The extension of the temporal availability of technologies and human beings has already assumed visible and measurable proportions. Murray Melbin speaks of the colonialization of the night' and means by this the increase in nocturnal activities in American cities: New York does not sleep and neither does Boston, as can be seen from the frequency of crime, the number of admissions in the hospitals at night, but also the number of people who go to 24-hour supermarkets, bowling alleys and repair shops of all kinds. Many factories, but also post offices, newspaper editorial offices, hotels and hospitals work in three shifts; service industries like the fire brigade, key cutting service, places where one can get new nappies or insecticides, TV repair services and burial places, are on call day and night.22 But the economic pressure of availability is also growing on the machines installed in the factories. If only because of the capital investment they contain, they have to run continuously, which leads to a distinct rise in shift-work. In the case of automated plants, the problem no longer arises, since they hardly require workers any more. Availability is automatically guaranteed.
What are above all ready on call' and continuously at hand are the electronic communication technologies, which have moved into offices and households. With the emergence of 'laboratory time'from the laboratory, now embodied in these technological artefacts, the patterns of temporal perception change once again. Other social structurings of time are needed in order to adapt to the demand for continuous attainability and to be able to use it.
Only gradually do temporal protective zones develop, so-called core times', in which presence or absence is demanded. Other technologies take on as substitutes the work of ‘answering' and cause machines to speak with machines. But people will not be able to absent themselves as easily as the euphoric supporters of information technologies think. On the contrary. Other demands are made on their temporal availability; they have to react to the time-structures made possible in the new technologies by laboratory time, and structure them. New, collective and individual time-strategies in dealing with the new machine time, laboratory time, have to be developed. Technology is no longer to be found merely at work, no longer merely in the infrastructures like transport and energy systems, but everywhere, even in one's own house or, as with the mobile personal telephone, on one's own body. In the case of strategies for dealing with this, to be negotiated collectively, individual time-preferences therefore play a far greater role than was previously the case. But every timestrategy, however individually determined, bears within it the stamp of social time, for nobody can free himself or herself of the temporal patterns which connect him or her with others. The ‘flexibilization' is a relative one. Here, too, time proves to be structure and structuring, and social time keeps on flowing through individual existence. The two following chapters are devoted to these themes.
Cronos's Fear of the New Age
99