Only at the turn of this century, as was shown earlier in this chapter, was there an explosive emergence into public life of these millions of subjective times which had previously been kept secret – prepared by the processes of economic integration, and made possible by the technologies which were capable of creating the illusion of simultaneity. It was the epoch in which proper time was constituted, just as it was the saddle period’from 1750 to 1850 which had constituted 'modern times'and the temporalization of history. It was up to an artistic and scientific avant-garde to express its new perceptions, experiences and feelings. It was not just by chance that the psychological theories of the time were intensively concerned with the problem of perception, of duration, of memory and of the traces which every temporal perception left behind in the memory. It was not by chance that the Theory of Relativity, even though it was understood by scarcely more than a handful of physicists, met with an enormous popular scientific response. It was not by chance that the fascination of simultaneity, precisely because it still represented the extraordinary, extended to the smallest village, even though the only evidence of this is what historians have found in the oral historical tradition. The emergence of proper time, in its subjectively experienced quality and scientifically grounded for the first time, thus entered the public domain. But it needed a further, social-organizational and technological infrastructure, created only in the second half of this century, to socialize proper time, to practise its use, and to make it a habit which has since made its temporal mark on everyday life. Here it is now practised and experienced, and in cases of conflict also suffered. Here it is trivialized. Since the socialized version of proper time, its now public dissemination and acquisition by everyone, just like the subjectivized version before it, the articulation of which was reserved for a minority, is mediated via technology, it seems reasonable to look for the determinants of the temporal changes in technology itself. It was as true then as it is today that cultural hypochondria' is never very far away from what is regarded as a non-pathological normal state. Numerous fears and prognoses arise in connection with the widespread invasion by telecommunications media of all spheres of social existence. They warn of the dangers of a possible psychological isolation, a social uncoupling in a hyper-individualized world of one's own. Temporal perceptions, mediated via the screen, can lead to extreme fragmentation even in the perception of social relations. Sherry Turkle describes the psycho-structure of young computer freaks who, through interaction with technology, create their own world – even in terms of time – which largely isolates them from the social events around them.24Maruyama reports on a new generation of Japanese youths whom, following the computer generations, he calls the fifth generation of computer kids. They are developing hitherto unknown cognitive faculties which are lacking in the older generation, even if the latter has already grown up with computers. Thus, among other things, they are able to see several programmes on video screens simultaneously,. and to grasp the narrative structures; they develop their own games whose rules provide for a continuous switching on and switching off, and patterns of temporal perception combining speed and simultaneity.25
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The Illusion of Simultaneity