What was euphorically celebrated at the turn of the century has become prosaic reality today, but with nontrivial consequences. The plurality of private time forces its way into publicity, is absorbed by it. From the original experience of private time and subjectively justified temporal existence, the temporal self, and also the bourgeois one, has been catapulted into working-time regulations, lifetime regulations, retirement age regulations. The private time of every man and woman has found its place, its time, in world time, but through communication technologies this private time has become one which is always connectable, available, and public. In. between there lies a process of the collective appropriation of communication technologies which matured technologically after the Second World War. Through the creation of a corresponding infrastructure and that typical convergence of individual technological systems into a gigantic techno-system, in which the diverse sectors are combined with one another,14 the technological and economic preconditions have been created to make communicating and acting in an approximative simultaneity not just possible, but a necessity. Simultaneity has become workaday routine for many people. It is no longer predominantly dramatic events, like the fate of the sinking Titanic or those ritual moments which serve to strengthen the feeling of solidarity among people, which convey simultaneity, but the course of everyday work, the constant temporal presence, real or virtual, of others.
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The Illusion of Simultaneity