky (1988) famously critiqued the logic of advertising revenues, which, according to them, controls the agenda, perspective and objectivity of news media. More recently, Jhally and Livant (2006) have argued that watching television is a form of work. Other industry practices reveal the monetization of time spent looking at screens of ICT gadgets. Some personal devices are available in two options—with or without advertising on the ‘home’ screen, the former being cheaper. Various web-based services such as e-mail and web-hosting offer an option of a clean ad-free interface for a premium. Advertising through advanced ICTs has reached the point where consumers are expected to pay a premium to be able to avoid it.

Working Passively

A significant contribution of advanced ICTs is that they are able to make human time productive not only ‘actively’ (i.e., when individuals purposefully prepare for and make consumption decisions), but also ‘passively’. The web pages one visits, the amount of time one spends there, the links one clicks on, the search terms one enters, the sequence of activities, the information voluntarily proffered (one’s likes and dislikes, interests, friends, etc.) and even the texts of the e-mails one receives create databases of preference-sets, that are in themselves valuable commodities. This is in addition to the log of one’s movements which are tracked through recorded IP addresses, location-based services and the communication between one’s device and the towers used by service providers. Further, the linking of accounts for multiple services creates ‘bridges’ between the parallel flows, which can then generate very rich models of consumer behaviour and preferences. Mark Andrejevic (2002) raised concerns regarding the surveillance of consumers, calling it ‘the work of being watched. Although Andrejevic is more concerned with issues of privacy and ‘disciplinary panopticism’ (p. 232), his conception of being watched ‘as a form of labor’ (Andrejevic, 2002) is relevant to this discussion. The operative question is not whether a particular conception of privacy has been violated but, rather: what are the relations that underwrite entry into a relationship of surveillance, and who profits from the work of being watched?’ (Andrejevic, 2002, p. 232). Miranda Joseph (1998), writing on the performative aspects of production and consumption, also questions the conditions under which exchange takes place:

Consumptive labor is procured and exploited through active subjection in the expression of needs, desires, self, identity, and community; as producers seem to freely sell their labor, consumers freely choose and purchase their commodities. The exploitation occurs insofar as by freely choosing, consumers contribute to the accumulation of capital – and thus to the power of the owners of the means of production – and enact the cultural and social formations in which their choices are embedded but which they do not control. (Joseph, 1998, p. 36)

The terms of the relationship between the observer and the observed raise ethical questions, with regards to the ends (i.e., the nature and use of the data collected) the means, the issue of informed consent, and the responsibilities of those collecting, using and selling this information.

The next section examines the effects of these phenomena on places and place-based communities. To be clear, the term ‘community’, as used here, refers to place-based groups, that is, those based in specific locations (urban neighbourhoods, districts, etc.). It is not used in an expanded sense to include other kinds of real, virtual, historical or imagined social formations.

Effects on Space and Society

Guy Debord’s ideas on the Society of the Spectacle, first published in 1967, are as insightful as they are prophetic. ‘[T]he spectacle is nothing other than the sense of the total practice of a social-economic formation, its use of time. It is the historical movement in which we are caught’ (Debord, 2010, p. 9). Omnipresent ICTs working together with the logic of advertising and new consumption choices creates a condition of continuous productivity. All conscious time of individuals is a market opportunity, measured in terms of commodified periods and flows of time. From this perspective, it is not a dystopian vision that captures the outcome of the time-tied society, such as the one imagined in Bladerunner (Dir: Ridley Scott, 1982) amongst others, but rather the consumptive utopia of Wall-E (Dir: Andrew Stanton, 2008).

It is necessary to clarify that this is not an argument against technology per se. Technology by itself is neutral. Numerous benefits have come out of today’s sophisticated telecommunications and information technologies. It has also been argued that social movements have benefited tremendously from technology. Technology has also been cited as helpful in emergent situations such as natural disasters, accidents and riots. Banking, investment and retail services have undergone successive transformations. Further, individuals derive great value from being able to communicate and obtain important information while on the move. So technology cannot be held responsible for society’s flaws. Technology, much like the Lefebvrian (Lefebvre, 1991) conception of space, is but another canvass on which the strengths and imbalances of social relations, collective values and political institutions are manifested.

