Time and Space

Overview

Time and space are the two coordinates against which every communication technology is measured, because every such technology is in the business of changing the relationship between them. A message that once required a journey now requires none; a distance that once cost three weeks now costs nothing; an event that happened elsewhere is now happening here. The category collects material on how technologies have repeatedly rearranged this relationship, and on what that rearrangement does to social life.

The Basic Pattern

Harold Innis, in Empire and Communications (1950), proposed a distinction that remains the most useful entry point. Media are time-biased or space-biased. Time-biased media — stone, clay, parchment, oral tradition — are durable and hard to move, and the societies built on them tend toward continuity, tradition, hierarchy and local depth. Space-biased media — papyrus, paper, print, radio, the network — are light and easily transported, and the societies built on them tend toward extension, administration at distance, and empire. Innis's point was not that one is better but that each is a bias, and that a society dominated by either develops characteristic blind spots.

Innis's student Marshall McLuhan turned the argument toward perception, and Wolfgang Schivelbusch's The Railway Journey (1977) supplied the classic case study: the railway did not merely make travel faster but destroyed the traveller's experienced relation between distance and duration, produced the standardisation of clock time across regions that had previously kept their own, and generated a new and initially disorienting way of seeing landscape from a moving window.

David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity (1989) named the general process time-space compression and located its motor in capital's need to reduce turnover time — arguing that each round of compression is followed by a cultural crisis in how space and time are represented.

Under Networked Conditions

The compression of transmission time to effectively zero does not abolish distance; it makes distance selectively relevant. Several consequences recur across the literature:

• Time zones become the residual friction. When transmission is instantaneous, the only remaining obstacle to synchronous work is that people are asleep — which is why asynchrony becomes an organisational discipline rather than a limitation.
• Simultaneity replaces sequence. Events elsewhere arrive as they happen rather than in an order established by travel time, which removes the interval in which sense used to be made of them.
• Place is decoupled from access. See Societies and Cities in the Age of Instant Access on what this does to cities.
• Storage collapses time. Everything recorded remains present, which produces the excavation problem described in persistent paleontology.

See

• The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century
• Time and Space Compression
• Societies and Cities in the Age of Instant Access
• The Social Logic of Space
• The Poetics of Space
• Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty