„Eigenzeit“ Reloaded: Individualized Time in the 21st Century

Helga Nowotny’s keynote speech for the kick-off to 100 Years of Now on 30/09/2015

30.10.2015 Time Regimes Martin Hager

What is time? And what does acceleration on the one hand and big data on the other do to people? As early as 1989, the sociologist Helga Nowotny addressed the decisive question of how changes in society affect our sense of time: Her book Eigenzeit hit a nerve, advancing to become a classic with translations into French, English and Italian. Now she has taken up the theme again: What is our sense of (our own) time today?

Data noise and global real-time communication have created a new form of media-dominated “proper time”: The possibility of uninterrupted connection to everyone via digital networks. However, what suffers is the hope of maintaining control over time: The past contracts, the future escapes our control. Here Helga Nowotny is in agreement with the ethnologist Arjun Appadurai. Improved living conditions have provided people with the “capacity to aspire”, the ability to cultivate wishes and desires. However, this also requires us to reanimate the atrophied social imagination of the good life.

A multimedia documentation of the event can be found here. The accompanying volume Die Zeit der Algorithmen is part of the book series 100 Years of Now Library.