It has been argued so far that contemporary technologies have created layers (or parallel flows) of consumptive/ productive time, and that this allows consumption to be deterritorialized and enables individuals to be constantly productive. These characteristics of time and technology raise concerns over the effects on community life. It is worth noting that the effects of ICTs on children’s development, romantic relationships, classroom dynamics, etc. are being debated widely. But that is another conversation. This section presents three issues, emerging from the mass adoption of advanced ICTs, that ought to concern those interested in community planning and civic life.

Lefebvre (2004 [1992]) sees urban life as comprising individual and collective rhythms. By insisting on the observation of everyday life, Lefebvre links the experience of time and space. In this sense, the project of ‘rhythmanalysis’ can be seen as an extension of Lefebvre’s use of the idea of ‘lived space’, to resolve the dialectic of ‘conceived’ and ‘perceived’ space. Lefebvre’s example of trees is instructive in understanding the role of time and temporality in the production of space (Lefebvre, 2004 [1992]). Although a tree presents a unified image of a single rhythm, within it, flowers, seeds, leaves and fruits operate with their own rhythms. The framework of ‘rhythms’ makes explicit the temporalities of space and community. Similarly, space, Lefebvre argues, is a symphony of many rhythms playing together. Underneath the surface of an urban place, Lefebvre encourages us to find and observe multiple rhythms—not only natural, but also physiological, cultural and mundane. Lefebvre’s ideas have been applied already in various contexts (Mulíček & Osman, 2018; Mareggi, 2013; Smith & Hall, 2013; Smith & Hetherington, 2013; Wunderlich, 2008, 2013).

Interpreting lived experiences of space and time through the framework of rhythms yields analytical benefits. It becomes evident, for example, that a radical intervention in the substructure of temporal potentialities affects all aspects of everyday life. Three effects on socio-spatial formations are discussed below.

Everyday Life Mediated by Constant Consumption

The paradox of technology, time and human life is that while we can create more than 24 hours’ worth of productive time in a day, we still have only 24 hours to live, or to lose. Kwan (2002), citing Robinson, Kestnbaum, Neustandtl, & Alvarez (2000), makes the point eloquently:

Since there is a limit to the simultaneous involvement in multiple activities for a particular person, an important feature of time is its zero-sum property—if more time is spent on some new activity or technology, it must necessarily displace the time spent on some other technology or activity. (Robinson et al., 2000 as cited in Kwan, 2002)

‘Time displacement’ studies (Wallsten, 2013; Gershuny, 2002; Kestnbaum et al., 2002; Moy et al., 1999; Gershuny & Robinson, 1988) attempt to understand how individuals’ time is re-allocated when new technologies (such as television or the internet) are introduced into their lives. The time displacement literature, however, has at least two weaknesses. First, there is disagreement on the method of recording personal time use of the respondents—a factor that seems to alter results significantly. Second, the analysis remains embedded in a Cartesian zero-sum framework of time. But since the Cartesian framework no longer applies to contemporary consumptive-productive time use, ‘displacement’ does not capture the nature of change in the human experience of time, occurring due to advanced ICTs.

In their time displacement study, Kestnbaum et al. (2002) approach an understanding of recent changes in human time similar to the arguments presented in this article. ‘Internet use seems more a “time enhancer,” one in which people do not seem forced to give up other activities to accommodate it’ (Kestnbaum et al., 2002, p. 36). This conclusion agrees with the idea that individuals today can be consumers of online services for longer more than 24 hours every day.

It is difficult to gauge exactly how much time one spends less interacting with the real world in a reflective, analytical or critical manner, when one is busy consuming intensely and compulsively. It is safe to conclude, however, that time spent online—particularly via mobile devices—fundamentally changes the amount and nature of our interaction with society and the environment. Precise measurement of the changes is less important than recognizing the phenomenon and understanding the underlying struggle over time. Moreover, the amount of time is not the only concern, the quality of time matters too.

Before the mass adoption of mobile telecommunications and information technology, during non-work time individuals were not as economically productive as they are now. They were also more in control of when they wanted to engage in consumption. Most consumption activity was linked with places (shopping centres, business districts, etc.), where one would go, when needed. Time spent in public places distanced individuals from transactions and consumption choices (although, as discussed earlier, advertising was becoming increasingly pervasive). The shift of public activity to private productive zones put the bodies into spaces designed around maximizing consumption. Advanced ICTs go even further, as they allow individuals to produce value—actively or passively—regardless of the space inhabited by the body. Texting while driving, for example, became such an epidemic that laws had to be passed to outlaw the practice. Texting in the classroom, or while walking, or while having a conversation, are lesser public health threats, but are symptoms of the same disjuncture between location and activity.

