Facing Uncertainty. Temporality and Biographies in the New Century 1

By now the international scientific community should have been convinced that the era we are living in is substantially transforming the fundamental coordinates of the relationship with time constructed by modernity (Adam, 1995; Bauman, 2000; Harvey, 1990; Nowotny, 1994; Sennett, 1998; Zoll, 1988). Contributing to these profound changes in contemporary temporal experience are both the new information and communication technologies, which construct experiences of simultaneity capable of casting doubt upon the principles of sequential and linear causality (Adam, 1992) and, in parallel, the crisis of the temporal model of industrial society. This model revolved around the centrality and regularity of working time, its corollary of the rational use of time linked to scarcity, its ability to coordinate social rhythms and to impose the idea of an abstract time controlled through internalized discipline (Sue, 1994).