Time as a social practice

Introduction

A clock advances regularly by drawing on forces that are themselves regular. It organizes the inevitable arrival of the future into a sequence. But it does not invent inevitability, futurity, or sequence. With clocks, the challenges of scheduling events, anticipating potentials, and synchronizing rhythms become easier, or at least more calculable. Yet, the clock cannot do this alone. It must be built, maintained, referenced, and trusted. Through a whole constellation of actions, human and non-human, some of the various ways temporality functions can be put to use. Despite this complex choreography of contingency, we have come to accept a simpler definition of time: what the clock measures.

This article argues that a time is a social practice that translates temporality into meaningful codes and organizes temporality’s material influence. There are many expressions of temporality and there are many times that cover and organize these together. Times relate to each other in many possible ways, but the roles of translation and material influence are especially important. This model moves beyond rejecting a traditional view of time as linear, singular, constant, and universal. That work has already been done. The goal now is to build positive accounts of many times in such a way that they can be understood together.

Time is worth thinking about because it matters in many specific cases. However, what it does in each situation varies tremendously. This variety has stunted growth around the topic: while many people are writing about time, there seems to be no way to fit together the different things they are saying. What goes on in intergenerational memories (Giesen, 2004) seems to have no relationship to the use of historical time in search engines (Hellsten et al., 2006). Such diverse research on time should produce a network effect; each additional study should enrich scholarship on time as a whole. Presently, studies are difficult to compare, and so are compared rarely. There are now a few major theses that could unite studies of time. These claims are: that time is accelerating; that a new kind of globally networked time is ascendant; and that there are many different times that are densely interwoven. Of these, the first simplifies the diversity of times into a single dynamic, the second describes only some practices of time, and the third makes all studies parallel but isolated. If the parallels between studies could be related in a systematic way, the third thesis might turn time into a productive term in the more general explanation of social change with which social science is tasked.

This article builds on Barbara Adam’s (1995) Timewatch, refining the insights that book gathers from lived knowledge of time into a more organized general theoretical model. In Timewatch, Adam turns away from existing work in the social sciences that approaches time from one particular angle (such as future orientation, use of waiting, or systems of time measurement). For Adam, times have many aspects, coexist, and act in many, complex ways. For Timewatch, she interviewed ordinary people about time, hoping to discover not just the personal significance of the term for those interviewed, but the actual function of time in the lives of all kinds of people—something they should understand best themselves. This project revealed a huge variety of aspects of time: time when; time as a medium of exchange; time periods; time in language; time frames; and the growth and death implicit in process. Such aspects of time, she argued, were mutually implicated, inseparable from one another, and deeply imbricated with the dominant time of the clock (Adam, 1995).

This article extends Adam’s analysis by inventing theoretical terms with which to recognize and relate together different aspects of time. In Timewatch, Adam argues repeatedly against categorization, abstraction, sharp distinctions, or isolating any aspect of time. We experience times in combination, as real to varying degrees in different contexts, and in multiple registers that do not exclude one another. Abstraction, she argued, would falsify that experience. Adam is not anti-theory, but this project prioritized everyday experience in order to open space for an account of times as multiple and mutually implicated. Here, I extend her analysis by offering terms in which different times can be apprehended in their difference, so that we can better understand and discuss their combination and mixture in reality as it is lived. Although everyday experience positions us between many times, we relate to these times in different ways and understand each in its peculiarities. That we think of a timecard in one way and our mortality in another does not deny a connection between the two or the fact that they both operate on the same people; it is by knowing each that we make sense of the experience of multiple times. Timewatch refined intuitions of time into a rich vocabulary. Here, I attempt to turn that vocabulary into a system for thinking about times as complicated, varied, and interrelated social practices.

This article’s thesis is that every different time organizes a set of relationships of temporality, and that these times enter into relations between one another. Imagine for a moment that temporality is essentially a matter of past, present, and future. Then, what a time does is organize relations between these: on the calendar, the present is one box, the past all the ones before, and the future is all the boxes that lie ahead. However, there is more to temporality than simply the categories of past, present, and future. Synchronization, memory, repetition, delay, and opportunity, for example, cannot be reduced to the modes of past, present, or future, yet are critical aspects of what calendars actually do. Thus, a time orders relations between not just three modes, but a larger number of ways temporality functions. Finally, these times relate to one another. These three categories organize the article.