Technologies are evolving to make consumption a constant condition. Minds and subjectivities are directed towards consumption (of one kind or another), either by continuous exposure of the senses to marketing campaigns, or by monitoring online behaviours (reading, browsing, transactions, likes, comments, etc.) With successively faster networks (5G is on the anvil as this is being written), individuals are able to engage with ever more intensely with multiple kinds of productive rhythms of consumption. Bill Gates’s (1999) idea of ‘business at the speed of thought’ acquires a very literal meaning in this context. Business is not just about digitization (as Gates argued at the time), but also about being in the mind of the consumer at all times. This does not mean that individuals can no longer think, or that they surrender all agency and control to unseen forces. Rather, consumption becomes a permanent condition, a habit, an unquestioned practice of everyday life—the rhythm that orders all others. Debord’s words echo eerily. The spectacle’s ‘means are simultaneously its ends. It is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity’ (Debord, 2010, pp. 9–10).

The electronic, hyper-individuated world of continuous sensory engagement, through ‘smart’ devices connected to high-speed networks, produces a great deal of value. Advertising, the sale of electronic content (news, entertainment, communication, etc.), fees for accessing the Internet and the goods and services bought online are all produced, sold and consumed as part of the condition of constant consumption. Individuals can be completely immersed in highly personalized retail-entertainment rhythms. Debord argues, with uncanny prescience, that isolation is a key strategy for controlling the workforce:

But the general movement of isolation, which is the reality of urbanism, must also include a controlled reintegration of workers depending on the needs of production and consumption that can be planned. Integration into the system requires that isolated individuals be recaptured and isolated together…. The widespread use of receivers of the spectacular message enables the individual to fill his isolation with the dominant images – images which derive their power precisely from this isolation. (Debord, 2010, pp 166–167)

Being ‘productive’ blunts subjectivities by ensconcing individuals in bubbles of consumption. Put in Debord’s terms, everyday life mediated by constant consumption reifies the pervasiveness and inevitability of the spectacle. Informed and engaged political subjects struggle in such an atmosphere. Further, there seems to be some consensus that the virtual world has few benefits for political engagement at any level. As Calhoun (1998) puts it, ‘[c]yberdemocracy…runs far behind cybercapitalism’ (p. 392). This opinion is seconded by Norris (2002), who claims that in terms of political activity, the Internet ‘functions mainly to engage the engaged’ (p. 22), and that much of the information exchange on the major online social fora is superficial.

Subsumption of Local Rhythms and Histories

As discussed above, Barbara Adam (1995) and Helga Nowotny (2005), among others, have argued that temporal meanings and rhythms differ with culture, gender, age, socio-economic conditions, etc. Lefebvre (2004) suggests that the media might pick up on these varied rhythms, tailoring the tone and substance of the content being aired or published, to match the rhythm to which it addressed. Similarly, advanced ICTs may profoundly affect community histories, struggles and specificities through an intensification of this phenomenon. Debord recognizes the tendency for time to be organized globally, and for it to subsume local rhythms and flows of time, that is, local histories.

With the development of capitalism, irreversible time is unified on a world scale. Universal history becomes a reality because the entire world is gathered under the development of this time. But this history, which is everywhere simultaneously the same, is still only the refusal within history of history itself. (Debord, 2010, p. 139)

Writing with the benefit of observing almost three decades of further technological and economic advancement, Virilio arrives at a similar observation:

For the first time, history is going to unfold within a one-time-system: global time. Up to now, history has taken place within local times, local frames, regions and nations. But now, in a certain way, globalization and virtualization are inaugurating a global time that prefigures a new form of tyranny.… [I]n the very near future, our history will happen in universal time, itself the outcome of instantaneity—and there only. (Virilio, 1995)

