Elastic Time
Definition
Plastic Time, also called Elastic Time, is "a framework that explains how technologies fit into our lives". Determining how Simultaneous Time affects the perception of time.
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.[1]
References
- ↑ Intel Research PaPR - Plastic Time http://papr.intel-research.net/projects.htm
