Network Speed and Democratic Politics

Abstract

Through a systematic foregrounding of temporality as a framework of analysis, the dynamics of neo-liberal globalization and the revolution in ICTs constitute a new epistemological context. From this perspective the world as an economic, social, cultural, and political postmodernity becomes apparent. The article argues that liberal democracy was created and evolved in a specific context too. It was one formed through the interactions of Enlightenment thought and capitalist action—both of which were suffused by the temporality of the clock. For nearly three-hundred years we have taken for granted its meter of the clock as the measure of temporal reality, and have similarly accepted that libera..