Ideas of ‘global’ or ‘universal’ time, and of time ‘unified on a world scale’, suggest that new rhythms of consumption generated by advanced technologies create a globally subjectivity that competes with local identities. According to Virilio, local histories will become more insignificant, obscure and unintelligible in the future, because they will be produced and consumed within a unified global time. The local that is intimate for a particular community become instantaneously accessible to a global audience. In this way, technologies of mass communication paradoxically make time both more momentous and more invisible. In order to be acknowledged, distributed and interpreted, locally significant moments of space and everyday life have to compete with global flows of information and images. In global flows and temporalities, public debate, community matters and civic engagement share space with memes, vacation pictures and celebrity gossip. The significance, relevance and gravity of one rhythm cannot be distinguished from that of another. Discourses and distractions compete with each other for virtual legitimacy. Manuel Castells (2000 [1996]) identified this phenomenon as ‘timeless time’ (p. 460), the ‘mantle of meaninglessness’ (p. xliv) that underpins culture in the ‘network society’—the ‘dominant temporality’ (p. 464) created through the ‘systemic perturbation in the sequential order of phenomena’ (Castells, 2000 [1996]). ‘Fake news’ may be considered a manifestation of the crisis of timeless time.

This is a concern for those interested in strengthening urban communities at the local level. To begin with, constant consumption, as discussed above, challenges the intensity of civic engagement. Moreover, the production of space at the local level is often animated by global aspirations. The loss of temporal diversity invites the superficiality of the virtual world into the public sphere. The economy of online validation engenders new senses of belonging in global cultural flows. The gaze of invisible global observers affects authenticity of design and dialogue alike. Universal time transcends cultural boundaries and ‘unifies’ people around the world. At the same time, however, universal time also overruns local political consciousness. Social issues are valourized in accordance with global cultural and political vectors. Desire for approval and acceptance informs political opinions and the production of space. The more entrenched individuals become in virtual rhythms of information and identification, the more they become susceptible to the ‘echo chamber’ effect. Nurturing genuine and unbiased engagement with issues of social-spatial justice becomes difficult in such conditions.

Loss of Public Time

Places acquire meaning and identity when individuals and communities invest their time in them. Vito Acconci, in an allegorical exploration of the relationship between public space and private time, wrote:

Public time was dead; there wasn’t time anymore for public space; public space was the next to go…. Public space is an old habit. The words public space are deceptive… I should be thinking only of a condition; but, instead, I imagine an architectural type. (Acconci, 1990, p. 901)

Critiques of the privatization of public space have tended to focus their concerns on exclusion, the curtailment of rights and the attrition of public life. Narratives emanating from various fields, prominently law (Mitchell, 2003), anthropology/ cultural studies (Low, 2000), urban design (Banerjee, 2001; Herzog, 2006; Sorkin, 1992) and politics (Kohn, 2004; Low & Smith, 2006) among others, have placed the blame squarely on the desire to maximize rent and retail revenue. This is certainly not incorrect, but approaching the issue from the perspective of time allows us to see how privatization of public space is one part of a logical progression towards privatizing swathes of time. The study of time, in this context, opens up new avenues of resistance and regeneration.

If technology (to the extent that it is used to maximize productivity of human time) leads to isolation and passivity, what, then, is the fate of community life? The question was asked previously by Tridib Banerjee while writing on the role of ‘the communication and information technology revolution in shaping ‘the future of public space’ (2001, p. 17). For Banerjee, the primary concern was a withdrawal of people from ‘real places and communities’. He wondered what affect the ability to ‘shop with the click of a mouse’ would have on shopping centres, main streets and third places and hypothesized that cyber-living ‘might lead to isolation, withdrawal, and anomie’ (Banerjee, 2001). These concerns are as relevant now as they were in 2001.

The nature of what Jacobs (1961) called ‘random interactions’ changes in the new time economy. The meaning of ‘random interactions’ ought not to be reduced to merely instances of exchanges or interaction between strangers. The value of a random interaction is not realized and captured only in the moment when it occurs. Rather, the benefits of random interactions are indirect and cumulative. Such moments do not change individuals instantaneously. Instead, over a period of time, these interactions nurture familiarity, acceptance and empathy towards others, especially those with whom one does not share ascriptive markers of identity. Thus, over time, random interactions help create a more inclusive definition of the ‘normal’ and ‘mundane’.

