Technologies That Derail Time

We might think of technologies that regulate our experience of time as "circadian media". One of many great contributions to an issue of Real Life magazine on the topic of how the temporal relates to the technological, this essay called “Already Late” by Ana Cecilia Alvarez concerns the pressure to be ever-present and “up to date” in a media-saturated world—a pressure that begins upon the very moment of waking every morning.

Morning routines have long fascinated writers and commentators: “The morning steers us, and the morning routine offers the path,” Alvarez argues. Mornings spell out how we ritualize the onset of the day and prepare ourselves for what may come; they represent the “aspirational” pre-labor moment, when hopes and expectations might be at the forefront of the mind.

In actuality, the smartphone alarm clock rings, and many of us begin the day by picking it up and immediately starting to scroll our news feeds. Alvarez interviewed people whose “day began before they had really woken, with the first groggy swipe", and found a consistent condition of feeling always switched on.

The smartphone has “the capacity of catapulting or derailing a day", fundamentally altering how we conceive of temporal transitions according to, for instance, bodily circadian rhythms. "Online, we inhabit an unrelenting present, where artificially spatialized time appears severed and successive” as opposed to continuous and corporeal.