This is the thesis at the heart of the book. It enables us to leave behind the old dichotomies about technologies being either inherently liberating or enslaving. By now we should have learnt to be skeptical about both extreme positions: the messianic promise of a technologically-wrought new epoch on the one hand and a blanket rejection of dominance by machines on the other. The digital world is neither exactly the same nor completely diferent from the industrial world. In order to understand our current obsession with speed, we would be better of exploring both the things that have stayed the same, and the things that are particular to our time.
To this end, a historical sense of “new” technologies is required. Machines in the industrial age recast people’s experience of time, just as they continue to do now. Yet considerations of technology’s impact on time fixate on the latest gadgets, while older dependable artifacts are so familiar as to be left forgotten in the shadows. I will call into question this implicit division between cutting-edge technologies and existing technologies, the spectacular and the ordinary. With this in mind, we will be less inclined to identify technology itself as the source of positive or negative change.
It is our own concrete social practices that generate those qualities of technologies we usually consider as intrinsic and permanent. In other words, technologies only come to life and have meaning as people adopt and use them. At the same time, technologies play a central role in the constitution of time regimes, as our very experience of human action and the material world is mediated by technology. It is simply impossible to disentangle our notion of time from our embodied habitual involvement with the sociomaterial world. We make the world together with technology and so it is with time.
Tools for Time
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