Showing papers in "KronoScope in 2011"

The Problem of Modern Time in American Journalism 1

Abstract: American life seems pressed for time, and journalists claim they must focus on the now because of competition and technology. Shorter news cycles affect the deadlines for producing live reports on television and constant updates online. Without time to investigate or edit, journalists say their work deteriorates, leaving the public uninformed. But our studies of newspaper, television, and internet news reveal that time in news coverage has been expanding into the past and the future for decades, reflecting news reporters’ professional and modernist claims to prioritize events in time. As temporal concepts transformed at the end of the twentieth century, journalists continued producing reports that reflect modern time regimes. The recent closings of mainstream newspapers, and the consequences journalists see for news quality and public policy, flow to some degree from their modernist sense of time that leaves them disconnected from the current time regime.

Time Abstraction, Temporal Policy and the Right to One’s Own Time*

Abstract: Democratic time policies—policies intended to coordinate working times, public and private service times, and urban time schedules, to the needs of human beings, individuals, families, communities—have to be founded and justified on concepts of abstract time and the right to time as preconditions of self-determined concrete individual and collective time. The right to time—in favor of which the Council of Europe recently declared itself—contains the right of individuals and groups to demand that their temporal requirements become the subject of protective and co-ordinating measures. And it requires appropriate social rules and provisions enabling the effective social co-ordination of times. The right to time foreshadows a welfare-society that deals not only with the redistribution of money but also simultaneously with the temporal conditions of its citizens’ quality of everyday life.

Stable and Variable Characteristics of the Time Perspective in Humans 1

Abstract: Today, many definitions and measures of the time perspective exist in parallel, with more or less common meaning. This article presents the most prominent conceptualizations of time perspective, which differ not only in the way of assessing the concept, but also in their assumed variability. The author then reports on an experiment that investigated the relationship between two different conceptualizations of the time perspective, and that examined the role emotions play in the variable part of the time perspective. Finally, conclusions are drawn with respect to the experimental results and the conceptualizations of the time perspective as expressed in the Introduction.

The Regular Sound of the Cock: Context-Dependent Time Reckoning in the Middle Ages 1

Abstract: Despite frequent references to cockcrow in medieval literature, the uses and limits of cockcrow as a means of reckoning time in this period have not been thoroughly explored. Through an approach that combines chronobiology, the archaeology of faunal remains, and a discussion of medieval texts, this article argues that cockcrow was a useful and widespread context-dependent indicator of time. Its limits were that it was only relevant before dawn, but in a society that organized itself around seasonally variable canonical hours, the variation of cockcrow with the relative lengths of daylight and night was useful. The article concludes with a discussion of how the biases toward homogeneity and context-independence in modern time-reckoning are an obstacle for understanding pre-clock context-dependent time-telling techniques, and that moreover, modern time-telling opts for humanly constructed arbitrary signs over locally embedded indicators of time tied to biological or environmental cycles.

Crusoe’s Foe, Foe’s Cruso, and the Origins and Future of the Novel

Abstract: The following paper explores how J. M. Coetzee’s 1986 Foe provides a postcolonialist critique of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 Robinson Crusoe through revising its temporal structure and reconceptualizing its treatment of time. I begin with Foe, explaining its function as a fictional urtext to Robinson Crusoe, an urtext whose characters listlessly while away their time and whose narrative lacks plot potential. Turning next to Robinson Crusoe, I discuss how its linear time-scheme reinforces the key colonialist assumptions about progress. I then return to Foe, explaining its reshaping of the past in service of a hoped-for future.

Time and Motion: Chronometry and the Railway Timetables of New South Wales, 1855-1906

Abstract: Timetables are part of the textual infrastructure of travel and mobility. As a way of “envisioning information,” they came into being with the advent of rail. As an important document of quotidian life, important to navigating modern space, railway timetables encapsulate a modernist horology, ‘contemporality.’ They are an element of the culture of calculation that Georg Simmel describes in his essay on urban life. Yet timetables have not received the attention that is their due. In this paper I redress this and analyse the early timetables of New South Wales, Australia. I argue that as well as inducting the travelling public into the new horology, timetables also—because their contents were not limited to temporal matters—inducted them into the mobility and spatial practices associated with railway culture.