Difference between revisions of "Elastic Time"

Revision as of 20:46, 22 January 2011

Also called Elastic Time.

Mobile Times

Plastic time is a framework that explains how technologies fit into our lives.

Mobile Times is a global study of time use'what do you do with it, how do you think about it, and how it evolves with the forces of globalization and social change. Our first set of studies revealed that the issue of managing one's own personal time zones'the set of social obligations, relationships, and activities that create the rhythms of one's day'was increasingly complex and fragmented, though this occurs differently in different parts of the world. Based on this, the study turned to mixing qualitative and quantitative methods to understand how personal time zones affected technology use. By doing this we discovered a new aspect of time "plastic time" that is cause to rethink our assumptions about busy lifestyles.

How do social scientists put together pieces of the puzzle?

In multi-sited, multi-method research, each field site and method provides an important piece of the puzzle, enabling social scientists to ask broad, fundamental questions. Here our central problem was, which aspects of time use matter most to technology use?

Being busy was not the root cause of dissatisfaction with time use Conflicts arise not when people have more to do, but increasingly diverse things to switch between, creating the need to "shift gears" frequently:

• Working for a meeting-driven multinational in Latin America, and then switching to a long leisurely coffee with friends
• Attending simultaneous banquets in China, so that all friends and business partners are happy

With globalization, we expect the amount of gear shifting to increase.

Busy? Rushed?

Your time shrinking, yet somehow, you happen to know the latest post on your favorite website? Our research shows that you are experiencing 'plastic time'. The experience of 'plastic time' frames modern life'it is an experience that is highly interruptible, shrinking and expanding around immediate concerns, and interleaving through multiple activities. By tracking 169 laptops and MIDs, (in connection with Intel's Mobility Group's Strategic Planning), interviewing people, and working with national time use datasets, we have studied the long term social transformations that have created this way of life.

Most social science of time use focuses on the "time crunch" the set of work and life balances that people attempt to achieve as the demands of work and family grow greater. However, by tracing computer usage, we have been able to develop an alternative point of view. When we showed printouts of people's computer usage, their accounts of their time use became very different. These accounts showed that even the busiest of us still manage to surf the internet.

There are many aspects of our day, such as computer usage, that fly under the radar, can be done not just in a rushed manner but at the right time, and be bent and stretched in such a way as to enable people to interleave the multiple activities going on in their lives, in both relaxed and high-pressure moments. This bending and stretching we are calling "plastic time," and is a key way that people engage with the constraints and opportunities of modern life. These social conditions mean that people use technologies to create more distractions for themselves, not less.

Distracted computing takes place in front of the television, in the kitchen and on the go, where people engage in totally unrelated content at varying levels of attention. The introduction of MIDs is set to expand the range of physical spaces, and content, from which people can distract themselves.

Source: Intel Research PaPR - Plastic Time