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Cultures & Time in the Digital Age
Time varies by culture. In the digital age, this is impacting geopolitics & sovereignty as well as cultural identity.
When we think about the internet and everything we do with it today, we tend to consider speed first. The faster the better. For the average citizen, that is what matters. Speed for streaming movies and shows, speed for browsing the internet. But what about time? Increasingly, time, or temporality, is playing a role geopolitically. From weaponisation to cultural preservation and respect. Why?
In 2017 when Iran was in the depths of massive anti-government protests, the government didn’t turn off the internet, they throttled it, significantly slowing it down. This was a deliberate act to desynchronise local and global information flows. In 2011 during the Arab Spring, Egypt turned off internet access in an attempt to stop protests. Instead it drove more people onto the streets. These were early attempts at weaponising digital time.
Some countries today, notably Russia and China, slow down internet traffic coming into their countries from Western nations while speeding up national content. This is using digital time as a means of excerpting digital sovereignty.
