{"id":992,"date":"2012-11-03T15:13:19","date_gmt":"2012-11-03T15:13:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chrisspeed.net\/?p=992"},"modified":"2012-11-03T15:24:49","modified_gmt":"2012-11-03T15:24:49","slug":"the-impact-of-the-network-society-upon-a-social-temporal-consciousness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chrisspeed.net\/?p=992","title":{"rendered":"The Impact of the Network Society upon a Social Temporal Consciousness"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Back in June, Larissa Pschetz<\/a> and I presented a short paper at the Slow Technology workshop<\/a> at DIS2012. Organised by William Odom, Carnegie Mellon; Richard Banks, Microsoft Research; Abigail Durrant, Culture Lab \/ Newcastle University; David Kirk Culture Lab \/ Newcastle University; and J ames Pierce, Carnegie Mellon University, the workshop recovered Halln\u00e4s and Redstr\u00f6m’s 2001 paper Slow Technology<\/a>. The paper argued that the increasing availability of technology in environments outside of the workplace requires interaction design practice to be expanded from creating tools to make people\u2019s lives more efficient to \u201ccreating technology that surrounds us and therefore is part of our activities for long periods of time\u201d ( p. 161).<\/p>\n

The core goal of the workshop was to critically reflect on the work that has emerged since\u00a0Slow Technology<\/em>\u00a0was originally proposed, in order to forge understanding of the challenges, limitations and opportunities characterizing the contemporary design space.<\/p>\n

Larissa and I responded to the invitation by submitting the following short position. The paper is available here<\/a>, but we thought that it would be a smart idea to include the trailers of the movies to offer a richer text…<\/p>\n

The Impact of the Network Society upon a Social Temporal Consciousness<\/strong><\/p>\n

Chris Speed &\u00a0Larissa Pschetz<\/p>\n

ABSTRACT<\/strong><\/p>\n

In this paper the authors reflect upon the past thirty years since the emergence and public awareness of what Castells describes as the network society [1] with the shifts in a social temporal consciousness that are evidenced through popular cinema. The short paper contextualizes slow technology within larger societal concerns for time, before introducing four epoch\u2019s within recent cinema that give insight into the condition of a social temporal consciousness.<\/p>\n

Author Keywords<\/strong><\/p>\n

Temporality, time, network society, temporal consciousness<\/p>\n

SLOW TECHNOLOGY IS\u2026
\n<\/strong>
\nThe concept of Slow Technology reflects an uncertainty in the speed and direction in current aspects of society and culture. The need to \u2018slow down\u2019 is a response to an uncomfortable circumstance that warrants an action. At present there are a series of global circumstances that are causing people to want to slow down in order to reassess a number of conditions that are beyond their comprehension such as: global warming, the collapse of financial systems, and even doubt in spiritual frameworks. The authors use a series of popular movies to evidence the shifts in cultural consumption away from reliable and traditional temporal frameworks, towards non-linear and unstable models of time. In brief the authors Slow Technology artefact is a collection of movies that from the last 30 years.<\/p>\n

TEMPORAL CONSCIOUSNESS<\/strong><\/p>\n

The authors adopt the term \u2018temporal consciousness\u2019 from Adam and Thrift [2, 3] who use it to describe the trend of understanding time by a particular group in a specific historical era. The researchers reflect upon the state of this \u2018public temporal consciousness\u2019 as we enter the second decade of the second millennium. In the last twenty years, as the network society has grown to include a third of all people in the world, a series of events have placed pressure upon the models of time that have dominated Western society. From the millennium that evoked hysteria in the form of the Y2K bug and the catalogue of Hollywood blockbusters that foretold the end of the world, to Harold Camping’s prediction of the \u2018Rapture\u2019 in 2011, security in a stable model of time has been replaced with an interest in more flexible notions of time. Whilst teleological \u2018grand narratives\u2019 that offer a model of time remain largely intact, the researchers explore a series of cultural indicators that suggest how the internet and networked experiences are beginning to offer different social \/ temporal consciousness. Given the speed and veracity of Hollywood\u2019s ability to produce depictions of the world using digital technologies, the researchers use a series of case studies taken from cinema since the 1980\u2019s that explore how the temporal models that operate within each \u2018environment\u2019 as network culture has evolved.<\/p>\n

Keeping the Linear Intact<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the 80s and early 90s a series of movies began to identify the symptoms of a condition of post-modernity [4]. Their narratives creatively played with new notions of time without changing the traditional linear model. In Back to the Future (1985) the main character travels to the past and back to the same point in future, and in Groundhog Day (1993) the character suddenly finds himself stuck in one day but the linear model is maintained. This movement can be compared with early moves from a modern to a postmodern model of flexible accumulation. In the same way, corporations such as Benetton and Toyota, anticipating a network culture, benefitted from a post-Fordist approach to production and consumption [5].<\/p>\n