Each is addressed in order: temporality, then times, and then relations between times. For the first and third topics, I use limited lists to suggest some members of a class without offering a complete catalog or a set of structural terms by which the total space of the category could be known in advance. There are many ways temporality acts in the world and that times can relate. Of these, some are especially common, important, and worth describing. Such lists are incomplete and not the final word. They are products of a theoretical exploration that learns nuance from phenomena, decides between interpretations, and produces stylized readings that guide further analysis.

Temporality functions

Why do humans produce clocks or schedule meetings? There is not one answer to this question, and that fact is critical. Against those narratives of domination that see the clock as a tyrannical force in recent human history, Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift argue that the clock’s power “comes from the fact that it can be so many things to so many people. Its power comes from the difference implicit in the multiple possibilities it generates” (Glennie and Thrift, 2009: 97 emphasis in original). One can use the clock to pace a process, to plan an event, to remember hours past, to trigger an alarm, to synchronize movements, to measure duration, to delay an action, or to pass the time. With the clock, we can make use of many aspects of temporality. However, there are aspects of temporality for which the clock is no use at all; the inevitable, the ultimate, the ancient, the backwards, and the hip are aspects of temporality on which clocks have no purchase.

Before anything as organized as a time develops, there are primordial influences I will refer to as ways temporality happens. We notice temporality because it does things and is the means by which things happen. It can act, mediate, or appear. Synchronization makes two processes begin at once that may meet later; pace mediates between forces of acceleration and deceleration; an event appears and ends. Temporality can work in these ways, or not. Temporality works by a number of distinctive functions, such as inevitability, anticipation, events, opportunity, speed, ephemerality, frequency, timed access, scheduling, and change.

These many functions cannot be reduced to a single term, despite many efforts to do just this. Master terms proposed to encompass all the heterogeneous functions of temporality include: paced repetition (Brann, 1999); absolute flux (Newton, 1962); ordered sequence (Gell, 1992); or duration itself (Bergson, 1950 [1896]). Each unification attempt subsumes very different aspects of temporality to its own universal logic. Therefore, each reduction works as an exclusion: if temporal passage is the only real form of temporality, then eternity, event, and causation are simply redefined as non-temporal. The most extreme form of this procedure occurs in those accounts that deny time exists at all (presentism), thereby asking that we speak of the regular movement of pendulums, memory of the past, and hours shops remain open without recourse to time or temporal vocabulary. However, it is exactly because phenomena such as rhythm, pace, change, memory, and opportunity exist that time is worth talking about in the first place. The many functions of temporality do not emerge from a single underlying nature of time, but from the variety of occasions that we cannot help but sense as temporal.

Temporality does things. Although it is not wholly material, temporality has an influence in the world. More precisely, it has many influences on the world. Temporality happens in every moment and we are quick to notice it because we are susceptible to it. The sun rises, an eye blinks, an event is scheduled, a room reminds one of the past, events happen in sequence, a library cuts back its hours. To experience the influence of temporality is not uniquely human; wood ages and cracks, plants flower and die, sedimentary layers accumulate and harden. Temporality is “out there” in the world precisely because it is “in here” for so many objects that are themselves out there in the world.

To recognize the pervasive role of temporality requires an ability to sense temporality and a willingness to regard phenomena in temporal terms. Boredom is psychological insofar as it is a response to disappointed vigilance, but it is also temporal insofar as it indexes a specific way temporality shapes human experience (Brodsky, 1995: 109; Heidegger, 1949: 364). Representing other peoples as backward invokes ethnocentrism in politically charged rhetoric; yet, temporality operates alongside ethnicity, race, rhetoric, and politics in backwardness and cannot be reduced to them (Butler, 2008; Chakrabarty, 1997; Fabian, 1983).

