- Jul 2018
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wendynorris.com wendynorris.com
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I propose that we think a bout temporal relations with reference to a cluster of temporal features, each implicated in all the others but not necessarily of equal importance in each instance. We might call this cluster a timescape. The notion of 'scape' is important here as it indicates, first, that time is inseparable from space and matter, and second, that context matters.
Definition of timescape -- "a cluster of temporal features, each implicated in all the others but not necessarily of equal importance in each instance."
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This control clusrer of the five Cs of time, I have suggested, needs to be differentiated from both time tempering and transcendence, on the one hand, and time knowledge and know-how, on the other, since only in the control cluster is time objectified, externalized and constructed to specific design principles.
"... only in the control cluster is time objectified, externalized and constructed to specific design principles."
Tempering vs knowledge are also important distinctions for the SBTF time-study.
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Once time is disembedded, that is, extracted from process and product, it becomes an object and as such subiect to bounding, exchange and transformation.40 It is in this form that time is colonized,, as distinct from the time embedded in events and processes, which has been subject ito cultural efforts of transcendence.
Check the citation. Don't understand this.
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It shows thar irrespective of the diverse temporal uses of time in the political, scientific and economic spheres, a unified clock time underpins the differences in expressions. All other forms of temporal relations are refracted through chis created temporal form, or at least touched by its pervasive dominance
Clock-time dominates political, scientific and economic practices despite the very different ways temporality is represented in these fields.
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This industrial norm, as I suggested above, is fundamentally rooted in clock time and underpinned by naturalized assumptions about not just the capacity but also the need to commodify, compress and control time.
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There are two sides to the colonization of time: the global imposition of a particular kind of time which is colonization with time, and the social incursion into time -past and future, night-time and seasons, for example -which is the colonization of time. Colonization with time therefore refers to the export of clock and commodified time as unquestioned and unquestionable standard, colonization of time to the scientific, technological and economic reach into time -most usually of distant others who have no say in the matter.
Colonization with time is defined as exporting Western industrial standards of clock time (GMT, time zones, ISO standards, etc.) and the commodification of time.
Colonization of time is defined as imposing those standards and expectations as norms on the developing world.
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'Interconnectivity', Hassan suggests, 'is what gives the network time its power within culture and society.'32 It is worth quoting him at length here. Network time does not 'kill' or render 'timeless' other temporalities, clock-time or otherwise. The embedded nature of the 'multiplicity' of temporalities rbat pervade culture and society, and tbe deeply intractable relationship we have with rhe clock make this unlikely. Rather, the process is one of 'displacement'. Network time constitutes a new and powerful temporality that is beginning to displace, neutralise, sublimate and otherwise upset other temporal relationships in our work, home and leisure environments
Hassan advances Castells' work on network time and focuses on how the cultural impact/power comes from interconnectivity of the network, not Virilio's emphasis on communication speed.
In this view, culture and society have multiple temporalities that layer/modify/supercede as globalization, political/work trends, and new technologies take hold.
Network time is displacing other types of temporal representations, like clock-time.
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This network time transforms social time into two allied but distinct forms: simultaneity and timelessness. 29 Simultaneity refers to the globally networked immediacy of communication provided by satellite television and the internee, which makes real-time exchanges possible irrespective of the distances involved. Timelessness, the more problematic concept, refers to the layering of time, the mixing of tenses, the editing of sequences, the splicing together of unrelated events. It points co the general loss of chronological order and context-dependent rhythmicity. It combines eternity with ephemeralicy, real time with contextual change. Castells designates timeless time as 'the dominant temporality of our society'
Per Castells, network time transforms social time into two forms: simultaneity and timelessness.
Simultaneity is characterized by global, networked real-time experience augmented by technology. Timelessness is characterized by a non-linear experiences and lack of contextual rhythms. Time is undifferentiated and seems eternal and ephemeral.
Castells views timelessness as the new dominant temporal culture.
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In Castells's analysis, time is not merely compressed but processed, and it is the network rather than acceleration that constitutes the discontinuity in a context of continuing compress10n.
compressed time vs processed time
acceleration (speed) vs network time
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In a systematic analysis Castells contrasts the clock time of modernity with the network time of the network society.
clock time vs network time
Definition of network time, per Hassan (2003): "Through the convergence of neoliberal globalization and ICT revolution a new powerful temporality has emerged through which knowledge production is refracted: network time."
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Virilio suggests that we can read the history of modernity as a series of innovations iu ever-increasing time compression. He argues that, through the ages, the wealth and power associated with ownership of land was equally tied to the capacity to traverse it and to the speed at which this could be achieved.
Cites French political theorist and technology critic Paul Virilio.
Virilio's engagement with speed integrates 3 concepts that evoke increasing tempos over 3 successive centuries: 19th century transport, 20th century transmission, and 21st century transplantion.
The concept of transplantation, which is more biological in origin/use, is not as broadly covered here as transport and transmission.
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From the above we can see that Virilio understands human history in terms of a race with time, of ever-increasing speeds that transcend humans' biological capacity. To theorize culture without the dromosphere, that is, the sphere of beings in motion, he therefore sugges,ts, misses the key point of cultural activity and the uniqueness of the industrial way of life. Without an explicit conceptualization of the contemporary dromosphere -or in my terms timescape -it is thus difficult to fully understand the human-technology-science-economyequity-environmenr constellation. Moreover, it becomes impossible to appreciate that people are che weakest link when the time frames of action are compressed to zero and effects expand to eternity, when transmission and transplantation are instantaneous but their outcomes extend into an open future, when instantaneity and eternity are combined in a discordant fusion of all times.
Adam's critique of Virilio's incomplete theory on time compression as it related to cultural transformation. Claims it lacks adequate theoretical description/understanding of how people in the high-tempo dromosphere in his writings, (timescape in her work) interact with time.
Adam further notes how important it is to understand how people factor into discordant time compressions through everyday sociocultural interactions -- which she refers to as "the human-technology-science-economy-equity-environment constellation."
This is pretty dense theoretical work. Would help to find an example or two in the SBTF time study to make this idea a little more accessible.
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the potential capacity of exterrirorial beings to be everywhere at once and nowhere in particular is inescapably tied to operators that are bounded by their embodied temporal limits of terrestrial existence and sequential information processing. The actual capacity for parallel absorption of knowledge, therefore, is hugely disappointing. Equally, the electronic capacity to be now-here and no-where has brought the body to a standstill.
Adam's critique of transmission technologies allowing people to be "now-here and no-where" perhaps also helps unpacks some of the tensions for SBTF's global social coordination.
Could this be some of the unconscious motive to use terms that situate volunteers with one another as they attempt to grapple with tempo-imposed friction points which work against "terrestrial existence" and "sequential information processing"?
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The overload of information, for example, is becoming so extensive that taking advantage of only the tiniest fraction of it not only blows apart the principle of instantaneity and 'real-time' communication, but also slows down operators to a pomt where they lose themselves in the eternity of electronically networked information.
High tempo Information overload exacerbates time compression and thus impacts temporal sensemaking through typical means via chronologies, linear information processing, and past/present/future contexts.
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The intensive {electronic) present, Virilio suggests, is no longer part of chronological time; we have to conceptualize it instead _as chronoscopic time. Real space, he argues, is making room for decontextualized 'real-time' processes and intensity takes over from extensity.11 This in turn has consequences and, similar to the time compression in transport, the compression in transmission has led to a range of paradoxical effects.
Definition of chronoscopic time: While still bounded and defined by clock-time, like chronological time, chronoscopic experiences are more tempo-driven and focused on a hyper-present real-time. Chronological time is situated in movement across a timeline of past, present, future where history and temporal story narrative arcs.
See Purser (2000) for a dromological analysis of Virilio's work on chronoscopic- and real-time.
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With respect to twentieth-century transmission Virilio has in mind the wireless telegraph, telephone, radio and subsequent developments in computer and satellite communication, which have once more changed the relationship between time and movement across space. Together, these innovations in transmission replaced succession and duration with seeming simultaneity and instantaneity. Duration has been compressed to zero and the present extended spatially to encircle the globe: it became a global present.
In the example of ICT advancements (radio, telegraph, computer, etc.), Adam describes a shift in tempo of a person's temporal experience due to real-time transmission capabilities.
Tempo experiences that are successive or have some duration quality are transformed into a perceived sense of instantaneous and simultaneous "real time" experience.
When a sociotemporal experience is lighting up friction points between time and space -- is this where tempo and timelines begin to get entangled?
Is the computer-mediated "movement" between time and space the inflection point where social coordination begins to break down? That we don't have enough time to process or make sense of CMC-delivered information?
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In economic production, time compression has been achieved by a number of means: by increasing the activity within the same unit of tifYle (through machines and the intensification of labour), reorganizing the sequence and ordering of activities (Tay!orism and Fordism), using peaks and troughs more effective!�· (flexibilization), and by eliminating all unproductive times from the process ( the just-in-time system of production, delivery and consumption).
Time compression considers how time moves across space.
Valorizing speed (aka "time compression" per Marx and CUNY Anthropology and Geography professor David Harvey) is a political and economic goal of Western industrialized nations.
Speed also provides competitive advantages, whether for technological advancements, cultural movements and species biological evolution.
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A third paradox is only hinted at by Vmho, when he suggests that conflict is to be expected between democracy and dromocracy, the politics that take account of time and the speed of movement across space.20 It concerns the sociopolitical and socioeconomic relations associated with advances in transport speed, which affect different indivi�uals, groups and classes of society in uneven ways.