A random interaction, which in Jacobs’s view allows people to learn from each other, is not merely a momentary merging of individuals’ personal space bubbles—it is an intersection of their rhythms. Here, people are constantly distracted by consumption choices, and by audio and visual advertising, and with a mobile phone, music player, or other digital devices providing additional sensory inputs, they share space, but their time is hyper-privatized. In this situation, although individuals may occupy the same space, the quality of their random interactions is depleted. With regards to Banerjee’s (2001) concerns, it turns out those living extensive cyber-lives have not retreated from physical public spaces. Cyber-lives are not being lived from home. Rather cyber-lives are being overlaid on ‘regular’ lives. And cyber-lives are lived as multiple cyber roles, ever more securely tied to consumption. People still visit cafes, walk in streets and sit in plazas, but these spaces are losing the shared rhythms that make them quintessential urban commons. Each individual is linked to global flows, but these flows are deterritorialized, virtualized and isolated from local socio-spatial relations and practices.

Rights to free speech and to presence in public space (in other words, the right to not be excluded or, aptly, ‘right to the city’) are important and must be fought for. But prized values of publicness are lost also through the phenomenon of continuous productivity in time. This part of the loss does not receive nearly as much attention. A guarantee of rights would not suffice to slow down the gradual loss of public life to consumption. The crucial missing variable is ‘public time’. Creating publicness, or building a community, requires shared public time.

The true value of public spaces is not realized unless people are able to share time and rhythms. Contemporary technologies, consumption and rhythms of productivity in time, create disjunctures between public time and public space. The real loss of publicness and of community (or social capital) occurs not merely through the ownership of space, but more importantly through attrition of the quality and quantity of public time.

A Socio-spatial-temporal Approach to Community Planning

It has been argued in this article that the meaning and experience of human time (particularly in the interconnected realms of labor, consumption and community) has been altered fundamentally by advanced ICTs. In response, urban designers and policymakers interested in place-making and community planning may consider a socio-spatial-temporal approach to interpreting places, everyday life and community building. Such an approach would respect the diversity of rhythms and temporalities and valourize the potentialities of shared time.

Polyrhythmic Public Space

The socio-spatial implications of a rhythmanalytic approach are clearly evident. When planning space, there could be a risk of privileging of some rhythms to the detriment of others. Mattias Kärrholm (2009) warns of the ‘potential danger of temporal homogeneity’ (p. 435) in public space. Based on a study of Malmö, Kärrholm argues that temporalities of retail shopping synchronize uses of space and impose their own rhythms on public space. It is important, in this context, to imagine ‘open-minded’ spaces (Walzer, 1986, p. 470) that can include multiple uses and diverse rhythms. A plaza (or park, street, waterfront, etc.) used for access, commerce, social and cultural activities throughout the day could also be used for exercise by the elderly in the morning and evening, as a children’s play space (at different times, for running around, playing team sports, riding bicycles or skateboarding), by young people to socialize, as a space for prayer, and for women to walk home alone. Each activity engages the space in the respective users’ temporal rhythms, and each carries its own set of challenges (crowding, access, noise, security, etc.)

In privately supplied public spaces, some rhythms are forced either to converge (synchronize) or disappear altogether. Along with the suppression of rights considered fundamental to the liberal-democratic polity (such as freedom of speech and association), the restriction on the mixing of rhythms and temporalities is a significant loss of use value that is incurred in privately supplied public space. ‘Bridging interactions’ across borders of identity can only occur when temporalities can intersect in the public realm, that is, when diverse temporalities are encouraged to intersect in space. Building inclusive and resilient communities requires a planning outlook that makes space for diverse rhythms of everyday life and creates innovative opportunities for them to mix. Planners, policymakers and urban designers must aspire to create ‘polyrhythmic’ (Lefebvre, 2004), ‘open-minded’ spaces (Walzer, 1986, p. 470) as counterpoints to the synchronizing, deterritorializing rhythms of always-engaged online consumption.

Community as Craft: Planning for Public Time

The first contribution of the socio-spatial-temporal approach is sensitivity towards diverse, intersecting and overlapping rhythms. The second has to do with recovering, conserving and reinvesting public time. In a passage that is closely aligned with the arguments in this article, Virilio argued that ‘[a]s a unity of place without any unity of time, the City has disappeared into the heterogeneity of that regime com-prised of the temporality of advanced tech-nologies’ (Virilio, 2002, p. 442). The sensory-intellectual stimulation of individuals, particularly in the public realm, should include opportunities to unplug from the imperative of consumption.

