Media and Time

In the context of 19th and 20th century modernity—its technical revolutions and specific ways of experiencing time—the insight has grown that our ideas of time are decisively shaped by our interaction with media: Media influence our understanding of time. Particularly in investigations in cultural and media theory, there have been [Page 833]attempts to work out the dependencies between media and conceptions of time. The following cultural-historical transformation can be considered as paradigmatic for the assumption of media-time dependency: the change in our experience of time through the invention of the clock.

Thanks to a uniform mechanical process, time became precisely measurable, independent of subjective impressions of time and independent of sequences of natural events (e.g., day/night). The cultural establishment of clock time since the 13th century has not only changed social processes but also changed and extended our consciousness of time. In contrast to the experience of event time, cultural awareness of qualitatively indifferent, infinitely divisible time has grown through clock time, which made possible a massive economization of time with all the known accompaniments, such as lacking time and acceleration. In a media-theoretical perspective, this historically indubitable finding serves as evidence for the assumption that a certain conception of time (idea of abstract linear time) depends on the invention of a medium (the clock). But whether the clock, as a “time machine” (Marshall McLuhan), can form a model for proving a media-time dependency is problematic. The question is whether a clock is a medium at all. A clarification of the relationship between time and media, and a differentiation of ideas of time using media parameters, cannot take place without a preceding differentiation of the concept of media.

Both in everyday language and in the sciences, the ways in which the term media is used are very varied and not to be subsumed under one category. If, along with the media philosopher Marshall McLuhan, one pursues a very broad media concept, according to which media are technical inventions (artifacts), indeed artificial extensions of the human, then the clock (as a technically optimized form of time measurement) can also be treated as a medium. The advantages of such an approach lie in the possibility of treating very different technical inventions (e.g., the car and the telephone) in their cultural context. The disadvantage of such a broad understanding is conceptual imprecision. The differentiations between medium and tool and between medium and machine remain largely unclear. How broadly one grasps the media concept ultimately depends on which questions and aims one has and which facts are relevant in an academic context. The connection between medium and time thus cannot be described generally but only by considering the respective perspec-tival character. This entry distinguishes four perspectives in which the connection between temporality and mediality is respectively outlined.