One step in cultivating a sensitivity to temporality is to notice its role in writing. As the reader becomes aware of the frequent, and inevitable, use of temporal vocabulary in this text, it should become more apparent the urgency of recognizing how functions of temporality permeate the domain of language and thought, and implicitly what they describe. The previous sentence invokes temporality with the words “becomes,” “frequent,” “inevitable,” and “urgency.” We are all already invoking temporal functions nearly every time we communicate in language.

The many ways temporality functions can be better understood with the help of theory. Using words, thoughts, and ideas, theory can stultify the influence and occurrence of temporality into patterns, types, and categories. This helps us recognize and discuss it. This stultification does not stop time or represent temporality as acting in singular and controlled ways, but it does provide a technique by which we can discern, describe, navigate, and respond to temporality as it functions. To notice temporality with theory is to have (and develop) a special sensitivity to temporality. This allows us to abstract from scenarios (the complexity of temporal experience) into functions. ¹ The theorization of temporality processes the occurrence of temporality into an artifice that can translate temporal influence into thought and argument.

Here, I will lay out three of the many temporal functions to give a sense of this technique. Each can be defined by its specific style, which is not quite reducible to combinations of other functions.

Time as social practice

Time is an enacted, material, social practice that organizes the functions of temporality. Although social theory of time has long recognized the artificiality of times, the status of these constructs remains unclear. What is clock time? How does it relate to memory, the time of a religious calendar, or the temporal conditioning of experience? Here, I propose that anything that may be called a time is also a practice conducted by associated beings in a more or less regular manner.

A time is a bundling of temporal functions that rationalizes them and it is a practice that coordinates them. I take this idea partly from John Koller’s analysis of Buddhist views of time. Koller (1974: 204) defines time as “a theoretical term to cover the temporal terms and relations as these are understood conceptually.” Time represents temporal terms as connected. It is not the source of that which we recognize as temporal, but the sense made of it. It is in practices that we experience time, and, thus, it is practices that make times (Shove et al., 2012: 129). A time gives temporal terms specific connections, rather than simply fusing them all together or mixing them up with each other. What does this look like?

In E.P. Thompson’s (1967) article on time in factory work, he argued that a new time practice came to dominate the many forms of time that had flourished in Europe previously. This new time depended on clocks with hands, gates that locked out workers who came late in the morning, and a work process requiring synchronized labor. It organized a number of functions of temporality in specific ways: it formed activity into measured durations, purged of idleness, that had beginnings and endings positioned within the hours of the day (Thompson, 1967). This practice, which we call a time, did not rationalize all functions of temporality; nostalgia, inevitability, and rituals that had made work irregular before were not part of its order. But it did take a number of specific ways temporality can act in the world (duration, idleness, event, schedule, and passage) and put them together so they did something useful.

If a time arranges temporality at a conceptual level, how does it actually go into force? For Thompson’s time practice, the answer is clear: “by the division of labour; the supervision of labour; fines; bells and clocks; money incentives; preachings and schooling; the suppression of fairs and sports” (Thompson, 1967: 90). Thompson drew on studies of the first generation of factory workers that show owners tended to use the stick often and carrot almost never (McKendrick, 1961; Pollard, 1963). The time of the factory, then, seems entirely dependent on force to move from an idea in the factory owner’s mind to an actual practice workers would more or less obey.

Discipline, however, represents only one means by which times are enacted. Not all times are policies enforced by violence, although those that produce a feeling of domination do invite analysis. Accounts narrowly grounded “in either technology or in social disciplining produce arguments in which any originary role for other spheres, from consumption to everyday practices, is by definition impossible” (Glennie and Thrift, 2005: 193). This has made scholarship acutely sensitive to the modern time formation whose expression is primarily in discipline. But these are not the only places where temporality matters, or even where it matters most. Research on historical time (Koselleck, 1985), time in religion (Eliade, 1959; Hubert, 1999; Rayment-Pickard, 2004), time in video games (Atkins, 2007; Nitsche, 2007), and time for wood boat enthusiasts (Jalas, 2006) all evidence the significance of time beside disciplinary relations of domination. Times do not need henchmen to go into effect; they just need to be performed.

Times can be enacted in a variety of ways. Although Koller’s definition of times as representations of temporal terms gestures toward the very wide range of ways particular times can coordinate aspects of temporality, his argument comes out of a Buddhist tradition wherein theoretical terms (such as time) must be regarded as mental constructs and therefore unreal. This part of his argument is less helpful in explaining the social organization of temporality in material practices.