Transportation speed is entangled with social equity and power: time-poor, cash-rich can "buy" time through labor, efficient technologies but the time-rich, cash-poor cannot trade time to become wealthy wealth.
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Rifkin and Howard point out, 'the faster we speed up, the faster we degrade
Virilio writes that speed, or time compression, also contributes to adverse social and environmental impacts, per Rifkin and Howard: "the faster we speed up, the faster we degrade."
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In the light of this evidence, which is fully supported by transport research, 17 Virilio formulated the �romological law, which states that increase in speed mcreases the potential for gridlock.
Virilio's dromological law: "increase in speed, increases the potential for gridlock."
This evokes environmental concerns as well as critiques of political privilege/power wrt to elites with access to fast transport options and those with less clout relegated to public transportation, traffic jams, less reliable options, etc.
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the relations of time and their socio-environmental impacts, underlying assumptions and their material expressions, institutional processes and recipients' experiences, hidden agendas and power relations, unquestioned time politics and 'othering' practices.9
Adams argues here and through her other papers(*) that social science researchers need to focus less on the obvious temporal conflicts in everyday life and focus more on the "socio-environmental impacts, underlying assumptions and their material exppressions, institutional processes and recipients' experiences, hidden agendas and power relations, unquestioned time politics and 'othering practices."
- Adam, Timescapes of Modernity and 'The Gendered Time Politics of Globalisation'.
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While interest and credit had been known and documented since 3000 BC in Babylonia, it was not until the late Middle Ages that the Christian Church slowly and almost surreptitiously changed its position on usury,6 which set time free for trade to be allocated, sold and controlled. It is against this back�round that we have to read the extr�cts from Benjar1_1in Franklin's text of 1736, quoted at length m chapter 2, which contains the famous phrases 'Remember, that time is money ... Remember that money begets money.'7 Clock time, the created time to human design, was a precondition for this change in value and practice and formed the perfect partner to abstract, decontextualized money. From the Middle Ages, trade fairs existed where the trade in time became commonplace and calculations about future prices an integral part of commerce. In addition, internatio�al trade by sea required complex calculations about pote�ual profit and loss over long periods, given that trade ships might be away for as long as three years at a time. The time economy of interest and credit, moreover, fed directly into the monetary value of labour time, that is, paid employme�t as an integral part of the production of goo?s and serv_1ce�. However it was not until the French Revolunon that the md1-vidual (�eaning male) ownership of time became enshrined as a legal right
Historical, religious, economic, and political aspects of how time became a commodity that could be allocated, sold, traded, borrowed against or controlled.
Benjamin Franklin metaphor: "time is money ... money begets money"
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The task for social theory, therefore, is to render the invisible visible, show relations and interconnections, begin tbe process of questioning the unquestioned. Before we can identify some of these economic relations of temporal inequity, however, we first need to understand in what way the sin of usury was a barrier to the development of economic life as we know it today in industrial societies.
Citing Weber (integrated with Marx), Adam describes how time is used to promote social inequity.
Taken for granted in a socio-economic system, time renders power relationships as invisible
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Marx's principal point regarding the commodification of time was that an empty, abstract, quantifiable time that was applicable anywhere, any time was a precondition for its use as an abstract exchange value on the one hand and for the commodification of labour and nature on the other. Only on the basis of this neutral measure could time take such a pivotal position in all economic exchange.
Citing Marx' critique on how time is commodified for value, labor and natural resources.
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Clock time, the human creation, as I have shown, operates according to fundamentally different principles from rhe ones ��derpinning the times of tbe cosmos, �ature and the spmt�al realm of eternity. It is a decontextuahzed empty ume that nes the measurement of motion to expression by number. Not change, creativity and process, but static states are given a number value in the temporal frames of calendars and clocks. The artifice rather than the processes of cosmos, nature and spirit, we need to appreciate, came to be the object of trade, control and colonization.
Primer on how clock-time differs from natural world and spiritual expressions of time.
Clock-time as a socio-economic numerical representation is a guiding force for how power is wielded through colonialization/conquered lands and people, labor becomes a value-laden commodity, and
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The creation of time to human design m an atemporal, decontextualized form, as outlined in chapter 5, was a necessary techno-material condition for the use of time by industrial societies as an abstract exchange value and for the acceleration, control and global imposition of time.
Time as a techno-material condition. Tie this back to Miller (2015) on materiality?
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This is so because all cultures, ancient and modern, have established collective ways of relating to the past and future, of synchronizing their activities, of coming to terms with finitude. How we extend ourselves into the past and future, how we pursue immortality and how we temporally manage, organize and regulate our social affairs, however, has been culturally, historically and contextually distinct. Each htstorical epoch with its new forms of socioeconomic expression is simultaneously restructuring its social relations of time.
Sociotemporal reactions/responses/concepts have deep historical roots and intercultural relationships.
Current ways of thinking about time continue to be significantly influenced by post-industrial socio-economic constructs, like clock-time, labor efficiencies (speed), and value metaphors (money, attention, thrift).
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the Reformation had a major role to play in the metamorphosis of time from God's gift to commodified, comp�essed, colonized and controlled resource. These four Cs of mdustrial time -comrnodification, compression, colonization and control -will be the focus in these pages, the fifth C of the creation of clock time having been discussed already in the previous chapter. I show their interdependence and id�ntify some of the socio-environmental impacts of those parttcular temporal relations.
Five C's of industrial time: Commodification, compression, colonialization, control, and clock time.
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The Quest for Time Control
Additional notes here that contrast Reddy and Adam for SBTF time study paper:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RNqPYmLkVV7ui06YDOSEOmod2XCXe6W3tQe9Oey2ico/edit
Tags
- clock-time
- colonialization
- colonization
- information overload
- social inequity
- transmission
- spatial
- network time
- labor
- commodification
- metaphor
- timelessness
- power
- timescape
- compression
- Marx
- dromological law
- control
- speed
- post-industrial
- sensemaking
- culture
- history
- sociotemporality
- real time
- environment
- simultaneity
- interconnectivity
- materiality
- tempo
- chronoscopic time
Annotators
URL
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wendynorris.com wendynorris.com
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er. Each of these choices reflect power dynamics and conflicting tensions. Desires for ‘presence’ or singular focus often conflict with obligations to be responsive and integrate ‘work’ and ‘life
Are these power dynamics/tensions: actor or agent-based? individual or technical? situational or contextual? deliberate or autonomous?
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How do we understand such mosaictime in terms of striving for balance? Temporal units are rarely single-purpose and their boundaries and dependencies are often implicit. What sociotemporal values should we be honoring? How can we account for time that fits on neither side of a scale? How might scholarship rethink balance or efficiency with different forms of accounting, with attention to institutions as well as individuals?
Design implication: What heuristics are involved in the lived experience and conflicts between temporal logic and porous time?
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Leshed and Sengers’s research reminds us that calendars are not just tools for the management of time, but are also sites of identity work where people can project to themselves and others the density of their days and apparent ‘success’ at doing it all[26]. These seemingly innocuous artifacts can thus perpetuate deeper normative logics a
The dark side of time artifacts and the social pressure of busyness/industriousness as a virtue.
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. When creating tools for schedulingandcoordination, it is crucial to provide ways for people to take into account not just the multiplicity of (potentially dissonant) rhythms [22, 46], but also the differential affective experiencesof time rendered by such rhythms.
Design implication: How to accommodate rhythms and obligation with social coordination work?
".. one 'chunk' of time is not equivalent to any other 'chunk'"
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rid. The apparent equivalency of thesetime chunksmask the affective experiences and emotional intensities of lived temporality
Lived experience spotlights the tension/stress between managing chunkable time vs accepting spectral time.
How to accommodate unequal units of time? Or units that have different contextual meanings?
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Our rendering of porous time imagines a newperspective on time, in whichthe dominant temporal logic expandsbeyond ideals of control and mastery to include navigation(with or without conscious attention) of that which cannot be gridded or managed: the temporal trails, multiple interests, misaligned rhythms and expectations of others.
Design implication: How to mesh temporal logic with porous time realities?
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Taken together, an orientation to time as spectral, mosaic, rhythmic (dissonant),and obligatedsuggestsa possible alternate understanding of what time is and how it can work.An initial typology ofporous time honors the fluidity of time and its unexpected shifts; it also acknowledges novel integrations of time in everyday practice. Addressingthese alternate temporal realities allows us to build on CSCW’s legacy of related research to questionthereach and scope of thedominant temporal logic.
Description of porous time and its elements as an extension of CSCW literature on temporal logic.
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Yet, thepromise of social control affordedby information and communication technologies belies the inadequacy ofthe dominant temporal logic.
Design implication: Re-aligning real time needs/pressures/representations with temporal logic.
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A close look at the ways that people continually navigate the expectations and rhythms of those around them reveals how much the rhetoric of time management and control, built on the assumption that one is a solo temporal agent,is a fiction.To be considered a success in various social arenas (either via internal assessment or external validation) means that individualsoften cannot choose whether or not to attend to certain temporal obligations.
Design implication: Empowering people to navigate time more effectively or at least balance obligated time pressures.
Critique of time management industrial complex.
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This social state obligatesindividuals to navigate a temporal web of moral and professional expectations, and accountabilities to others. These temporalobligations affect tempora
Definition of obligated time. Counters the idea of ownable time or temporal agency.
