Time-Space Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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All social life is ordered over time and through space. However, when sociologists attend to the ”situated” character of social life, they do not treat time-space as simply the temporal and spatial environment of the phenomena they study. They see social life as not just being ”in” time-space, they see time-space as central to all social interaction. The ”situatedness” of social life involves time-space as a constitutive feature in the construction and reconstruction of what people do and in the way they do things together. The ordering of social life comes about because social practices are routinely made to come together across time-space as shared experiences. This binding of time-space is expressed in the ways in which societies, institutions, and individuals organize time-space.

Anthony Giddens draws attention to three features that need to be addressed by sociologists when seeking to understand the way in which social life is ordered across time-space. The first involves the construction and reconstruction of regularized social interaction across time-space through informed practices. Take, for example, the actions and interactions relating to the lending and borrowing of a library book. These are knowledgeable activities involving the understanding of a range of time-space relations by both lenders and borrowers. A borrowed book has to be returned before the elapse of a specific time period. The library staff gather and process information on the whereabouts of the books they have lent out.

The second feature involves the association of social interaction with purposefully designed spatial and temporal environments. Taking once again the example of a library book, such transactions are embedded in purposefully designed spatial and temporal settings for the storage, distribution, and collection of books. The design features of a library building are integral to the spatial and temporal coordination of library transactions and are integral to what a library is.

The third feature involves the organizational mechanisms which are used to regulate the timing and spacing of social interaction. The lending and borrowing of a library book are organized by means of various time-space organizing devices. A library will have specific opening hours. The annual cycle of opening hours may include holiday closures. Other time-space schedules, such as a library’s borrowing and cataloging system, regulate the location of books, and the length of the borrowing period.

The development and use of information, communication, and transportation technology impact on all three of the features set out above. David Harvey’s term ”time-space compression” describes the reduction of distance experienced through the decrease in the time taken, either to cross space physically by means of transportation, or symbolically by means of communication. People can, for example, increasingly download reading material digitally and so cancel out the need for physical transportation altogether. The use of the Internet also impacts on libraries as purposefully designed spatial and temporal settings. For example, library users may browse through books on a computer screen rather than in the open book stacks in a library building. Finally, Internet use impacts on the organizational mechanisms which are used to regulate the timing and spacing of library transactions. People can, for example, consult a library’s cataloging system even outside a library’s opening hours.

Time-space compression allows for the stretching of social life across time-space, a phenomenon that lies at the heart of globalization. Tomlinson (1999) writes of ”the ‘proximity’ that comes from the networking of social relations across large tracts of time-space, causing distant events and powers to penetrate our local experience.” However, as he makes clear, the compression of time-space is not just about physical distance. It is also about social-cultural distance.

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