Thomas Luckmann instructively connects mental constructs of time with their social reality using the categories of the virtual and actual. On the one hand, times are mental and immaterial. They exist virtually as a social stock of knowledge, ready to be drawn on in ways that exceed their material presence. On the other hand, they subsist in transmissions or materializations, such as instruments or writing. They are actualized in two characteristic ways. First, they are performed, as in instruction or mimesis. Workers hurrying off to work, fined, or learning about the goodness of time thrift are examples of this path to actualization. Second, times manifest themselves in artifacts, such as notations and instruments for measuring time. The clock, bells, closed gate, and posted schedule are examples from Thompson applicable here. Both these kinds of actualization, however, depend on the field of potentials established by time knowledge. Thus, the actual and virtual are codependent; someone must know how to read a clock for the clock to actualize a practice of time, and, similarly, to tell someone they are late requires a clock showing that they in fact are. Because of the interrelation of the field of potentials surrounding a practice of time and the actualized bodies that animate it, social practices of time are not strictly human. Times require knowledge, activity, and technology.

The human experience of time is only one element in a practice of time. Despite limits on the subject’s experience of time explained by phenomenology (Husserl, 1964), technologies extend and modify thought, experience, and the performance of human social life. Although humans cannot experience time as a series of discrete states (due to protension and retention), they can go back through backed-up copies of their files on a computer as if time were a series of discrete states. Ongoing work by Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift identifies the clock as a component of distributed cognition in urban areas: “Clock time comprises a number of concepts, devices, and practices” that work together in historically and geographically variable ways, for various communities of practice (Glennie and Thrift, 2009: 9 emphasis in original). Time practices depend on the imperfect cooperation of these elements, but result together in the scheduling of leisure, the measuring of movements in a task, and the recording of history.

Thompson provides an example of time enforced as a policy and Glennie and Thrift outline a set of time practices centered on clocks. Yet, social practices of time can take many other forms. Involuntary memories “break into the present in sudden, unexpected ways” but “do not last long” (Hoy, 2009: 192). Trauma structures repetition in experience by having first been forgotten and then experienced as both forgotten and inescapable (Caruth, 1996: 17). Cottage time (the slow and calm situation of time spent in a summer cottage) happens without strict schedules, synchronization, or regularity. But to come into existence, this time requires one provide specially for it, preparing for a vacation and going to a cottage (Eriksen, 2001: 157–158).

These times act together, jostling, ignoring, or overpowering one another. Adam theorizes this complexity as a mutual implication between a multiplicity of times. The mixture of times that characterizes experience is a product of many practices of time that can be distinguished, and which we do in fact distinguish in ordinary life. Catching a plane, checking a watch, and timing a joke all involve different kinds of time that can happen together. Often, the joke is not substantially affected by being on an airplane, and the time told by the watch, though it has a different significance on the airplane than it did in the airport, is not hard to distinguish from the timing of the joke.

Social practices are not always neat, but they can be separated out. They are worth studying because they are not just individual habits or unexpected events; they are concretely observable patterns of behavior that are visible in their enactment, which often constitute social relations, and which become sites of contestation (Swidler, 2001). Practices are repeated (Shove et al., 2012). This fact makes practices matter, because what has repeated many times before is likely to repeat again in the future. The downside to the conceptual tidiness of the concept of practice is that communities of practice are not well-defined (Glennie and Thrift, 2005: 165) while the concepts of practices are defined too well; we can understand practices with a diagrammatic clarity that actual events lack. No day is average, but we still speak of an average day. Still, what does happen does tend toward certain repetitions that can be characterized, and, in many cases, those characterizations are worth making.

To summarize this section, times organize heterogeneous functions of temporality into practices that are experienced and enacted, though they are jumbled. The next section provides a richer vocabulary for that jumble.