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In contrast to the assumption oftime as linear, with ordered chunks progressing ina straightforward manner, people often negotiate time rhythmically, arranging timein patterns and tempos that do not always co-exist harmoniously.
Does rhythmic time help to explain some of the tension in crowdsourcing crisis data from non-linear social media streams?
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In contrast to the assumption oftime as linear, with ordered chunks progressing ina straightforward manner, people often negotiate time rhythmically, arranging timein patterns and tempos that do not always co-exist harmoniously. In line with earlier CSCW findings [e.g., 4, 9, 45, 46], we term thisrhythmic time, which acknowledges both the rhythmic nature of temporal experience as well a potential disorderliness or ‘dissonance’ when temporal rhythms conflict.Like mosaic time, bringing dissonant rhythms into semi-alignment requires adaptation, work, and patience.
Rhythmic time definition. Counters the idea of linear time.
How does this fit (or not) with Reddy's notion of temporal rhythms?
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Thinking abouttime as mosaic raises numerous questionsabout:when the mosaic is and is not obvious; what forms of interaction (or tiles) are given priority in any one moment; what skillsareneeded to engage in mosaic time with more or less effort; and what the effects of mosaic timeareon concentration, stress, and affect. Mosaic time appears mostsuccessful when people engage in attention switching in order to enact multiple social roles at once.
Design implication: How to accommodate mosaic time needs?
How to even prompt users to more effectively switch to mosaic time when appropriate?
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By mosaic, we mean that time is often simultaneouslyinhabited by multiple types of interaction that are forced to form a coherent whole. Unlikeconcepts like multi-tasking(doing multiple tasks ‘at once’) or polychronicity(a reported preference for doing multiple tasks at once) [44], mosaic timerefers to the negotiated merging of multiple social spheres into a layered or fitted set of simultaneous interactions
Definition of mosaic time. Counters the idea (ideal?) of single purpose time.
Is negotiated not imposed.
Does not include multitasking or polychronicity.
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. Notably, this lack of predictability had large social, rather than individual, implications—a finding that strongly echoes prior CSCW research [1, 4, 13, 15, 20, 22, 34, 35, 36, 38, 45, 46, 59]
Design implication: This is the nut to crack.
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In alignmentwith Reddy and Dourish’s concept of temporal trajectory [45], spectral time suggests that temporal experience is more than a grid of accountable blocks; multiple temporalities create flowsthat often defy both logical renderingand seamless manipulation
Spectral time is linked to Reddy's idea of temporal trajectory.
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Our data reveal that not every temporal experience is easily articulated, planned for, measurable orable to be renderedinto a schedule.We call these temporal experiences spectral time,to capture howtime trailsor ghostsin ways that cannot always be expected, planned, or accounted for.Spectral time referencesmoments that do not lend themselves to scheduling(i.e. chunking), either because the act seems toomundane to justify articulation (i.e., getting dressed), because it is difficult to assess (i.e., travel time) or simply because it cannot be anticipated (i.e., creative phases).
Definition and examples of spectral time -- or time that can't easily be accounted/planned for.
Counters the idea that time is chunkable.
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bels. To date, we have found that our subjects have a minimal ability, and almost no language, to discuss the vagaries of time. In general, people attempt to negotiate their subjective experiences of time through the assumptions of the dominant temporal logic outlined a
So true, in my study too.
Cite this graf.
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In witnessing how people struggle toorient to the dominant temporal logic,we find it isinsufficient to encapsulate temporal experiences. Thus, we now theorizea set of expanded notions, an initial typology that we call ‘porous time’.
Definition of porous time.
Elements of porous time include: spectral, mosaic, rhythmic and obligated.
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One of the ways that a temporal logic becomesvisible for analysis and critique is through the tensions that emerge when its assumptions and norms do not align with daily experience. In our collective fieldwork we have observedmultiple examples of mundane dailypractices coming into conflict withthe logic that time is, or should be, chunk-able, singular purpose, linear, and/or owned.These tensionshelp bring to the fore the extent of the dominant temporal logic and showcase the inadequacy of this narrow set of assumptions to fully describetemporal experiences.
This section of the paper focuses on tensions in temporal logic that lead to the new typology of "porous time".
These tensions give rise to conflicts in how people's activities don't align with the logic of how they should/could allot, manage and/or own their time.
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions and bad calendaring?"
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We call this prevailing temporal logic ‘circumscribed time.’ We use this label to highlight the underlying orientation to time as a resource that can, and should, be mastered. A circumscribed temporal logic infers that time should be harnessed into ‘productive’ capacity by approaching it as something that can be chunked, allocated to a single use, experienced linearly, and owned. In turn, the norms of society place the burden on individuals to manage and ‘balance’ time as a steward, optimizing this precious resource by way of control and active manipulation.
Description of the elements of circumscribed time.
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Finally,time is understood asaresource that is owned by an individual and thus needs to be managed and apportioned by that individual.Like personal income, time is a resource that the individual has both the burden and responsibility to manage well. This vision of time reflects an assumption there are ‘better’ or ‘worse’ ways to use, spend and save time and it is up to the individual to engage in practices of temporal ownership. Controlling time doesnot suggest thatan individual can speed up or slow down time, but rather,suggeststhat timecan be personally configured to meet individual aims or goals.
Definition of time as ownable.
This idea of time as a resource also denotes a certain sense of personal agency/control over time when certain practices, like scheduling or efficiencies, are applied.
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Thedominant temporal logicalso conceptualizestime aslinear. In other words,one chunk of time leads to another in a straight progression. While chunks of time can be manipulated and reordered in the course of a day (or week, or month), each chunk of time has a limited duration and each activity has a beginning and an end. An hour is an hour is an hour, and in the course of a day (or a lifetime) hours stack up like a vector, moving one forward in a straightforward progression.
Definition of linear time.
WRT to temporal linguistics, linear time drives moving-ego and moving-time metaphors.
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Aligned with chunk-able time is the assumption that each chunk of time, or its particular gridded arrangement, is allocated to a single purpose.
Definition of single purpose time.
Design implication: How does single-purpose time align or conflict with multitasking and/or blurred task types that overlap home vs office, personal vs professional.
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appointment. Time chunksopen up the possibility for future-oriented temporal manipulation and valuation; they assumethat we are able to know, in advance, the duration of tasks and experiences.
How does the idea of time chunks and future-orientation fit with:
Reddy's temporal horizon concept? Zimbardo's future time perspective?
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The expectation that time is chunk-able is conditioned by an understanding that time exists in units (a second, a minute, a year) and that temporal units are equal–that can be swapped and exchanged with relative ease.
Definition of chunkable time.
Design implication: Time is experienced in consistent, measurable, and incremental units.
Ex: 60 minutes is always 60 minutes no matter what part of the day it occurs or in any social context, such as calendaring/scheduling an event.
Using a chunkable time perspective, we conform our activities/appointments to clock-time increments rather than making the calendar conform. Per Mazmanian, et al., this perspective "perpetuates a sense that time is malleable and responsive" with little concern about how changing an appointment time can affect the rest of the calendar.
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the nature of timethat reflect a dominant temporal logic –specifically that timeischunkable, single-purpose, linearandownable
4 aspects of circumscribed time
describes time as a resource that can be mastered incrementally.
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A temporal logicoperatesat multiple levels. It is perpetuated insocialand cultural discourse; is embedded in institutional expectations and policies; drivesthe design and implementation of technologies;establishes resilient social norms; and provides a cache of normative, rational examples to draw on when individuals needtomake sense of their everyday engagements with time. When a tool like Microsoft Outlook is designed, presented, and justified in a marketing campaign it is both reflecting and perpetuating atemporal logic.
Design implication: How temporal logic informs and influences other behaviors.
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According to Egger and Wagner, this orientation, which we refer to as circumscribed time,holds that”time is homogeneous, objective, measurable, and infinitely divisible” [11:249].It is this conceptualization of time—and its implications—that we analyze, critique, and try to reframein this paper
Definition of circumscribed time.
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In previous temporalities research,scholars have drawn productively on Zerubavel’s similar concept of a sociotemporal order–an orientation to time that is shared amongst a social group and thusly produces coordinated rhythms and temporal alignments [15, 53]
Definition of sociotemporal order as a common orientation to time which leads to coordinated social rhythms and ways to align, or reconcile conflicts in those rhythms.
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In particular, by temporal logicwe mean the socially legitimated, shared assumptions about time that areembedded in institutional and societal norms, discourses, material and technological processes, and shared ideologies. A temporal logic defines what is rational, normal and expected, andimbues a society with a definitionof what time is that directsindividuals in how they should operate in and through time.It provides an understanding of time that becomes so embedded that it seems to define reality.
Definition of temporal logic as a shared understanding that leads to social constructs of common practices, rules, and norms.
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While some of this research has been aimed at building technologies to better support multi-tasking, other research has been critical, pointing out the negative consequences of distraction and task-switching [29]. A parallel line of thinking, called ‘presence bleed’ [16], articulates the way that multi-tasking and extended temporal boundaries blur individuals’ professional and personal identities as work bleeds into and throughout multiple spheres
Maladapative/problematic studies of time include: multitasking, time-switching, presence bleed (work-life convergence), morality, agency and power, individual vs organizational choices, 24/7 availability, etc.
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CSCW has been investigating the relationship of time and work practically from its inception as a scholarly fiel
Classic CSWC literature on time includes: groupware calendaring systems, temporal rhythm, temporal trajectories, temporal ordering, temporal artifacts.
