TIME CHALLENGING SPACE

Time and space are the two variables that more than anything define our existence, but that does not mean that they are equal. Our experience of space is dependent on the organization of time. For most of human history, people have travelled by foot. This meant that distances were experienced as great. Nomads travelled continuously, while others remained in one place, cultivating plants and growing their gardens. This latter group saw a very limited part of earth. They became extremely familiar with the space they inhabited, but knew next to nothing about other, more distant, places; the travel would take too much time. 

As technology became more advanced, global infrastructure improved. Maps became more detailed while clocks became more exact in their demonstration of time. The map helped people’s imaginations – it became possible to fantasize about other places when they were outlined in great detail on a map. However, it was the invention of the clock that first disentangled time from space. For centuries, the perception of time was a function of the perception of space. A feeling of time would develop because spatial qualities in our vicinity changed: it becomes light as day or dark as night, warm as summer or cold as winter. Even in the 19th century, the time of day differed from place to place or at least from region to region. Daytime was when the sun was at its zenith (and autumn was the same as when certain fruits ripened in the fields). For thousands of years, space dominated time. 

This changed due to the success of more advanced infrastructure, connecting different regions with one another. The new railway schedules required a national standardization of time. Consequently, time was no longer determined by spatial qualities but by technology: midday was not when the sun was at its peak but when the clock said so. In 1912, at the international conference on time in Paris, a unified and globally valid “world time” was introduced, which released time completely from the past constraints of space. 

Successively, time became a variable more or less independent of space. At the same time, the accelerated revolution of transport begun to “shrink” the perception and relevance of space for many social and cultural processes, and at the end even making it into a function of time. In a popular analogy from the early 20th century, railroads reduced Europe to roughly the size of Germany. Throughout the century, space continued to shrink due to the invention and diffusion of the automobile and the airplane and then finally, the space shuttle. This has also changed how we experience space when travelling: when walking or riding a bicycle, we can see and feel how we more from one place to another. On a train, we can see it through the windows (though even trains go faster and faster with every new decade). Travelling by air doesn’t feel like moving. Whoever flies completely breaks loose from the topographical space of life and the surface of the earth. For the traveller, space is only an abstract, empty distance measured by the duration of the flight. 

In addition, space completely loses its orientating function where material transportation processes are replaced by the electronic transmission of information. Online, the time at which information is sent or requested is registered, but not the place. In our contemporary digital age, the latter has become more or less meaningless. Today, the worldwide simultaneous access to information of all kinds and the “shrinkage of space” as a consequence of the acceleration of transport has led to the decline of “there”. In the current digital era, we are all “here”. 

For further reading: 

Harmut Rosa

Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity

New York: Columbia University Press, 2015