As part of the summative coursework for my Poverty, Inequality, and Social Policy course, I wrote a review of The People of the Abyss by Jack London, which chronicles the author’s observations over six weeks among London’s poorest citizens in the Whitechapel District of East London. The book is a stunning account of the immense psychological and physiological toll that poverty takes on those subjected to it. The most poignant aspect of Jack London’s analysis, in my view, is its revelation of the way that England’s minimal welfare system fractured the time that its recipients had to truly progress as human beings. For example, there were a number of shelters that the city’s homeless population could seek out for food and a place to sleep. However, if they stayed in a shelter one night, they could only stay in a shelter the next night if it were ten miles away from their lodging the previous night. Thus, the homeless were forced to choose between spending their days walking to a place where they could receive food and shelter and spending that day seeking work. Rather than uplifting the vulnerable, the government’s support system reduced individuals to their basic needs, precluding any possibility of individual development.
The contemporary economy is much different than that of early 20th Century England, but time is still central to humans’ capacity for manifesting our potential. As someone who grew up free from the influence of technology—I did not have a television until I was thirteen—I have felt my phone, laptop, and the social and entrepreneurial obligations that come with them, slowly ossify social and personal expectations of how I use my time. I look at my phone while I wait for the bus, I scroll through twitter while my professors prepare their lecture notes, and I overcome any lull in stimulation by drawing from the vast array of information that sits in my pocket. It is a life of fracture, obligation, and self-directed cynicism towards what I see as my own passive acceptance of constant interruption. It is not that simple, however. The more I have thought about the role that digital technologies play in my life, the more I have begun to realize that I conceive of the time I spend “scrolling” as distinct from some authentic time characterized by a lack of “scrolling.” When I see my own phone use in public spaces, alongside that of my friends and strangers, I wonder what my parents were doing at my age before phones formed the nexus of social, political, and economic life. How did they fill these moments? I have begun exploring this idea in the writings of Herbert Marcuse and Tiziana Terranova, to whom I was introduced in my political theory course, as well as in the work of Judy Wajcman, a Professor at the LSE, who has explored time extensively. These theorists have taught me a lot about how time is understood in the social sciences and shown me an area of study that has yet to be developed.
Much of the social science literature about time and digital communications technologies I have read is written by and about a generation whose relationship to these technologies evolved as they became tools for social, economic, and political ends. These accounts, in my view, regard time through the authentic-inauthentic dichotomy that shapes my own relationship to these technologies. However, there has yet to be serious inquiry into how these technologies are shaping younger generations’ conceptions of time—those for whom these technologies were ubiquitous and fundamental to every dimension of life for as long as they can remember, for whom there is no nondigital past.
I am interested in exploring three lines of thought along these lines. Firstly, I am interested in exploring the impact of digital technologies on the culture of self-optimization among younger people through statistical sociological analysis. Secondly, I want to understand how the framing of everything as an entrepreneurial resource—i.e. as a starting point for manifesting socially desired outcomes—affects curiosity, creativity, and happiness. Lastly, in a much broader sense, I am interested in learning what it means to live in a society where there is a vast disjuncture between the rhythm of time to which the lives of our generation have been set – notably the immediacy of social, intellectual, and creative expression within digital communications – and the slow-onset nature of climate change, and to a lesser degree, the coronavirus. Most recently, people across the world have been forced to see their behavior in terms of how it will affect people fourteen days into the future and how their lives might have been derailed by interactions that took place fourteen days in the past. For myself, and perhaps for others who have been habituated to instantaneous action and reaction, the way that these disruptions play out temporally challenges how we see our own lives and our roles within society at large. Time is central to all of these dynamics, and as neither digital communications, climate change, or pandemics are likely to disappear, it is important to understand it as best we can.
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