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What would it look like to more explicitly acknowledge power dynamics in information and communication technologies? In the tradition of critical and reflective design [50], how might CSCW scholarship think about designing technologies that ‘protect’ users from temporal obligations and render messiness and disorganization a possible way of engaging with time?
Design implication: What if porous time was considered a feature not a bug?
How to better integrate personal agency/autonomy and values into a temporal experience?
How could a temporal artifact better support a user flexibly shifting/adapting temporal logic to a lived experience?
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Interrogating the temporal logic of circumscribed time raises three related sociotemporal concerns particularly relevant to CSCW: lived experience, visions of success, and power relations. We address each concernin relation to key theoretical works to showhow the insights presented here both point tothe limitations of the dominant temporal logic of circumscribed time and demandexpanding this logic to include those orientations suggested by porous time.
3 sociotemporal concerns that help bridge circumscribed and porous time: lived experience, visions of success and power relations.
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The temporal logic of circumscribed time falls short of describing, let alone organizing, the complex temporalities that govern American lives today. As an expansion of the dominant logic, porous time aims toprovide a more nuanced account of howtemporality shapes interactions among people, technologies, and the
The tension between circumscribed and porous time leads to control-seeking and a need to adapt to the "fluidities of time".
This tension serves up different coping mechanisms, such as: metaphors, time representations, design challenges, routines, need for self-reflection, quantification via scheduling, data collection, technical solutions, predictive models, etc.
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We find and name an emergent set of temporal elements–spectral, mosaic,rhythmicand obligatedtime–which implicitly challenge the assumptions of the dominant logic. We call this collective set ‘porous time.’
Definition of porous time and the set of temporal elements that challenge the dominant logic.
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s ‘circumscribed time.’This logic, which is embedded in many popular tools, current scholarship,and especially in the discourse of time management, is characterized by assumptions that time is chunk-able(i.e. unitized and measurable), oriented to a single purpose, experiencedlinearly, and owned by individuals
Definition of circumscribed time -- a dominant temporal logic.
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temporal logic–a particular orientation to time that manifests in time-related social norms, moral judgments, daily practices, and technologies for scheduling and coordinat
Definition of temporal logic
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Cooperation and collaboration, both core activities within this domain, require attention to temporal patterns almost by definition, whether it be in the sequential ordering of interdependent tasks or the particular rhythms of subgroups. Despite this core focus, Steinhardt and Jackson [53] suggest that time continues tobe a fertile topic to explore within the field of CSCW. A richer understanding of the ways that time animates the multiple overlapping domains of contemporary professional and social—and now highly mobile—lives is needed. We respond to this call by returning to our field’s legacy of interrogating the design, use and resistance to temporal technologies such as calendars and scheduling softwareto showcase how certain logics of time pervade everyday sociotechnical practices, both inside the office and out.
Why time research matters: Sociotemporality is situational, contextual and ubiquitous in both work and home life.
Tags
- time metaphor
- obligated time
- related work
- rhythmic time
- temporal horizon
- artifact
- trajectory
- power dynamics
- mosaic time
- social coordination
- spectral time
- rhythm
- polychronicity
- collaborative artifacts
- time presence
- design implication
- chunkable time
- future time perspective
- lived experience
- single purpose time
- linear time
- language of time
- ownable time
- sociotemporal order
- temporal logic
- sociotemporality
- temporal rhythm
- circumscribed time
- porous time
- multitasking
- temporal trajectory
Annotators
URL
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wendynorris.com wendynorris.com
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One of the foremost contributions of Saussure to semiology was his claim that indi- vidual signs are always part of larger systemic wholes and that the meaning of any particular sign is essentially a function of the way in which it is related to other signs within the same system of signification. Finding out the meaning of any particular sign thus is possible only within the context of the entire symbolic system within which it is anchored, since it is necessary to first examine its relations to other signs wit
This points to another friction point for SBTF data and the crowdsourcing process.
Sequences in social media timelines are often arbitrary per obscure user settings and unknown/uncontrollable algorithmic priorities. That affects data collection.
There are also SBTF processes that cause workflow frictions because of a lack of sequence specificity in order of social coordination activities or a desire for order from the volunteers.
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Along similar lines, while the sequential order in which we arrange items is usually indicative of their relative priority to us, the essence of such a symbolic relationship is by no means unproblematic
The sequence of events may be arbitrary and does not always signify importance.
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The degree of rigidity with which we schedule events is also indicative of their relative importance
Rigidity also symbolizes importance, as does firmness and ever-availability.
Is this because the use of the term "importance" is ambiguous or that context matters?
As mentioned as an example: Ending a dinner date in one hour would seem rude but not for a lunch date.
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The degree of firmness and finality with which we schedule events is usually also indicative of their relative i
Firmness/Finality also symbolizes importance and commitment.
Is there a degree of difference here as compared to ever-availability which seem like different social contracts?
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Given the association of access to private time with intimacy, consider also the symbolic implications of ever-availability (Zerubavel 1981, p. 146). Admittedly becom- ing increasingly anachronistic with bureaucratization (Zerubavel 1981, pp. 153-166), the quality of being always accessible nevertheless remains a powerful symbol of a rapidly dying traditional social order and is still strongly cherished and admired within traditional domains of social life such a
Ever-availability symbolizes loyalty, commitment and dedication.
"... is strongly cherished and admired within traditional domains of social life ..."
Is this sentiment still true for online availability?
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venings and weekends. Given our association of exclusivity with intimacy (Simmel 1950, pp. 126-132; Zerubavel 1982b, pp. 100-102), we usually attach particular significance to contacts that take place at times that are socially defined as more private. Since people are generally expected to be less accessi- ble during such time periods, contacts that do occur within them tend to acquire a special meaning (Zerubavel 1
Timing seems to symbolize two different meanings:
Importance and exclusivity on one hand. But the moment/time period in which the activity takes place (work vs private time; weekday vs weekend, day vs night, lunch vs dinner) also conveys special meaning.
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The negative connotations of long stretches of waiting time also become apparent once we examine the symbolic implications of the frequency at which social contacts occu
Frequency of activity symbolizes social commitment.
Quotes Durkheim as indicating that frequency can be a measure of "moral density" in relationships.
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Shorter waiting time entails greater speed, the symbolic implications of which become quite apparent when one considers urgency a
Speed as a factor in symbolizing time.
Slow >> lack of respect vs Fast >> priority, higher esteem
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Consider also the symbolic dimension of lead time (Hall 1959, p. 17). Essentially defining themselves as less accessible, the powerful and eminent usually also demand longer advance notice when being approached, occasionally making others wait longer before they can reach them for the mere sake of displaying the r
How does the idea of "lead time" square with Mazmanian et al's paper on time as a commodity imbued with power?
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ard them. Being on time, on the other hand, is symboli- cally indicative of the respect we feel toward others, the extreme form of "ritual wait- ing" being an explicit symbolic display
This is a distinctly Western-centric attitude. Not necessarily shared in other cultures.
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cance. Waiting, for example (which, given the modern utilitarian approach to time [Zerubavel 1981, pp. 54-59], is generally regarded as an ordeal), is normally associated with worthlessness, and making others wait is often regarded as a symbolic display of deg
How does this idea of negative time stretch / waiting as insignificance apply to technology or the social coordination process?
How does "slow technology" overcome this and retain a positive self-reflective value?
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The amount of time we are willing to devote to the various relations in which we are involved and organizations to which we belong clearly reflects the level of our commit- ment to each of them
Could this account for how/why SBTF volunteers use personally situated time references to signal how long they can be available/devote to an activation?
Is this a semiotic version of Reddy's temporal trajectory?
Motive expressed through "duration" seems to be fairly well determined for Wikipedia editors, per Kittur/Kraut/Resnick chapters. I don't see why it wouldn't also apply to SBTF.
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While only few of us may have been formally sensitized to it, we all seem to be tacitly aware of the way in which the amount of time we allow an event or activity to last is symbolically associated with the degree of significance we attach
The duration of a person's engagement in an activity serves as a symbol for its importance.
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Timing as a
Could the multiple temporalities that symbolize importance account for a source of tension between always online volunteers and those who show up for random periods of time?
Deployments have fixed time periods for data collection but no scheduling mechanisms for volunteers. Does this create a source of friction when there is no mechanism to signal social intent or meaning?
How does this problem get reflected in Reddy's TRH model or Mazmanian's porous time idea?
How can you manage social coordination of rhythms/horizons when there is no signal to convey intent/commitment?
What part of the SBTF social coordination is spectral, mosaic, rhythmic and/or obligated? And when is it not?
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article, time clearly constitutes a quasi-linguistic nonverbal system of signification that deserves the full attention of students of symbolic communication. As we have seen, both individuals and societies use this "language" in their "speech," essentially manipulating various dimensions of temporality as virtual semiotic codes through which they manage to convey critical social messages without ha
Semiotics codes that represent non-verbal social communication about time/temporality is not an explicit skill but something seemingly intuitive to both speaker and listener.
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In short, the "language of time" identified here is by no means a merely intellectual phenomenon invented by sociology. Not only are we all aware of its existence, we also use it quite actively in our own "speech."7 The manipulative use of temporality is quite evident not only at the macrosocial level of societal politics, but also at the microsocial level of interpersonal relations. We employ the language of time quite strategically in our every- day "speech" and, quite often, what appears on the surface as entirely spontaneous behavior may actually involve a deliberate manipulation of temporal circu
The language of time incorporates "deliberate mainpulation of temporal circumstances."