How times relate

The basic syntagm is familiar: we used to get together to watch Project Runway in 2008 on TiVo. The memory, the historical period, the TV season, the day of the week, the time of the workday, the scheduled time of the show, the wait while everyone showed up, the hour we spent together, the segmentation of content and advertisements, the sequence of the episodes, the timeline within the show, the editing of an episode, the stylistic references of the designers, the harried pace of the design process. These are the paradigmatic times involved. But what are the paradigmatic relations?

Times always relate to each other in ways specific to a situation, but we can still name some general types of relationships that tend to form. Barbara Adam describes the relations between times with the catch-all term mutual implication. The phrase suggests play and mutual presupposition; complex relations cannot be frozen into a single image (Adam, 1995: 159). In the course of Timewatch, the phrase provides several specific meanings. In this section, I draw out types of relations from these varied uses. This section will begin with times irrelevant to one another, explore how times translate each other, and then explore material influence and mutual reinforcement.

Mutual implication, as a term, ambiguously suggests that all times somehow relate. However, Adam is quick to point out that gaps are more common than connections, and that non-interactions can be more important than connections:

Most of these times are implicit, taken for granted, and seldom brought into relation with each other: the times of consciousness, memory, and anticipation are rarely discussed with reference to situations dominated by schedules and deadlines. The times expressed through everyday language tend to remain isolated from the various parameters and boundaries through which we live in time. (Adam, 1995: 12)

Most times coexist in a degree of passive non-interaction. Because the times do not envelop and overrun each other, opportunities remain for times to grow, flourish, and find a niche. Using the examples of the dissemination of the mechanical clock and of railway time, Jon May and Nigel Thrift suggest that there have been “various (and uneven) networks of time stretching in different and divergent directions across an uneven social field” (May and Thrift, 2001: 5). A practice of time will interact with times within its reach, changing local patterns of life and giving new terms to thoughts of the past and future. But outside its reach, it may very well not. Towns near railroad stations feel the importance of the times used by railroads, but those further away easily find other points of reference. Geographic distance is one expression of non-interaction, but times may also coexist without much relation in a single space. The times of consciousness, anticipation, and work schedules often run in parallel, touching only occasionally. But ignorance between times is not always a result of simply being of different kinds in different places; ignorance can be educated.

Active non-interaction is a politically significant failure of communication: a town that refuses to accept the railroad’s time, a factory that does not recognize Monday as a drinking holiday, a government that gives no parental leave. Feminist studies of time emphasize that the time spent caring for other people has been continuously ignored by employers and policymakers. Dominant practices of time are numb not only to hours spent (mostly by women), but also to the kind of time care represents. Staying up with a sick child is not exactly measurable as hours on the clock; living with someone older who needs special attention will condition one’s working hours but does not simply consume them (Bryson, 2007).

Active non-interaction is really a failure of translation. One time does not register another properly. Sometimes, this is done by choice: an employer would rather not give more sick leave. Very often, though, one time actually cannot represent aspects of the other time in its own idiom. If the system is to count up the number of hours spent doing something, how many hours can one claim for the effort of caring for a sick child? Times cover some temporal terms and catch them up in a practice; other temporal terms, and other parts of other practices, may not fit at all. Adam describes the mutual implication of the time of care and the economic measurement of time as not just intermeshed with the commodity, but “evaluated through the mediating filter of that economic time” (Adam, 1995: 99). That which has value in the arena of exchange becomes visible; that which cannot be traded cannot be recognized.

Bliss Lim further develops the idea of translating time through Henri Bergson. Although clocks are, from a Bergsonian perspective, fundamentally translating duration, they cannot grasp duration as a qualitative multiplicity. However, they still systematically represent it. This is a regularized mistranslation. In the same way, Lim argues, the dominant time practices of modernity represent the times of other cultures, denying a culture’s own ways of understanding time. Ghosts no longer stand for ancestors visiting the present; they become delusions and myths demonstrating a culture’s rich storytelling tradition. Despite its attempt to translate a culture’s own time into the secular schema of modernity, modern time cannot account for specters in terms of time and so relegates them to the status of superstition and folklore. ² Here, one time sorts another into an intelligible portion (a model of the original) and a cultural supplement. For Eurocentric developmentalist narratives, the time of other cultures appears as a muddled and discrepant version of their own time—of what they would no doubt say time really is (Lim, 2009). For the most part, though, the translation effort has been successful: modern time has converted lunar and solar calendars into its terms, assigned hours to the day, reconstructed histories on its timeline, and translated local rhythms into periods of days or years. Although much is lost in this rough translation, this representation of other times has become dominant in many parts of the world (Postill, 2002).

