ABSTRACT
The third core theme which we can identify in information society debates concerns changes in our conception and experience of both time and space — a theme we have explored in the work of Manuel Castells in Chapter 2. For a long while it has been acknowledged in social theory that time and space are closely linked: shortening dramatically the time that it takes to communicate with (or travel to) a distant place makes that place seem nearer, and we can't talk of space without a conception of time. It has also long been recognized that social life is routinized around time and space (Giddens, 1990). Because interaction takes place in time and space, and can't be understood without account of this, then changes in time or space are profoundly significant for society, but also for social theory. The historian Edward Thompson is among those who have discussed the significance of the clock, perhaps the defining symbol of the industrial era. Social life became regulated by factory hours, instead of by the weather, seasons or daylight (Thompson, 1967). Another social historian, Eric Hobsbawn, writing of the last quarter of the twentieth century as the ‘economic, social and cultural transformation, the greatest, most rapid and most fundamental in recorded history’, states that ‘perhaps the most dramatic practical consequence … was a revolution in transport and communication which virtually annihilated time and distance’ (Hobsbawn, 1995, pp.8, 12, cited in Hakken, 1999).