People use symbolic associations to convey special meanings to certain periods of time. Example provided is a late night phone call that hints at a desire for a closer, more intimate relationship.
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Temporal contrasts can be used not only to substantiate abstract conceptual contrasts but also to help accentuate actual social and political ones (Zerubavel 1985, pp. 47, 71-7
How are these contrasts represented? Does Bergson's paper reflect this idea?
Look up citation: Zerubavel.1985. The Seven-Day Circle
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It was Bergson (1960, pp. 98-128, 226-240) who first sensitized us to the qualitative dimension of time by noting how we often experience mathematically identical dura- tions as having quite different feeling tones. Ho
Get Bergson's paper.
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implies the virtual inseparability of semantics from syntactics, and, indeed, Saussure's followers are often quite appropriately called structuralists, as they view signs not so much in terms of their substantive "content" as in terms of the ways in which they are formally related to other signs (i.e., in terms of the structure of the symbolic system to which they belong). More specifically, they tend to focus particularly on the formal relation of opposition or contrast, because, "in any semiological system, whatever distin- guishes one sign from the oth
What is the SBTF structure? What differentiates it?
Do the temporal signs for data collection contrast/differ enough from the temporal signs for the crowd process to describe a single structure for digital humanitarian work?
Data time = desire for real time information where units of data have their own time contexts (meta data, periods, timelines, qualitative representations/metaphors, etc.)
Process time = acceptance that work time is always 24/7, urgent and feels like a step behind. The people who perform the process also have their own time contexts (personally situated time, trajectories, rhythms, horizons, etc.)
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Given our tendency to reify social reality (Berger and Luckmann 1967, pp. 89-92, 134-136), we often regard the association of particular "signifiers" with particular "signifieds" (Saussure 1959, p. 67) as inevitable. Such symbolic relations, however, are essentially conventional and, quite often, arbitrary (Durkheim 1965, pp. 261-265; Mead 1934, pp. 117-125; Peirce 1932, Vol. 2, pp. 165-169; Saussure 1959, pp. 67
Time symbols have cultural contexts.
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Culture, according to semiotics, is a communicational system consisting of various messages conveyed by and to members through the use of certain codes (Leach 1976; Lvi-Strauss 196
Definition of culture.
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ticulate them verbally. Examining the symbolic relations between the temporal and the social within the contexts of both interpersonal relations and societal politics will reveal an intricate semiotic system that seems to operate at both the microsocial and m
Sociotemporal semiotics provide symbolic ways to communicate about interpersonal and societal concerns.
The symbolic communication system appears to take place at either small scale human interaction ("microsocial") and structural/system ("macrosocial") levels
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Extending such endeavors to the domain of temporality, the present article attempts to develop a distinctively semiotic perspective on time. Aiming at laying out the rudi- mentary foundations of a semiotics of temporality, I shall examine the way people practically manipulate time as a virtual code through which they manage to convey many important social messages without having to a
Time is a "virtual code" to convey social meaning
Tags
- frequency
- slow technology
- temporal horizon
- firmness
- speed
- timing
- culture
- temporal structures
- rigidity
- ever-available
- manipulation
- temporal contrasts
- commodity
- porous time
- representations
- lead time
- semiotics
- duration
- power
- language of time
- situated time
- sociotemporality
- temporal rhythm
- waiting
- sequence
- temporal trajectory
Annotators
URL
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wendynorris.com wendynorris.com
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Re-cent work by Reinecke et al. [39] is one example of how culture affects the ways in which people organise them-selves around time, and Adam [1] provides a useful account of different cultural metaphors of time, contrasting, for in-stance, timelines, which emphasise linear, directional movement, with cyclic representations, which represent rhythm and stability.
Papers that include non-western interpretations of time.
This could be a paper in and of itself for CSCW on possible friction points for SBTF practices that are Western-oriented with a global volunteer base. Should look at the Ning to get a better handle on how distributed folks are.
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There is a long history of work within CSCW that might be adapted to this problem, ranging from an un-derstanding of how to support awareness [e.g. 41] to com-munity [e.g. 8] to communication across time zones [e.g. 49].
Look up the paper on time zone communication.
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This point ties into the conceptualisation of time as collec-tive [29] and entangled [43]. The infrastructure that sup-ports a 24/7 society is one that relies on people as well as technologies, the conventional nine-to-five work rhythm, for example, being underpinned by people working shifts outside of these hours.
How are the concepts of collective and entangled time reflected in virtual social coordination, if at all? Is it the same, similar or something wholly different?
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Notably, a practice-oriented treatment of digital time does open up avenues for research and design, one that resonates with Kuutti and Bannon’s [23] recent account of a practice perspective forming a new paradigm for HCI. They propose that a central issue in a practice-based research agenda is the need to develop the capability to transform practices through technology. Essential to this is understanding the role of computer artefacts in the emergence and transfor-mation of practices, and the possibilities for influencing these by changing the artefacts themselves.
How can artifacts be incorporated into a revised SBTF data collection practices? What would that look like as a product of social coordination?
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Consequently, efforts to design for temporal experience must do more than simply build desirable temporal models into technologies.
Quote this for CHI paper.
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How can we design for time as collective and interdependent, rather than individualised on the one hand, or explicitly scheduled on the other? What does it mean to position collective time not as something that is achieved when people come together, but as a set of relationships through which they are connected? Both Sharma and Mazmanian and Erickson raise this challenge while highlighting the difficulty in addressing it; neither offer a solution.
The big question!
Design implication: One advantage that SBTF has is that its work is very relationship-oriented.
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A shared context is im-plicit here, but the ways in which rhythms that bind people are shaped has been pulled into sharper focus by Jackson et al. [21]. Picking up on Orlikowski and Yates’ position, theyargue that “distributed collective practices not only have rhythms, but in some fundamental sense are rhythms” [p. 247]. Rhythms shape collective action but are also shaped by it, and efforts to build them and to bring them into alignment are an essential part of collaborative work.
Lookup Jackson et al paper.
Design implication: Similar to Wilk paper. How to adopt/adapt these findings to smooth the transition for SBTF to develop new routines/rhythms around temporal data collection.
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Wilk [57] has considered how routines come to be cultivated, observing that every day we are presented with opportuni-ties to “naturalize something new”, and turn events into the “precedents” of new routines [p. 151]. He argues that the decisions that surround the adoption of these routines are part of the process of their cultivation, in which uncon-scious habits are brought forward into consciousness, re-flection and discourse. Cultivation can be active or passive (routines may be actively initiated, or forced upon us), and is governed by “tacit rules” that reveal “how often things must be discussed before they can be done without discus-sion, how often things have to be repeated by agreement or with supervision before they can become an accepted part of shared daily routine” [p. 151].
Design implication: Look up Wilk paper on recommendations for creating precedents of new routines. This will be important in encouraging new/different practices for incorporating time/temporality into SBTF data collection practices.
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In their view, time is both independent of and dependent on behaviour: temporal structures are produced and reproduced through everyday action, and these in turn shape the rhythm and form of ongoing practices. Existing temporal structures become taken for granted and appear to be unbending, but time is also treated as malleable in that temporal structures can be changed and new ones estab-lished. The objective/subjective dichotomy is not inherent to the nature of time, but is a property of the particular tem-poral structures being enacted at a particular moment. They call for a focus on examining how temporal structures be-come established for a particular activity, and how they are sustained, reinforced or modified in practice.
Org studies perspective on temporal structures.
Does this have some implications for Reddy's paper on trajectories/rhythms/horizons?
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Orlikowski and Yates [34], working in the field of organization studies, build on this point. They argue that time is plural; it can be experienced as objective, quantitative and independent of humankind, but also as subjective, situated and socially constructed.
Org studies description of multiple temporalities by Orlikowski and Yates.
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Designing for an alternative temporal experience means understanding the ways in which multiple temporali-ties intersect, whether these frame a person’s working day, or allow a family to spend time together. While scheduling technologies do of course have a role to play here [see e.g. 31], many of the temporal structures that frame everyday life are not so much scheduled as unfold in a way that isunremarkable [54], or are so firmly established that they are no longer seen as alterable.
Design implication: To integrate multiple temporalities into technology we need to reconsider temporal structures -- or the patterns of social coordination that we use as rules, rhythms, habits, and practices that guide activity.
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As noted by Zerubavel, “[t]ime is definitely one of the principles that can best allow us to establish and organ-ise priority in our lives as well as to symbolically display it” [59, p. 53].
Design implication: Heuristic of control for user
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In his analysis of the concept, Southerton [45] identifies quality time as a contemporary concern, and uses it alongside an analysis of diaries written in 1937 and 2000 to examine the impression that everyday life is speeding up. His findings lead him to argue that the feeling of time pressure that seems inherent to modern life is due to difficulties in coor-dinating practices, rather than the sheer density of events that need to be accomplished.
Design implication: Insufficient coordination practices leads to sociotemporal stress (sense of urgency, lack of time, etc.)
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Trajectories and rhythms frame temporal horizons, de-scribed as knowledge of likely future activities that are drawn upon in the organization of current work. The three together bring orderliness to the working day, with the na-ture of temporal horizons dictating how flexibly work can be organised, and the urgency with which it needs to be carried out.
Nice encapsulation as to how Reddy's trajectories, rhythms and horizons interact with one another.
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Yet, Grosse-Hering et al.’s findings make clear the need to ad-dress multiple temporalities, and prior research in CSCW has emphasised how understanding the ways in which dif-ferent temporal structures intersect is essential to designing for the felt experience of time.
