Networked Time and the "Common Ruin of the Contending Classes"

Abstract

The rise of the network society has been hailed often as the bringer of many positive things and has been damned in equal measure. This essay discusses the network society in terms of its effects upon the theory and practice of bourgeois and socialist democracy. Through the theoretical prism of social and technologically created time, the essay argues that the network society has created a neoliberal "networked time". This is a logic that functions at the global level and operates at computer network driven speeds-incorporating in its wake not only the polity, but economy and society, too. What the temporal analysis reveals in this process, is that "networked time" as a primarily digital for..