ABSTRACT
This final chapter argues that temporality is the key factor underpinning our capacity to maintain tightly integrated body-object relationships. Certain artefacts have a capacity to synchronise their functioning with the rhythms of human action and perception in such a way that they fade from a user’s moment-to-moment awareness.
The chapter begins with a critique of a tendency to see the operation of digital technologies as antithetical to human time perception. Modernity is associated with the acceleration of time, and writers such as Paul Virilio and Bernard Stiegler employ the term ‘real time’ to refer to an end point in this acceleration, at which it reaches a point of instantaneity that renders human perception and critical engagement with technological systems impossible. But this claim can be complicated by tracing the origins of the term real time in efforts to create digital devices that interrupt the speed of computer processing in an attempt to facilitate human engagement. Rather than ruling out human engagement, this attempt to inject the time of human perception and action into the functioning of digital devices made possible the close engagement between user and machine that produced the digital revolution. The attempt to splice together separate machine times and human times has, however, produced a logic of interruption, of waiting rather than acceleration, and the chapter continues to discuss how this can be better understood once unhelpful claims about the end of human time are put aside. From here the discussion moves to a broader consideration of how time perception is shaped in a dynamic way by our engagement with objects, from the ‘flow’ of expert tool use to the ‘zone’ of gamblers hypnotised by slot machines. Drawing on Henri Bergson’s theorisation of time perception, it is shown that how we experience time is widely shaped by our modes of engagement with objects, and suggests a further potential for the creation of modes of interaction that move from intentional, planned action to habituated, unreflective skill by cultivating certain embodied relationships with the time of objects.
