What leads people to declare their pressing need for time so categorically, especially in this pronounced first person form? After all, they have got their time-saving machines which make their lives easier and relieve them of tedious or heavy manual work. Means of transport are always available to take them at great speed to almost all corners of the earth. Today many more things work by pushing a button than just the light switches. Modern communication technologies attain speeds which can no longer be directly perceived by human sense organs. But through integration into world-wide simultaneity there grows the need to distinguish one's own'time from that which connects people with others; there grows the desire to be able to control the interlocking to some extent oneself, to gain ‘temporal sovereignty' over one's local time, which is now visibly and noticeably integrated into world time. It is not so much the very long and the very short time, the time of history, of the longue durée' and the specious present, of the perception of the flow of time in split seconds, which seek contact and resolution in a juxtaposition charged with tension, but one's own, subjective local time that sees itself confronted with a public world time which – spatially extended over the entire earth - professes to be simultaneous.
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The Illusion of Simultaneity