Time hacking: how technologies mediate time

ABSTRACT

Technologies change users’ existing social, cultural, and material practices by providing new opportunities for reflecting on and managing their lives. As technological advancements pervade our private and professional lives, users are tempted to see them as ‘magic bullets’ that can help them become more organized and efficient. In this paper, we introduce the term ‘time hacking’ to capture the various ways technologies mediate users’ time perception and perspective. We will use the examples of virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa and the Quantified Self Movement to illustrate how people feel that they are capable of hacking time by using devices and programs. Imagining tools as neutral entities that help them better manage their lives in a world that seems increasingly sped up, users are often blind to the multifarious ways these technologies, and the companies that produce them, shape what they attend to and how they make sense of information. The concept of time hacking helps us examine what narratives users construct and share about timesaving tools and how users’ perception of and perspective about time changes in response to emerging technologies. Most importantly, time hacking can help to explain the allure of timesaving technologies, why users might be enthusiastic about taking them up and integrating them into their lives.

KEYWORDS:

• Media studies
• sociology
• temporality
• interactivity
• surveillance/privacy
• communication studies
• human-technology interaction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Social scientists often draw difference between the term time and temporality. The philosopher Hoy (2009) argues that whereas time refers to the objective time of the natural world, temporality concerns to the time of human existence. Because we focus on technologically mediated time experiences, we use the term ‘time’ to describe subjective time, encompassing people’s time perception and time perspective.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter Nagy

Peter Nagy is a media scholar with a master’s degree in psychology from Eötvös Loránd University and a PhD in management from Corvinus University of Budapest. Before joining the Center for Science and the Imagination, Peter worked as a psychologist at a high school and as a research fellow at Central European University’s Center for Data, Media and Society in Budapest, Hungary. Peter’s research interests include the impact of communication technology on identity formation as well as the public understanding of science.

Joey Eschrich

Joey Eschrich is the editor and program manager at the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, and assistant director for Future Tense, a partnership of ASU, Slate magazine, and New America on emerging technologies, culture, and society. He has edited several books of science fiction and nonfiction, including Future Tense Fiction: Stories of Tomorrow, published by Unnamed Press, and Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities, which was funded by a grant from NASA.

Ed Finn

Ed Finn is the founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University where he is an associate professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the School of Arts, Media and Engineering. He is the author of What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computation (MIT Press) and coeditor of Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds (MIT Press) as well as several collections of science fiction. He completed his PhD in English and American Literature at Stanford University in 2011 and his bachelor’s degree at Princeton University in 2002.