Howard Rheingold points to an interesting article that examines everyday life in today’s ‘internet enabled’ age. The article starts out with an example of how our concept of time has been altered by the tools that provide ‘instant access’ to family and friends.

“Three days? It’s like eternity!” she explained.

For a generation accustomed to near-instantaneous keeping in touch — primarily via instant messaging, cell phones and e-mail — Rainie’s complaint doesn’t seem so far-fetched, especially since she and her generational peers are perfectly comfortable roaming in a social sphere where real face-to-face encounters take a backseat to cyber contact.

I don’t know about you but the idea of Time being malleable just, well, kinda freaks me out. It’s not a new idea though, in fact it seems like it’s been the subject of a lot of study. Most of that study focuses on the historical evolution of time but in light of the exponential rate of technological development we are now able to notice the evolution in our own lifetime. Fabio Sergio started questioning the connection between time and technology more than a year ago saying:

Mobile connected devices have already started changing the way we collectively relate to the passing of seconds, freeing us from rigidly planned arrangements and allowing us to rely on connectivity to constantly re-schedule our daily activities, but that said, what are the long-term implications of this trend? I am not talking about projects such as IDII’s Fluid Time, which focus on ways to solve problems already associated with some of these changes, I am talking about our culture’s very model of time. During the past week I spent a few hours rummaging through my college books, and dug out Sandra Bonfiglioli’s excellent “L’Architettura del Tempo” (The Architecture of Time). The book is a fascinating, in-depth analysis of how the philo-socio-economical concept of time has evolved in the western world, from the natural light /darkness cycles of early agricultural villages, to the discrete time of the church bells of medieval cities, to the split-second precision of the clock of industrial urban settings.

And a lot has changed in the year since Fabio made those comments…