My interest focuses on the question: how does time change? It all began many years ago with my desire to know why some people have ‘more', othérs less', and many ‘no' time at all, and how these differences were connected with the culture from which they came, with their class status and the relations they established with past, present and future.² Then in the course of time many new questions and observations were added: women's time is differently structured and is used differently from men's time; the phenomenon of everyday life', in which the boundaries between private and public time are increasingly beginning to become blurred, also began to interest me. I gradually became convinced of the inexorable disappearance of the category of the future and its replacement by something I call the extended present. And always and everywhere I encountered those technologies which are changing the human perception of time most immediately and most visibly – the modern technologies of communication. Their influence is perceptible, tangible, and demonstrable at work and at home, in means of transport and in communication networks, in the finance markets of the world and in the countries of the Third World.
Introduction
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