15 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2018
    1. It may well be, as Edmond Wright has pointed out (personal communi-cation) that by leaving sui generis time to the physicists, i.e. by leaving it out of social theory altogether, there is the risk of losing sight of the 'real' temporal continuum which serves as standard reference for all other forms of times. It also impedes coming to terms with 'time embedded' in natural objects and technical artifacts, as Hagerstrand (1974, 1975, 1988) repeatedly emphasized.

      Nowotny argues that social theory is reduced to a narrow, dualistic society vs nature perspective by focusing on symbolism in social time and failing to consider other (sui generis) types of time.

      This is especially problematic when exploring how time is embedded in "natural objects and technical artifacts".

    2. The fundamen-tal question for Giddens then becomes how social systems 'come to be stretched across time and space' (i.e. how they constitute their tempor-ality (Giddens, 1984).

      Space-time distanciation theory.

      See also: Adam - 1990 - Time for Social Theory

    3. The claim to the existence of a concept of 'social time', distinct from other forms of time, was thus made early in the history of social thought. It continues to focus upon the claims of the peculiar nature of the 'social constitution' or the 'social construction' of time. These claims evidently put the category of 'social time' into the wider realm of 'symbolic time', a cultural phenomenon, the constitution of which has remained the object of inquiry of more disciplines than sociology alone, but which separates it from time in nature, embedded in things and artifacts.

      Early work in social time focused on the social construction of time and symbolic/semiotic representations (see Zerubavel).

      Sociology and other disciplines see time as "embedded in things and artifacts" apart from what Adam refers to as natural time.

    1. It reveals that technology and artefacts not only shape our lives but our knowledge; that the dead things which are so conscientiously excluded from social analyses are not only implicated in our daily existence but constitute our social theories. They therefore need to be moved to the centre stage of social theory. We need to allow the implications of contemporary living to penetrate the depth of our understanding, to connect the complexity of our being to the meanings we impose on it, and to recognise our existing social theories as relics of a bygone age.

      Adam concludes with a call to modernize social time theory by engaging with artifacts and technology.

      "The focus on time helps us to see the invisible."

    2. I am proposing that we need to take on board the time-scales of our technologies if our theories are to become adequate to their subject matter: contemporary industrialised, science-based technological society. Giddens's concept of time-space distanciation might prove useful here despite its association with the storage capacity of information Time for Social Theory: Points of Departure 167 which makes the present application of the concept primarily past, rather than past and future orientated. There seems to be no reason why the concept of time-space distanciation, with its link to power, could not be exploited to theorise influences on the long-term future. Such an extension would allow us to understand the present as present past and present future, where each change affects the whole.

      Adam revisits the need to incorporate technology and artifacts into sociotemporal theory.

      She cites Giddens' time-space distanciation, a construct that describes how social systems stretch across time and space to "store" knowledge, material goods, and cultural traditions.


    3. The exclusion of non-symbolic expressions from social science analysis has not only resulted in a highly problematic conceptualisation of nature and natural time but it has also meant the omission of artefacts and technology from social science. As Carlstein ( I 982: 8-9) points out, 'social scientists have commonly refused to see 'dead things' as social or have left them aside for the natural scientists. Social scientists have also commonly Time for Social Theory: Points of Departure 157 refused to look upon artefacts as social in the sense that they impinge on how individuals interact with each other. These 'dead things' are, at best, seen as symbols and are not considered to be genuine ingredients in social situations and processes.' Yet, with respect to time, it is difficult to see how we can understand society without the time aspects of those 'dead things', those created artefacts and machines that shape our lives and our understanding of reality.

      Interesting perspective on how sociotemporality is also influenced by artifacts and technology. Adam argues this is a missing opportunity in social theory. I suspect STS theorists would vehemently disagree. But in 1990 (when this book was published) STS, ANT, etc., were still relatively new ideas.

      This passage sets up the discussion on metaphor.

  2. Jul 2018
    1. Leshed and Sengers’s research reminds us that calendars are not just tools for the management of time, but are also sites of identity work where people can project to themselves and others the density of their days and apparent ‘success’ at doing it all[26]. These seemingly innocuous artifacts can thus perpetuate deeper normative logics a

      The dark side of time artifacts and the social pressure of busyness/industriousness as a virtue.

    2. CSCW has been investigating the relationship of time and work practically from its inception as a scholarly fiel

      Classic CSWC literature on time includes: groupware calendaring systems, temporal rhythm, temporal trajectories, temporal ordering, temporal artifacts.

    1. Notably, a practice-oriented treatment of digital time does open up avenues for research and design, one that resonates with Kuutti and Bannon’s [23] recent account of a practice perspective forming a new paradigm for HCI. They propose that a central issue in a practice-based research agenda is the need to develop the capability to transform practices through technology. Essential to this is understanding the role of computer artefacts in the emergence and transfor-mation of practices, and the possibilities for influencing these by changing the artefacts themselves.

      How can artifacts be incorporated into a revised SBTF data collection practices? What would that look like as a product of social coordination?

  3. May 2018
    1. Dervin (1999) describes information as aninteractionally created artifact, encouraging us to turn our analytic attentionaway from problems of ‘‘access’’ and towards the ways in which informationis created in the course of collaborative work. An aspect of work that playsan important role in the creation and use of information is temporality.

      It's a shame that the meta data can't be extracted from the SBTF documents. I'll bet there is a story to tell there.

      It might be interested to do a meta-analysis of several SBTF deployment documents to understand the trajectory of its own knowledge and practices around crowdsourcing crisis data, but also to substantiate my hunch that event temporality (slow, sudden, chronic) affects the collaboration process and the data artifacts it produces.

  4. Nov 2017
    1. "it's not about the technology" because "the technology is neutral."

      Right. Technology isn’t neutral. Nor is it good or bad. It’s diverse and it’s part of a broader context. Can get that some educators saying that it’s not about technology may have a skewed view of technology. But, on its own, this first part can also lead to an important point about our goals. It’s about something else. But, of course, there are some people who use the “bah, the technology doesn’t matter as long as we can do what we do” line to evade discussion. Might be a sign that the context isn’t right for deep discussion, maybe because educators have deeper fears.

  5. Sep 2016
    1. This common activity depended on a great many cultural artifacts, the things people shape or make from natural resources

      Cultural artifacts - the things people shape or make from natural resources (ex. The bark of trees are made into paper, glue used to hold pages together, etc.)

    2. When ethnographers study other cultures, they must deal with three fundamental aspects of human experience: what people do, what people know, and the things peo-ple make and use

      Ethnographers deal with three fundamental aspects of the human experience : cultural behavior, cultural knowledge, and cultural artifacts

    3. Culture

      Culture behavior, cultural artifacts

  6. Feb 2016
    1. Global fluctuations, originating presumably from such systemic effects as respiration and cardiac-induced pulsations, were accounted for individually by orthogonalizing the time-courses with respect to the first three principal components from the white matter voxel time course ensemble and the first three principal components from the time course ensemble of the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) voxels (Behzadi et al., 2007).