Time Perception in the Digital Age
When we are children, summers seem almost endless. The wait for birthdays and holidays interminable. As we move into our adult years, it seems time speeds up with every passing year. For those who live in the country, time passes and is measured differently from those in the cities. In today’s technology driven world, we talk about the ever increasing pace of life.
Turns out, there may well be some truth to that. How we perceive, value and work with time is changing in the Digital Age. Especially if we consider how time was understood in pre-history and even just a century ago.
We may bemoan this changing perception of time, sometimes seeing this faster pace of life as bad or wrong. That is a reaction to change, even though we know the only constant in life is change. Ever since we developed technologies such as language and stone axes, our relationship with time has been changing, much like our societies and cultures.
What are the potential impacts and implications of change as we move more deeply into the Digital Age?
Time as an aspect of being human has long been studied by anthropologists and very much so by sociologists.
Digital technologies impact our sense of now, how we imagine the future and how we feel about the past. As all technologies have throughout our history. Sometimes we may look back at past eras and think that it must have been much simpler and easier without all of today’s technologies seemingly intruding on every aspect of our lives.
We’ve always yearned for times gone by, believing them to be simpler, better, less stressful. This is not really the case. In the 1950’s we thought the 1850’s must have been less fast and an easier life. The reality in the 1850s was that people thought the same and prior times. And lifespans were shorter, medicine was nowhere near what it has become today. Manual labour had little rules and life was rather brutal.
Time is a social entity. This is through the collective rhythms of how we engage with the world. We see this in statements such as “time is money”, which also implicates money as a unit of economic value, also being tied to time. Which is a whole additional area of discussion.
Oddly though, most people tend to see technology as distinct from time. A sort of “other.” But technology is deeply intertwined with what it means to be human. We simply cannot survive without technology.
Digital technologies do speed up our lives in a societal context. Email is a great example. So pervasive has it become that some countries, such as France and some smaller regions, like the province of Ontario in Canada, have implemented regulations around employers use of emails outside of work hours. This in an attempt to give time back to employees.
Social media impacts our sense of time in how we feel we should respond to notifications and postings within our social graph. Digital marketing encourages us to buy now or miss out on deals. Shein and Temu use time to great effect to drive us to make purchases a quickly as possible. Online auction site eBay was one of the first digital tools to leverage our relationship with time and money and social anxieties.
DNA genealogy sites like Ancestry and 23andme employ time as a measure of helping us understand our family histories as we reflect on where we came from. And encourage us to connect with newfound family members. They have also benefitted society in solving cold cases.
While it is almost impossible to say just how much digital technologies will impact society and evolve, we do see some indicators. On the downside, we know that a fast-paced life can lead to greater stress and anxiety with feelings of not being able to keep pace with modern life, especially in urban settings. On the upside, we can get some jobs done faster and easier and then find more time to relax and play.
The story of time and technology today is often very linear, such as technological determinism and that those who have control over our time are powerful and those who have little control over time are powerless
What is more probable in the near term is that our relationship with time, how we manage it and perceive it, will change significantly. Perhaps more-so than well, any previous time.
More research is needed, to understand not just the surface aspects of time and a modern society such as speed, but also the cost to maintain the infrastructure of a faster society. Facebook, TikTok, Instagram Reels are at the front of faster time. But behind them is the slow-time to keep that pace working. The coders writing the software, the engineers keeping things working. And of course, how all that is paid for.
Digital money, information technologies, knowledge management, the role of Artificial Intelligence, medical technology advances, will impact every aspect of time and how we live. For both good and bad and with, as with every technology, the unintended consequences.
So, well, thanks for taking the time to read this article! More to come at another, uhm, time…