With translation comes the possibility for the universalization of a time. If a time can account for most everything belonging to other times, what do other times have to offer? Here is a common view among students learning about suspiciously complicated theories of time: time is a dimension, and that is good enough. The dimensional account can provide a translation of any other time, so nothing more need be said. Ergo, historical time is a matter of how academics write; time systems of different cultures are just approximations of the Western system; philosophical ideas about time describe psychology and not reality. Such enthusiasm for a single time establishes a universalizing pretension. It does this, however, at the expense of many aspects of other times that are simply redefined outside the terms of time, as with the displacement of ghosts into folklore. This universalization, self-important as it may be, has actually been very rewarding for scientific concepts of time and practices of time central to modern bureaucracy because it allows them to expand their empires. Most science uses a roughly Newtonian model of time, making work in different experiments—even in different fields—more easily combinable; this allows a larger empire to develop more quickly.

When people regularly use one time to translate other times, times can take on the relationship of referent. A referent time serves as an ideal toward which other times should be directed, or at least with which other times become easier to think about. The clock is our most general referent for times. It is difficult to even recognize something as a time except to the degree that it resembles the clock. Adam discusses times as models in another passage on mutual implication. In the relation of the “archetypal and endogenous temporality of the birthing process and the rational clock time of obstetrics,” Adam argues that these times do not just oscillate, but “interpenetrate and mutually inform each other’s meanings” (Adam, 1995: 49–50). The obstetric schedule has a basis in the experience of birthing and can vary during a birth to better model it. However, a reciprocal modeling takes place too often, where the actual birth may be condensed to fit a given schedule.

In the relation of a model, one time is understood, designed, or practiced in the image of another, or with a significant borrowing of elements. The model changes the very form of another time, not just translating content into it, but actually changing it to better accommodate that content. Segments of advertisements during Project Runway are modeled on viewers’ attention and coax and shape that attention; the time in the evening when the show runs models the work schedule of an intended viewership. Because many practices of time model themselves on others, modeling can be iterative. For example, when NASA scientists worked on the Mars rover, the hours of their work had to switch to Mars time, a variation of the usual solar day of Earth. This time depends on the clock (special watches that run a bit slower than usual), but models its structure on the day, which itself refers to the rising and setting of the sun (Mirmalek, 2009).

The common-sense account of time might imagine these times as derived from increasingly faithful originals. We traditionally see practices of things as imitations of an underlying transcendental reality. By instead seeing practices as related to one another by reference, we focus attention on how time is enacted and lived, rather than an ideal form to which some of these practices allude. Idealizations and referents are tactics within the many practices of time and their shifting relations.

Translation is not purely textual, just as time is not. Like interpretation, someone must make a translation and someone must act on it. Translation matters materially and material influence is itself a critical register at which times (themselves partly material) relate. In most of the passages where Adam discusses mutual implication, this is what she means. Times affect other times. Times are active simultaneously, the addition of new times changes those that already exist, birthing time and obstetric schedules intermesh, and, again, commodified time and the time of care “affect each others quality and meaning” (Adam, 1995: 15, 28, 50, 99). Mutual implication also means mutual change.

Times, in their actuality, often act on the same materials, and so interact materially. The examples of translation all take on significance because of the material influence they imply: NASA scientists trying to keep on Mars time lost sleep, obstetricians rush birth, modern time translates traditional times to replace them, and work schedules wreak havoc on the time of care. It matters if one time translates another properly because the mistranslation will have an impact. If we schedule a weekly meet-up but ignore one person’s schedule, such that she is late every week, our meeting will de facto begin late every week on account of the one time’s insensitivity to another.