Look up Grosse_Hering et al's paper.
Are there concrete examples of sociotemporalities to incorporate?
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The slow technology design agenda, first presented by Hallnäs and Redström [15], builds on the idea that as tech-nologies become more ubiquitous they must do more than prioritise the efficiency and productivity associated with task-completion. In contrast to fast technologies that savetime, the aim with slow technologies is to produce time, by serving as an incitement for reflection.
This seems like a clearer, more boiled down definition of "slow technology" than found in the Pschetz Temporal Design paper.
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In these analyses of plasticity we see how, like clock time, digital time is not simply a property of technologies, nor does it straightforwardly emerge as a sociotechnical con-vention associated with their use. Rather, it has coevolved with broader shifts in the temporality of everyday life, such as the emergence of fractured rhythms, and the associated need to fill the gaps between them.
Digital time is a type of sociotemporality that has co-evolved through influence of technology and its influence on technology AND rhythms/trajectories/horizons of modern life. See Rattenbury above.
Think more about how Reddy's and Pschetz's work may be important here re: social coordination.
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While Rattenbury et al. highlight web browsing as the per-fect plastic activity, the concept has also been applied to television watching by Irani et al. [20].
Good examples of sociotemporality: web surfing and TV viewing.
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Plastic time is described as unanticipated, un-reflexive and fluid, as the “experience of temporal ‘scraps’, of gapsin the schedule”, and as “the negative space of busyness”[p. 233]. Plastic time flies under the radar, being unplanned and non-immersive, and associated with neither productivi-ty nor leisure. It is interruptible, but can also expand until some other activity presents itself.
Definition of plastic time.
Adds nuance to the idea of digital time as plastic -- morphable in some ways. rigid in others, asynchronous but also rhythmic in its own way (especially around the examples of web surfing and TV viewing) when the experience of time is lost.
Does plastic time also hint at kind of materiality?? Time as tangible?
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Accord-ingly, and in the interests of exploring how broader shifts in time use have may coevolved with digital technologies, we now look to work by Rattenbury et al. [37], which relates the always-on quality of digital technologies to more gen-eral shifts in the organization of everyday life. These are changes that have resulted in a temporal experience that they describe as plastic, a temporal experience that is both shaped by and shapes the use of digital technologies.
Look up Rattenbury paper
Again, seems to indicate a socio-technical temporal experience where temporal experiences influence and are influenced by digital technologies.
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The temporal experience is as much a product of the ways in which the technologies are used as it is a feature of their design. This points to how, just as has been argued for the case of clocks, digital technologies and practices have coevolved to underpin particular experiences of time.
Design implication for digital sociotemporal experiences
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hey create what Adam [1] calls the ‘expanded present’, by creating a relevant past and future that serves to enrich the moment.
Adam's timescape concept
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Furthermore, and differentiating digital time from clock time, he suggests that a lack of adherence to chronological time is compounded by the fact that digital technologies connect with a flow of information that is al-ways and instantly available. He argues that continual change, which is bound up with web services such as social network sites, blogs and the news, is central to the experi-enced need for constant connectivity.
Q: How does this idea of time vs information flow affect the data harvested during a digital crowdwork process in humanitarian emergencies?
Q: How does this idea of time vs information flow manifest when the information flow is not chronological due to content throttling or algorithmic decisions on what content to deliver to a user?
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Research in HCI has illustrated how this notion of immedi-acy is upheld through the social conventions associated with technologies, as well as through their design. For ex-ample, Harper et al. [16] have described the lived experi-ence (or durée, following Bergson [6]) of Facebook as be-ing located firmly in the now, and have noted that this ne-cessitates a particular approach to the performance of iden-tity on the site by its users. They observe that interactions privilege the present and underpin an impression of events unfolding as they happen (even if this is not the case in terms of spatial time, or Bergson’s temps). Because of this, the performance of identity is one of the moment: users reported feeling it inappropriate to post old content, and were similarly aggrieved when others uploaded photos that surfaced ‘out of time’.
Look up Harper paper.
Friction point of out-of-order, non-chronological streams of events on social media.
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Research by narrative theorist Ruth Page [35] (a co-author on the above paper) considers fur-ther how Facebook users learn to interpret social media posts when reading the newsfeed. While the series of snip-pets of ‘breaking news’ posted by a variety of members of one’s social network do not offer a typical narrative, readers nevertheless draw their own story-like experience, using their knowledge of those posting content to build a backsto-ry, whilst imagining what may happen next.
Look up Page paper.
Could help to bolster argument about crowdsourcing process friction caused by non-chronological social media.
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A related, but richer, argument is made by the sociologist John Tomlinson [55], in his account of the ‘condition of immediacy’. Tomlinson argues that speed is central to modern cultural practices, experiences and values, and he focuses on immediacy in particular because it has three connotations.
Look up Tomlinson paper.
Immediacy = speed, instantaneity and connectedness thru electronic media
Q: How does Tomlinson's notion of speed interact with Hassan's?
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Instead, technologies and the uses made of them are positioned as coevolving, with new temporal knowledges being gradually accumulated and integrated into the practices of everyday life.
This is a little confusing.
Is Lindley suggesting an additional entanglement of co-evolving socio-technical temporality that is different to analog experiences of time?
Kind of presents a chicken vs egg dilemma that is tough to square re: the role of technology. The paper's previous arguments (Glennie and Thrift, Mumford, Thompson) are at odds with one another re: ideas of commodity/industrial time, tech determinism and its influence on sociotemporality.
Need to ponder this a little more.
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Similarly, E. P. Thompson [53], in his paper on time disci-pline and industrial capitalism, suggests that a view of time as an interchangeable commodity came to replace what had been a more task-oriented approach to time use. Glennie and Thrift argue against this conceptualisation of clock time. They acknowledge that people’s consciousness of time was disrupted by the clock, but disagree with a notion of clock time that is “inauthentic, unnatural, omnipotent” [p. 50], that follows the metaphor of the production line, or that adopts a narrative of a world that is intensifying and speeding up.
This seems to also follow Hassan's use of the commodity metaphor in thinking about time.
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For example, in his classic analysis of the his-tory of the machine, Lewis Mumford [30] notes that, “Abstract time became the new medium of existence. Or-ganic functions themselves were regulated by it: one ate, not upon feeling hungry, but when prompted by the clock: one slept, not when one was tired, but when the clock sanc-tioned it.” [p. 17]
Examples of sociotemporality vs clock time by Mumford.
Eat when hungry not at Noon Sleep when tired not at prescribed time
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For them, clock time is best understood as sets of practices, which are bound up with time-reckoning and time-keeping technologies, butwhich vary and are shaped by different times, places and communities. This view of clock time is quite different to that often de-picted in the literature, where it is positioned as abstract and mechanistic.
Alternative clock time definition by Glennie and Thrift.
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We then detail a position outlined by Glennie and Thrift [12], in which clock time is described as a series of practices rather than a concept created by new timekeep-ing technologies.
Loop up Glennie and Thrift paper.
Need as many examples as I can get that offer concrete ways to describe sociotemporality beyond clock time. This lack of explicit examples seems to trip people up the most. Sociotemporality is still too intangible.
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This leads us to argue that ‘redesigning’ the experience of time as me-diated by technologies necessitates a broader way of deal-ing with the rhythms and routines that frame their use. We consider what role technology might play in this, through shaping temporal infrastructures and shifting reified tem-poral patterns. We conclude by noting the considerable challenges that this entails, especially in view of recent ac-counts that position time as collective and entangled.
Plants a flag to urge more HCI research to consider sociotemporality -- time as rhythmic, patterned, collective, and entangled.
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The motivation in writing this paper is to examine some of these ideas about time and technology. The notion that digi-tal technologies in themselves have a temporal quality that is problematic is questionable.
Lindley claims that previous HCI studies of time have tended toward moral panics and technological determinism. Brings to mind Wacjman's work and Hassan's book "Empires of Speed."
I'm curious about what she means here, as the next section describing Shoenbeck's study doesn't quite fit the argument:
"The notion that digital technologies in themselves have a temporal quality that is problematic is questionable."
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Research gap: Time is not well-studied vs space/place. Topic demands multi-disciplinary definitions and constructs to understand the many ways time is experienced by people.
Tags
- crisis data
- HCI
- collective time
- horizon
- digital time
- time cultures
- organizational studies
- non-Western temporalities
- entangled time
- clock time
- information flow
- heuristic
- time as commodity
- non-chronological streams
- capitalism
- timescape
- chronological time
- crowd process
- new routines
- industrialism
- moral panic
- time zone
- slow technology
- asynchronous
- speed
- trajectory
- immediacy
- social coordination
- rhythm
- sociotemporality
- design implication
- plastic time
- temporal structure
- materiality
- artifacts
- technological determinism
Annotators
URL
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wendynorris.com wendynorris.com
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sregarded. Temporal Design attempts to counteract these effects by drawing attention to social practices of time. Time is a social process, tacitly defined through everyday practices. It is rehearsed, learned, designed, created, storied, and made. This aspect however is often overlooked not only by designers, but also by society in general. Designers can have a key role in unlocking the hegemonic narratives that restrict cultural understandings of time and in opening up new ways of making, living and thinking
Description of temporal design and its purpose.
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As the original visions for Slow Design and Slow Technology suggest, the world is comprised of multiple temporal expressions, which play important roles in our lives, even if disregarded within dominant accounts of what ti
What are the "multiple temporal expressions?" Examples would help here.
