Throughout the book I have argued that ICTs create a multiplicity of temporalities and modes of everyday living, as people craft new understandings of themselves and their relation to others. Time cannot be thought of as an abstraction, divorced from a socially situated materiality and embodiment. We make and measure time with and through instruments, tools, and techniques. But it does not follow that accelerating technologies inevitably hasten the pace of all social domains. The way artifacts evolve in relation to time practices crucially depends on how they become embedded in our institutions and the vicissitudes of ordinary life.
The very same machines that can make us feel harried also free up time, allowing for much greater autonomy, flexibility, and versatility in how we organize human afairs. Recall our discussion of the smartphone, the quintessential time-space compression mechanism. Not only does it both save and consume time, it also transforms linear, sequential timescapes, and all this simultaneously. I have argued that the experience of harriedness takes a variety of forms, depending on which aspect of temporality is being squeezed. Problems of temporal disorganization, the dificulty of coordinating shared social practices with others, loom large with the growth of dual-earner households. So it is not surprising that people have actively embraced and appropriated cell phones in order to microcoordinate and synchronize their multifarious activities. By softening schedules and making time more fluid, these devices ofer unique techniques for alleviating this aspect of time pressure.
Indeed, I have debunked the notion that we have all become cyberserfs, technologically tethered workers with no control over our own lives. In chapter 4 I considered the complex entanglement of contemporary work practices, working time, and the materiality of technical artifacts. I showed that neither the smartphone nor even the sheer volume of e-mail trafic drives the speed of work. People overloaded with work reach for their electronic gadgets in an attempt to relieve the pressure that the devices magnify but do not in themselves cause.
Finding Time in a D igi tal Age
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