Based on a study on ‘urban walking’, Middleton (2009) argued that the emphasis on speed causes policymakers (in this case in the field of transportation) to overlook ‘experiential dimensions of time’ (p. 1943). Jane Jacobs’s idea of promoting ‘random interactions’, discussed earlier, suggests that social benefits of community building accrue over a period of time. Manzo and Perkins (2006), approaching the issue from the perspective of ‘emotion’, suggest that ‘place attachment’ increases gradually and gets stronger over time. Citing Tuan (1974) and Manzo and Perkins (2006) indicate that ‘places acquires deep meaning ‘through the steady accretion of sentiment’ and experience’ (p. 337). Nigel Thrift (1977a, b) points out the importance of seeing time as a resource in understanding space and community. Sennett (2008) argued that the learning of a craft requires the apprentice to invest 10,000 hours of time, in a workshop, under the guidance of a master, in order to learn the skill. Linking Sennett’s works on ‘craft’ and on ‘the public man’, Chakravarty (2011) has posited that community planners should think in terms of ‘planning for public time’ in order to foster a strong sense of community and solidarity. Members of a community can practise the ‘skills’ or the ‘craft’ of community by investing time in collective practices for building trust and interaction.

Planning for public time could include public participation events, charrettes, workshops, museum offerings, open mic sessions, reading events, neighbourhood tours, art walks, events reclaiming street space for pedestrians and cyclists, street performances, and public art installations. Much of this is already happening. Bogota’s Ciclovia (Montero, 2017), cultural events by Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Zeller, 2019; Lugo, 2013) and community gardening in Toronto (Baker, 2004) and elsewhere are only some examples of the work that has already been done.

In India, though, few initiatives of this kind are undertaken with the broader goal of nurturing civic engagement, participation and an inclusive public life. They remain discrete, biased in favour of the middle classes and the elite, and rarely built into planning institutions. Moreover, most of the participation exercises at the local level are either undertaken because of statutory requirements or out of concerns for property values and security (Chakravarty, 2016; Ellis, 2011; Benjamin, 2008). The important shift would be for planners and civil society to utilize public time in more systematic manner, oriented towards investing places to with shared meanings for their residents over time.

Further, there is a case for integrating advanced ICTs into these efforts. Local government agencies have rarely utilized ICTs for purposes other than sharing news, information and forms, trip planning, making payments and reporting complaints. Opportunities can be created to allow people of all ages to engage with ongoing planning projects of various kinds, in addition to referenda, surveys and non-profit endeavours. If people feel that they can exercise a degree of control on the fate of their communities and neighbourhoods, they are more likely to spend their time engaging in these efforts. Civic engagement experiments in Boston that utilize virtual worlds (Gordon & Koo, 2008) and the use of community informatics for participatory planning in Helsinki (Saad-Sulonen & Horelli, 2010) are significant in this regard. Not least, Crang, Crosbie, & Graham (2007) call for a deeper understanding of the interactions between virtual and real, rather than treating them as a binary.

Conclusion

This article interprets the ubiquitous use of advanced ICTs through a framework of time. It is argued that the productivity (overall addition of value to the economy) of individuals’ time has increased manifold because of the capabilities of advanced ICTs operating on fast networks. Further, it is argued that the constraint on human labour, of the 24-hour day, has been overcome by devices that allow participation in multiple flows of consumption at the same instant of clock time.

It is important to underline, again, that the argument is not against technology itself. Rather, it is society’s response to technology that requires attention. The challenges posed by advanced ICTs have to be first acknowledged and understood. In a transitional age when societies around the world are still formulating responses to issues such as surveillance, data security, cybercrime and Artificial Intelligence, policymakers interested in space and community are invited to consider the temporal aspects of planning and design more explicitly. In response to the effects of emergent temporalities of labour and consumption, a socio-spatial-temporal outlook to urban planning and place-making can rebuild communities and help them reassert their rights to the city.

This exploratory study attempts identify how broad trends in technology are reorganizing time and outline some impacts on space and society. It is expected that the analysis will help generate hypotheses and further inquiry. Phenomenological research on the human experience of technology and how it affects individuals’ beliefs and values will enhance our understanding of the forces at play, and the degree to which individuals can exercise agency over technology. In particular, it is important to understand how the condition of constant consumption affects interpersonal relationships, identity, values and community life.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

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