In the sociological literature on time, there are many examples of powerful interactions between rhythms. In one case, the schedule of nearby transportation influenced the shift schedule of workers at a prison (Bluedorn, 2002: 148). In another case, government changes to the week in France (the switch to a 10-day week) and Russia (the dissolution of the weekend) resulted in a split between the obedient cities and traditional countryside. This undermined the rule of law and rural workers simply took holidays from both the new calendar and the old one (Zerubavel, 1985: 10, 42–43). Lefebvre’s incomplete project of rhythmanalysis would have put this interaction at the center of all social processes: the world as rhythms of social life in complex interactions (Lefebvre, 2007). But these visions risk being too monocausal and mechanistic.

Influence can come in many forms beside translation and rhythm. The Taylorist administration of time that arose in the workplace has moved to home life, where it now drives employees to spend more time at their post-Taylorist jobs (Hochschild, 1997). One practice drives its practitioners to another practice. Contemporary practices of listening to music have encouraged shifts in compositional strategy, because audiences enter and exit the piece at the push of a button (Kramer, 1988: 45). Audiences become used to one kind of time and this makes them ready for other practices they would not have enjoyed as much before. The ability to quickly retry a segment of a video game encourages short-term planning and easier gameplay at the expense of virtuoso play and memorization (Moran, 2010). Changes in time practices change the nature of computer gameplay; such an argument can also be made for computer-based work.

Although it only tells part of the story, material influence is an important aspect of how times relate. By understanding times as practices, it becomes easier to see how easy it is to affect them, and, conversely, how influential each practice is itself. Often, these material relations work in conjunction with other relations to accomplish a larger effect. The mixture of times, in their mutual implication, does not make all times equal, at a political level. Some are doing much better than others.

Reinforcement between times is a large-scale phenomenon that incorporates many kinds of relations and happens between several times together. Some times make each other stronger. This has been the central story in the history of time since the 14th century. What some call modern time, network time, or simply clock time can better be understood as an alliance of many times. The second, minute, hour, day, week, month, and year seem a natural fit, despite tiny leap seconds, months of uneven length, and the occasional extra day for a leap year. Yet, these units only fit together because of half a millennium of international efforts pushing for their alignment. And still, the only perfect fit between these units are definitional ones between minutes, hours, and days. While the units of time, now carefully defined from the second up, make a practice of time that works at large and small scales, other allies make other contributions. The very close match between 24 hours and the rotation of the Earth (days) works like the match between 365 days and one orbit around the sun (years): these sub-practices of time naturalize the entire reinforcing set. The scientific concept of time as the fourth dimension turns the pragmatic convention of measuring durations of activity into a fundamental aspect of the cosmos. Capitalism’s translation of time into a measurable commodity gives force to time measured. Adam refers to this clustering of times as a reinforcing set. Their consequence, she argues, has been the reification of time as an external object (Adam, 2004: 138).

Yet, by extending a form of time through alliance, contributing forces also strain it and make it vulnerable. Any contradiction between allies threatens the reification; if the needs of capitalism no longer depend on blocks of time that supposedly measure regularized activity, a schedule of hours matters less in a plain economic sense. A second vulnerability arises from instability within any of the contributing members. If physics rejects the dimensional model of time, something quantum theory presents as a serious possibility, clock time becomes a useful convention lacking any further significance. These weaknesses have already begun to call for contemporary investigations of changing time practices, and may be partly responsible for popular interest in new forms of time. It is not just that many practices have been changing, this has happened throughout history. The contemporary situation is that time has accumulated into a fairly consistent thing, which was open to critique in the middle of the 20th century and is now beginning to appear as many things nestled closely together.

Still, the alliance is strong. Although many sense something amiss with time, it is hard to put one’s finger on it. We speculate in spare moments, but still do the responsible business of respectable life on the clock. For those with little time for the matter, the simplest answer remains that these oddities are simply different aspects of the same basic time. To the extent they do not fit the universal model, they can be excluded from time and must be thought of in some other way.

To summarize this section, times always take on specific relations to each other in a complex totality, but the nature of these relationships can be better understood by knowing their habits. Many times have no direct relationship with each other, and this makes it worthwhile to see connections as they do exist and where they do develop. Times translate each other, with incomplete success, and often in regularized ways. In translation, they can actively fail to translate other times, claim a universal status for their own representation of temporality, or serve as a model for other times. Times influence each other materially, blocking each other, privileging some times over others, accelerating other times, or interacting in some other way. Times have related to each other in various ways for a long time, and some have emerged as a powerful reinforcing set, challenged, but still dominant.

