EFFECTS OF NEW COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES ON TIME PERCEPTION

Text topic: Philosophy of Media

Text author: Татјана Миливојевић, Драгана Јовановић и Александра Бокан

The topic of the ever more accelerated pace of life and laments over the destructive effects of this phenomenon, is not new. It has already appeared in the nineteenth century with the invention of railways and telegraphs. Since the age of industrialization modern man has begun to experience a radical change in his relationship to time. With the globalization, which came on the wave of new information technologies, the imperative of speed, urgency, instantism, simultaneity, short termism, established as new units for measuring time. At the source of time acceleration are modern technologies, but Internet brought this process to a climax. Accordingly, it can be argued that speed is not just a secondary feature, but one of the determinants of modern civilization. There is a constant pressure of the acceleration and fragmentation of time which, overflowing from economic and technological spheres tends to colonize the entire psychological and social space. In this paper we do not deal with value judgements on technological speed per se, nor express nostalgic sadness for the good old slower times. We are interested in the way speed, as value-neutral, or even positively connoted term, refracts through psychological prism, specifically the perception of time, so establishing haste (urgency) as dominant mode of individual and social existence. In order to better understand and analyze the relationship between speed and haste, and its effects on psychosocial health, we distinguish between three kinds of temporality: physio-psychological, socio-psychological and techno-psychological. According to the results of a research carried out with regular Internet users, we try to show how they come to suffer a stressful conflict between these temporal modes and develop the so-called “pathology of present”.