Note to self: Use more explicit language, case examples, etc., to avoid reviewers' incorrectly filling in the gaps or misinterpreting an already cagey subject that's hard to pin down.
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The documentation of routines invited the students to reflect on the multiplicity of practices that shape temporality inside the school community, making the social layering of time more perceptible. Far from being restricted to timetables, buzzers and timed tasks, school time is a fusion of personal times, rhythms and temporal force
This graf and the next, might be helpful for the Time Machine Project study. Cites: Adam on description of "school time."
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While the Printer Clock focused on emphasising the embodied and situated nature of time, pointing to the mesh of activities and characters that come together to create time, the TimeBots drew attention to personal rhythms and how they played out within the context of the classroom
Pschetz, et al., also use idea of "situated time."
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e students. The TimeBots interacted with each other on a different level, revealing the subjective timescap
Adam's timescape concept as applied to a group during social coordination.
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4.3.3 TimeBotsWhile the Printer Clock focused on emphasising the embodied and situated nature of time, pointing to the mesh of activities and characters that come together to create time, the TimeBots drew attention to personal rhythms and how they played out within the context of the classroom. The aim was to challenge the idea that the world is in a state of constant acceleration by inviting children to reflect on the multiple speeds of their day. In contrast to the slow movement, which assumes acceleration as a universalised condition and attempts to counteract this condition by promoting opportunities to slow down, the intention here was to invite the students to explore the variant speeds at which they l
Does this idea map with Reddy's premise about temporal trajectories, rhythms, and horizons?
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ast. Moving from a quantitative time to a qualitative one, the Printer Clock tells time through the activities of others and the variety of pictures reveals the multiplicity of rhythms within that
Qualitative time as a way to express a new present in some one else's past.
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Temporal Design could thereforeinvolve:•Identifying dominant narratives, including the forces and infrastructures that sustain them or which they help to support;•Challenging these narratives, e.g. by revealing more nuanced expressions of time;•Drawing attention to alternative temporalities, their dynamics and significance;•Exposing networks of temporalities, so as to illustrate multiplicity and variety.The approach would bring several benefits:•Acknowledging that slow and fast rhythms co-occur and are often interdependent would challenge the assumption of universal acceleration,•Acknowledging that the times of some are more invested in than others, would enable challenges to temporal inequalities.•Acknowledging that the natural world has multiple rhythms would change the assumption that ittherefore provides a stable background for human-made ‘progress’(McKibben, 2008
Highlighting this section to return to it later with more concrete application to sociotemporal representations/expressions in crises and response to crises.
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LARISSA PSCHETZ, MICHELLE BASTIAN, CHRIS SPEED 6With this in mind we propose Temporal Design as a shift within design towards a pluralist perspectiveon time. Temporal Design attempts to identify and challenge expressions of dominant narratives of time, as it recognises that everyday rhythms are composed of multiple temporalities, whichare defined by both direct and indirect factors. It also seeks to empower alternative notions that are neglected by these narratives. It suggests that designers should start looking at time as something that emerges in relation to a complexity of cultural, social, economicand political forces.Temporal designers wouldtherefore observe time in the social context, investigating beyond narratives of a universal time and linear progression, and beyond simple dichotomies of fast and slow. This is not to simply negate dominant notions but acknowledging that they co-exist with several other expressions in all aspects of life. There is a multiplicity of temporalities latent in the world. Designers can help to create tools that disclose them, also revealing the intricacies of temporal relationships and negotiations that take place across individuals, groups, and institutions. They would then consider a network of times that accommodates the multiplicity of temporalities in the everyday, the natural world, and in intersections between these re
Further description of the idea around Temporal Design. But still lacks clarity about what "multiple temporalities" are and how they manifest in social coordination.
Note to self: Use the template margins to offer concrete examples in my paper. The lack of specificity is frustrating and will surely draw the wrath of the reviewers.
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Despite a clear social motivation, the alternative approaches to time in design described above have been constrained by dominant narratives of time. Further they have often only considered time in terms of pace, direction and flow rather than the more complex ways that it is involved in social life (e.g. Gre
Look up Greenhouse 1996 paper.
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Thus in developing a theoretical framework which could support an understanding of time as multiple, heterogeneous and deeply entangled within various social formations (which may be discrete or overlapping), work in the social sciences, particularly anthropology and sociology, has proven to be more useful. Such approaches enable us to ask different questions about what time is and how it works. Rather than seeing time as a flow between past, present and future (whether this be linear or nonlinear), it becomes possible to ask how time operates as a system for social collaboration (Sorokin and Merton 1937), how it legitimates some and ‘manages’ others (Greenhouse 1996), or how it works within systems of exclusion (Fabian 1983). We thus move from time as flow to time as s
Describes how time bridges into the concept of social coordination.
Look up the Sorokin and Merton (1937). Greenhouse (1996) and Fabian (1983) papers to get a better handle on how "social coordination" is defined.
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tries (Prado 2013). Here again, instead of looking at the present as a heterogeneous context, the present isconsidered as uniform and following a linear trajectory toward
This is an important caveat for the study of sociotemporality in humanitarian crises. Need to stay grounded in the present and how even some immediate, incremental steps toward improving the representation of time in the data and in the data gathering process can be serve the larger, future goals of attaining real-time situational awareness.
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(Dunne, 1999). The call has influenced movements such as Critical Design (Dunne and Raby, 2001), Design Fictions (Bleecker, 2009) and Design for Debate (Dunne and Raby, 200
Unclear as to how these movements differ:
Critical Design Design Fiction Design for Debate
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Design has also taken a critical approach to time in its attempt to anticipate the impacts of present actions in the future, particularly those concerning the introduction of new technologies. This attitude may be generally identified in particular design projects but is most evident in speculative design movements such as Design Fictions, Critical Design and Design for Debate.Since design is often focused on yet-to-exist interventions in a given context, it is often said to be invariably future-oriented (e.g. in Dunne & Rab
Look up Dunne & Raby's 2013 paper. This could be helpful to frame/cite in the virtual participatory design study.
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evices. Similarly, Phoebe Sengers (2011) reflects on the way slower attitudes could be promoted by ‘‘making fewer choices, accessing less information, making productivity less central, keeping our lives less under formal control’’; she further considers how this attitude could be reflected in the design of communication technologies. Instead of reinforcing dichotomies, Fullerton (2010) and Sengers (2011) draw attention to practices that emphasise alternative expressions
Look up Sengers 2011 paper on ICT design.
What are the alternative expressions of time she references?
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The association of alternative approaches to time with a rejection of technology reinforces dichotomies that do not reflect the way people relate to artefacts and systems (Wajcman 2015). As a result, these proposals not only risk being interpreted as nostalgic or backward looking, but also leave little space for integrating more complex accounts of time (particularly those arising in the social sciences) or for discussing more nuanced rhythms, as well as more complex forces and consequences related to temporal decisions. As a result, instead of challenging dominant accounts of time, these proposals arguably reinforce the overarching narrative of universalised acceler
Argument that slow technology is not anti-technology but should encourage different perspective on how people relate to artifacts and systems via time, rhythms, and other forces that help drive temporal decisions.
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gs done. Accepting an invitation for reflection inherent in the design means on the other hand that time willappear, i.e. we open up for time presence” (Hallnas & Redstrom 2001). A slow technology would not disappear, but would make its
The idea of making time more present/more felt is counter-intuitive to how time is experienced in crisis response as urgent, as a need for effiicency, as an intense flow (Csikszentmihalyi) that disappears.
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In Slow Technology, Hallnas & Redstrom (2001) advance the need for a form of design that emphasises reflection, the amplification of environments, and the use of technologies that a) amplify the presence of time; b) stretch time and extend processes; and c) reveal an expression of presenttime as slow-paced. Important here is the concept of “time presence”: “when we use a thing as an efficient tool, time disappears, i.e. we get things done. Accepting an invitation for reflection inherent in the design means on the other hand that time willappear, i.e. we open up for time presence” (Hallnas & Redstrom 2001). A slow technology would not disappear, but would make its
Definition of "slow technology" and its purpose to make time more present for the user.
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Argument for the need for Temporal Design and how it could lead to broader notions/ideas/solutions of time's role in social coordination.
Tags
- temporal expressions
- slow technology
- trajectory
- horizon
- design fiction
- flow
- rhythms
- qualitative time representation
- temporal design
- social coordination
- future
- ICT
- time presence
- design implication
- speculative
- school time
- Time Machine Project
- timescape
- situated time
- sociotemporality
- critical design
- present as past
Annotators
URL
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wendynorris.com wendynorris.com
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Additional notes here that contrast Reddy and Adam for SBTF time study paper:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RNqPYmLkVV7ui06YDOSEOmod2XCXe6W3tQe9Oey2ico/edit
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- May 2018
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emlis.pair.com emlis.pair.com
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5.2.AWARENESS
Fairly confused by this section. Need to read the cited works -- perhaps there are some clues there to help demystify what Reddy is getting at here.
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Bypresenting information in a temporal context – in terms of, for example,trajectories, rhythms, and horizons, although potentially too according toother metaphors such as timelines – we can provide tools for more effectivelymaking sense of information and its consequences (Reddy et al., 2001)
Effective information sensemaking tools integrate temporal contexts, such as trajectories, rhythms, horizons and metaphors.
