Time of Society and Time of Experience: Multiple Times and Social Change

Abstract

Abstract J. T. Fraser highlighted the distinctive connections between the different levels of temporality that characterize the human timescape. In this context, he also demonstrated a clear awareness of the relationship between sociotemporality and the existential processing of time. Human experience, in its myriad expressions, bears the mark of the social processes and dynamics within which it takes shape. Analyzing this relationship, we can assert that identity itself is marked by the conception of time that characterizes a given historical period. Processes of social change, forms of experience, identities and expressions of subjectivity are therefore interwoven. The ways in which we experience and conceive of time should therefore also be interpreted in the light of this interconnection. In this particular period, information technologies appear to have the power to redefine the whole of human experience, including our experience of time. After analyzing the close relationship between time and identity, and the multiplicity of temporal dimensions it comprises, referencing social phenomenology, the paper explores the nature of the processes of change that characterize our era—starting from the crisis of the future and the dynamics connected to the acceleration of time. The general aim is to highlight the link between historical times, social times and individual times. It looks at the reflection formulated by J. T. Fraser on the multiplicity of times as it relates to the analytical tools developed by the sociology of time.