Theoretical Perspectives

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the key terms in the debate on time. Many contributors to the debate on time in the digital era have diagnosed a paradigm shift toward a timeless present that has swallowed up the past. Indeed, network society displaces the sequential order of lived experience by way of a “real virtuality” that immerses people into a world of instantaneity. The chapter then engages with the temporal anxiety that people can no longer narrate history and their own lives as coherent stories. The ongoing debate on time and temporality revolves around a range of interconnected diagnostic tropes that aim to illuminate a fundamental recalibration of the conditions of temporality in the network era: acceleration, resonance, atomization, immediacy, the extended present, time–space compression, network time, and precarious times.