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Temporal horizons allow people to situate their work with respect to otheranticipated needs and activities. So, for instance, the proximity (immediacy)of the next activity affects the work currently being done (e.g., increases thesense of urgency). We characterize a temporal horizon ascloseordistantwhen describing a situation where people use their knowledge of what’scoming up – through their understanding of rhythms – to determine howquickly they must work to finish their current activities.
The close vs distant feature of temporal horizons is actually not well communicated or managed in the SBTF process. Often, the volunteers don't know the precise deployment end date or that date may be a moving target depending on the data collection needs and accessibility of information. (Think Hurricane Harvey toxic spill info request that was not available until weeks after the event).
This could be an important process improvement to help volunteers set their own horizons.
A sense of urgency seems to come at two other points: toward the end of the deployment when volunteers rush to complete data entry and the introduction of a side-project where volunteers flag their willingness to turn their attention to another task.
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We characterize a temporal horizon asflexibleorinflexiblewhen describing an individual’s flexibility on when shehas to get her work done. A situation in which an individual has flexibilityconcerning when an activity has to be finished, we describe as a flexibletemporal horizon. If the person does not have much flexibility on when thework needs to done, we describe as an inflexible temporal horizon. Individ-uals who have less flexibility have to follow the actual ‘‘scheduling’’ of thework much more closely than individuals who have greater flexibility.
Flexible vs inflexible horizons seems to have more to do situated time for the SBTF volunteer.
This could be manifested as whether the volunteer makes him/herself available during the deployment. It could also play out (as often happens) as a volunteer rushing to complete a task before the sign off for the night -- they've created an artificial inflexiblity.
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We characterize the manifesta-tions of rhythms in work practice as an emergence of a set oftemporalhorizons. People, in the course of their daily work, use their knowledge oflikely future activities to organize their current activities.
Temporal horizons describe how people order/organize their current work activties toward future goals/expectations and/or information needs. This work is done in conjunction with the known temporal trajectories and temporal rhythms of the work. Horizons are people-based not activity-based.
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Temporal horizons reflect this broad temporal structure to theperson’s day. Some of the activities have fixed deadlines such as teachingclass at 10:00 am while others such as meeting students early in the after-noon are more vague. Temporal horizons point to how an individual’spersonnel view of her activities is temporally organized. Second, an indi-vidual doing her work often has to deal with multiple temporal horizons.Rarely, will she have only one activity to focus on.
While the multi-tasking aspect of temporal horizons is very much an attribute of SBTF crowd work, the temporal structure is not as fixed as in the nursing and teaching examples offered in the paper.
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The broad pattern of work in the unit is governed by sets of large-scale andfiner-grained rhythms
In SBTF work:
Large-scale rhythms are collective information-seeking (crowdsourcing) and the patterns of responding to an activation request, on-boarding during a new activation, volunteers getting comfortable with new documents/processes, moving from data collection to verification to cleaning, etc.
Fine-grained rhythms are the start/midpt/end peaks for questions about data entry, subsequent adjusting of instructions, creating new data sheets in the midst of the deployment when new info needs become apparent.
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An analytical approach that highlights a temporalcharacteristic of work at a collective level is the concept oftemporal rhythms.The concept of rhythms directs our attention to the re-occurring patterns ofwork and how people use their knowledge of these re-occurring patternsduring their patient care and organizational activities in the unit.
Temporal rhythms are workers' response to re-occurring patterns in collective activities and how people use those rhythms to build knowledge for later information-seeking and sensemaking.
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There are major differences between the rhythms of the day shift and nightshift nurses (Zerubavel, 1979
This is somewhat reminiscent of the Euro vs US timezones. There are more Europeans who are active Slack channel participants so late afternoon/early evening UTC +/- 1 is fairly busy. The US starts coming on board when the Europeans are going to bed.
I suspect "shift work" also varies for the place of disaster. It would be interesting to know if the "day shift" for Cyclone Pam/Vanuatu was Australian timezones and Nepal Earthquake was Indian timezones. Or if they both remained Euro-centric because that's where the volunteers largely live.
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The first period of intense activity is at the beginning of the shift.The nurse going off duty ‘‘gives report’’ to the incoming nurse taking over forher. During this information exchange, which usually lasts for 30 minutes,the incoming nurse must rapidly assimilate all the information about thepatient and the daily plan of care for the patient. Immediately after shiftreport, the nurse ensures that all the medications are available and checks onthe patient. The next intense period of activities follows the SICU teammorning rounds; the nurse implements or helps the physicians implement theplan of care decisions made during the rounds. The final intense period ofactivity occurs at the end of the shift.
SBTF has tried to institute these more familiar rhythmic/routine activities but it doesn't seem to stick. Because there's such a lack of shift work mentality in the work, there isn't a convenient benchmark for assembling the latest information for Core Team/Coords or Leads/Volunteers.
This has proven to be pretty problematic, especially when decisions are made but buried in Slack transcripts.
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The information contained in the information system is notsufficient in itself; the temporal context within which it can be placed,organized according to the trajectory, helps makes sense of it.
Likewise, in SBTF data collection. Temporal contexts are crucial but often not captured consistently or at all.
What are the temporal contexts in crisis situations that could/should be collected so that it doesn't lack meaning or is misinterpreted later?
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Sonnenwald, D.H. and L.G. Pierce (2000): Information Behavior in Dynamic Group WorkContexts: Interwoven Situational Awareness, Dense Social Networks and ContestedCollaboration in Command and Control.Information Processing and Management, vol. 36,pp. 461–479.
Get this paper on context and situational awareness.
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structured ‘‘timeline’’of activities, events, and occurrences – atemporal trajectory. We use this termto focus on the fact that illness trajectories have not only a spatial but also atemporal logic by which they proceed. The temporal aspect of a trajectoryconcerns the way in which it unfolds and the forces that move it to com-pletion.
Temporal trajectories in illnesses, like humanitarian crises, have embedded arcs, logics, spatial elements and progressions.
They are animated by concern about past-present-future actions/predictions.
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Like Orlikowski and Yates, we are particularly concerned with the rela-tionship between temporality and practice, with the ways in which a nego-tiated temporal order arises within, and lends meaning to, individualactivities coordinated in concert. We believe that a detailed understanding ofthe relationship between temporality and practice provides a basis for both amore detailed analytic understanding of the temporality of collaboration, butalso for technological and representational advances in support of cooper-ative activity.
Cite this to ground the need to study temporality and practice as a way forward for "technological and representational advances" in CSCW.
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Dervin (1999) describes information as aninteractionally created artifact, encouraging us to turn our analytic attentionaway from problems of ‘‘access’’ and towards the ways in which informationis created in the course of collaborative work. An aspect of work that playsan important role in the creation and use of information is temporality.
It's a shame that the meta data can't be extracted from the SBTF documents. I'll bet there is a story to tell there.
It might be interested to do a meta-analysis of several SBTF deployment documents to understand the trajectory of its own knowledge and practices around crowdsourcing crisis data, but also to substantiate my hunch that event temporality (slow, sudden, chronic) affects the collaboration process and the data artifacts it produces.
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Traditional approaches to information processing present ‘‘information’’as given, well-defined and stable.
This assumption about information attributes runs completely counter to humanitarian crisis data, broadly spreaking, and SBTF data collection/analysis, in general. In fact, this couldn't further from the truth.
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One of the largest-scalestudies exploring this problem was undertaken at the University of Wash-ington (Fidel et al., 2000), where researchers investigated the information-seeking behavior of teams from two different companies, Boeing andMicrosoft (Poltrock et al., 2003). They found that each team had differentcommunication and information-seeking practices, and that current infor-mation systems are oriented toward individual rather than collaborativeinformation-seeking activities. In practice, though, information seeking isoften embedded in collaboration
SBTF uses Google Sheets and Docs for information collection and shared documentation. Though Google products are billed as cloud-computing collaboration tools, it would be interesting to know if these systems remain oriented in individual information-seeking activities rather than collaborative.
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In the SICU, we have been examining the experience oftemporality in the context of workers’ searching for, managing, and pro-viding information.
This seems like a particular flash point for the SBTF work. The data is temporal and the collection work is temporal but there seems to be a gap between structuring the two temporalities into the final data product. Harvesting date/timestamps and agreeing to formats/standards are rarely incorporated into the initial deployment instructions. The value of temporality often seems implied when it might need to be made more explicit for making sense of the data and the constant need for updating/filtering/sorting/analysis.
Yeah, I've got some thoughts here.
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Attempts toincorporate a notion of temporality into the construction of collaborativetechnologies must, accordingly, provide for the social nature of the temporaltexture of everyday activity, and focus not simply on how activities are or-ganized in time, but how they are experienced in time.
This is true but, for me, this is where the study focus begins to get fuzzy.
Q: How to acknowledge this "truth" without sliding headlong into a cultural-linguistics study? Is it just enough to say it and move on?
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When looking at collaborative settings, it is critical to recognize that theexperience of time also has a social component. Sorokin and Merton (1937)explore the notion of ‘‘social time,’’ observing that, while time proceedsunremittingly and uniformly, our experience of time reflects cultural and so-cial patterns that give it meaning.
This is an important consideration for the SBTF study (especially the interview phase) since the volunteer base is international.
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emlis.pair.com emlis.pair.com
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The latter belongs to a more philosophical approach, where thefocus is on the experience of time, mostly through the observation that changes, such as aging or processing, occur.
What does Adam (2004) say about the notion of time as change. Where does this fit in her timescapes model?
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