Editorial

In the so-called ‘age of post-truth’ the function of theory is more vital than ever. Why? If we content ourselves with the idea that truth is relative and facts have admissible alternatives, then we risk sliding into a degraded post-modernity where nothing is true and everything is possible. Through mainstream politics – and amplified by digital technology – such a world is today being formed in almost every country and continent. Information networks shrink planetary time and space and deliver the human (and the vital human scale), increasingly, to play the role of bystander. Notwithstanding the mass-alienatory tendency of digital systems, tiny global-spanning strata have access to and control over digital technology development and deployment. An even smaller number (ideologically driven hackers, state employed code-breakers and biddable free-lancers) are able to manipulate this public technology in ways that make the nature of reality and the real even more opaque. Who knew until mid-2019 that WhatsApp, a supposedly secure ‘end-to-end encrypted’ smartphone application in the pockets of 1.5 billion of us, is susceptible to spyware that can be activated on your phone? You don’t even have to answer the call. A digital payload can be dropped by simply ringing your number and then can open up your private communications. This is an uncomfortable truth for the post-truth age. It means Panoptical power and leverage for the few over the many. But even the few cannot comprehend the ‘whole’ they have privileged access to. No one sees and understands the entirety and complexity of the world today. No one can. This is why theory is still vital. Its role is an old one – it sets up a postulate, a framework that can act as the basis of a reasoning that can open up new ways of seeing – but is applied our very new times.

This journal has made a redoubled commitment to publishing theoretical and philosophical perspectives on the nature of time and temporality in our post-modernity. A principal reason for this intellectual obligation is because a fuller and more varied understanding of the functions of technological time, social time and subjective time will allow insights into what constitutes a key process affecting social, economic, political, environmental and technological transformation today.

The present issue is another expanded one. It begins with a special section on ‘Rethinking key concepts’, which includes an excellent range and quality of just the kinds of theoretical explorations of temporality that make the social world a more interesting and challenging place for us as scholars and as citizens. To cite just one example: Paul D’Ambrosio (2019) writes a searching critique of our previous editor-in-chief, Hartmut Rosa, and his influential classification of acceleration and social change. D’Ambrosio extends the scope of Rosa’s thinking and questions ideas of selfhood in our time and introduces the concept of ‘profilicity’ as a way to understand identity and self-presentation in a temporal context.

A second special section completes work in our first issue of this year to look again at ‘Time Perspectives’. Here our authors deliver a more empirically-focused and social-science based approach to the pressing questions and problems of time and temporality, while also including a call from Temple et al. (2019) to reconsider the role of theory within time perspectives research as a whole. Both perspectives – exploratory theory and philosophy, as well as understandings and insights from more durable and flexible approaches – we feel help go some ways to filling the gaps in our knowledge that open continually in a time when a critical discourse and better judgement is needed more and more.