Conclusion

We notice time most when it is strange. We become confused by time out of joint and wonder: what is time? Rather than demand a single explanation that gives a single master term for all of temporality, we should trust our instinct that time is confusing and not reducible to a timeline or experience of passage. Temporality does not work in one way; it functions in many ways. We do not practice time only to register temporal passage, but for many reasons. The ways that temporality functions get caught up in social practices in large part because we want them to. Temporality happens in the world, so we involve ourselves with it. By growing living systems of time, we make more times and the times begin to animate activity. Some meet each other and social relations form. Others miss the opportunity and there is no encounter. Times relate to each other in some rather predictable ways: translating or ignoring one another, interfering with or reinforcing each other.

Different times do not do the same job. Only if we presume a single function that all times are doing (such as measuring passage or ordering sequences) is it necessary to see how all cultures do something equivalent to the modern reification of time. Times, however, organize different aspects of temporality in their own ways for their own purposes.

Interesting things are happening in time. Social practices, particularly those with significant technological components, are organizing temporality in exciting ways. The passing of time is becoming less important than the accrual of possible events or of sequences that can be activated whenever. Indeed, these practices challenge the very meaning of temporal terms such as memory, event, and even the contemporary.

But if there is no minimum requirement for what may be considered a time, except that it is a practice organizing temporality, are all social practices times? This suggestion contradicts everyday experience. Few would refer to the time of paying bills, though we would consider many aspects of farming as times. Historically, a reinforcing set of practices reified a time that gives us a limited and misleading referent when trying to see time at work around us. We expect times to be those things that do what the clock does. The more a practice is like a system of gears, the more easily we accept it as a time. Ironically, this means that those things most easily called times contribute the least to our knowledge of what times can do. In this sense, paying bills simply does not sound like time, though it does have its own logic of rhythm, procrastination, suddenness, opportunity, and delay. (For many, though, payday is a very real time indeed.)

A historical answer can be supplemented with a theoretical one. A social practice referred to by other practices for its organization of temporality serves as a time. The calendar is a time because it is such a standard referent. We use farming as a model for time with harvest festivals, our associations for the seasons, and the switch to daylight savings time. Paying bills, on the other hand, is simply not referred to as a kind of time and does not widely influence how other practices organize temporality.

Today, a large number of social practices doing interesting things with temporality have become important to social life, and so we each have the hunch that there are many times in effect. We are not just living in the time of the clock and the calendar; we live in the time of farming, post-Fordist labor practices, comedic timing, involuntary memories, trauma, relaxation, transportation schedules, slow historical changes, interactive computer-mediated time, and in the still-changing times of care.

The perspective developed in this article allows us to make connections between different practices of time and the sorts of temporality they work with. We should now be able to return to a challenge raised in the introduction: what is the relation between intergenerational memory and the historical time of search engines? Although the media system establishes common memories for those who have lived during certain events, this marking of age cohorts does not create significant divides between generations (Giesen, 2004). Search engines obscure the diachronic change of the Web by presenting search results as if all pages were simultaneous with the present (Hellsten et al., 2006). These are social practices serving as times: the media system’s creation of events everyone knows; the differences in memory between generations; the continual production of new material for the Web; and the representation of the Web as changeless. The functions of temporality they emphasize are themselves open to historical change, as some become more or less important and as practices distinguish meaningful possibilities or new aggregates (such as the sense of a worldwide present moment that exists only on the Web).

The opportunity before us is to recognize the nearly invisible temporal operations caught up in events, to figure out what they are doing, and to relate this to transformations of time, large and small. Which times are accelerating? Which times conjoin into a new reinforcing set of network time centered on simultaneity? Which do not? What has driven other times to emerge and what projects do they support? How do existing practices of time guide and direct behavior, at all scales?

So long as we believe time is constructed socially, but, not knowing quite how or why this happens, lapse into platitudes about time’s true nature or unknowable complexity, these questions will remain difficult to answer.