Untitled - socium.ge

Informationalism and the network society 37activities, and the content and geometry of the flows of information thatperform the activities in terms of function and meaning. This is the space offlows.Time, in social terms, used to be defined as the sequencing of practices.Biological time, characteristic of most of human existence (and still the lot ofmost people in the world) is defined by the sequence programmed in the lifecycles of nature. Biological time was shaped throughout history by what I callbureaucratic time; that is, the organization of time, in institutions and in everydaylife, by the codes of military-ideological apparatuses, working on therhythms of biological time. In the industrial age, clock time graduallyemerged; that is, the measure and organization of sequencing with enoughprecision to assign tasks and order to every moment of life, starting with standardizedindustrial work and the calculation of the time horizon of financialtransactions, two fundamental components of industrial capitalism that couldnot work without clock time. In the network society, the emphasis on sequencingis reversed. The relationship to time is defined by the use of informationand communication technologies in a relentless effort to annihilate time bynegating sequencing. This is done, on the one hand, by compressing time (asin split-second global financial transactions or the effort to fight “instantwars”), and, on the other, by blurring the sequence of social practices, includingpast, present, and future, in a random order, as in the electronic hypertext,or in the blurring of life-cycle patterns, both in work and in parenting.In industrial society, organized around the idea of progress and the developmentof productive forces, becoming structured being, time conformed tospace. In the network society, the space of flows dissolves time by disorderingthe sequence of events and making them simultaneous, thus installing societyin structural ephemerality: being cancels becoming.The construction of space and time is socially differentiated. The multiplespace of places, fragmented and disconnected, displays diverse temporalities,from the most traditional domination of biological rhythms to the control ofclock time. Selected functions and individuals transcend time, while devaluedactivities and subordinate people endure life as time goes by. There are,however, alternative projects of structuration of time and space, as an expressionof social movements that aim at modifying the dominant programs of thenetwork society. Thus, instead of accepting timeless time as the time ofautomata, the environmental movement proposes to live time in a longuedurée cosmological perspective, seeing our lives as part of the evolution of ourspecies, and feeling solidarity with future generations, and with our cosmologicalbelonging. This is what Lash and Urry (1994) conceptualized as glacialtime.Communities around the world also fight to preserve the meaning of locality,and to assert the space of places, based on experience, over the logic of the