Interactive Time and “ Real Time ” in Software and Society

The “Real Time” that keeps everyone updated on the developing present is an historical amalgam that posits itself as the general nature of time. Real Time works by automating data exchanges that are so rapid we experience them as evidence of a progressive and synchronized present moment that is in fact largely constructed by Real Time. This time dominates other temporalities by translating them into its terms so long as its translations are authoritative. There are, however, other related forms of time that allow for local interaction with the motion of time. The undo command common to so much software is exemplary. It allows users to retract previous actions and navigate between states of a document, working on a very different set of principles from Real Time. This other kind of time is non-globalizing, asynchronous, enforced by users themselves, and is becoming increasingly common. Thus, interactive time appears as action within a “Real Time” that seems to describe the full spectrum of temporal possibility. What remains untranslatable in these other times is exactly what makes them unique as other kinds of time animating social life today. One is Real Time, not as the colloquial adjective “real” modifying the abstract noun “time,” but as a technical term that describes things that are upto-the-minute or 24/7. Though the meaning of the term blends very smoothly into a feeling of time’s reality, Real Time will be treated as a proper noun in this article for the sake of clarity. Real Time is pervasive, well-connected to other forms of time, and powerfully enforced. The other specimen is a meeker time, one that follows software’s undo command. This comfortable time hovers in the present, allowing one to retract actions and restore a previous state. The time of undo is made up of actions, with a past made up of executed commands, and a future that is the carefully designed set of commands available to the user. What is the relation between Real Time and the time of undo? Both depend on computer hardware and software and are made possible in particular cases only with assistance. One is primarily a present moment, the other a reversible history. One is networked, the other isolating. There are many things that we do not think about as involving time: iPods, traffic sensors, conditions of labor, word processing, Facebook. But I want to suggest that this is more often because we are not sufficiently prepared to discuss time, not that the topics themselves have no temporal specificity. When questions of time seem unrewarding they will be passed over. There are, in the world, many times. Although it is convenient to discuss the time of modernity as one thing, postmodern perspectives recognize that there are many very different kinds of time. [1] There are calendars, clocks, measures of abstract labor, railroad schedules, concepts of progress, historical timelines, and independent variables representing time in physics and statistics. These are not just different practical means of deploying time, they are all possible ways that temporality functions. In this sense, they can give rise to a sense of what time, at its most basic, actually is. What I will do here is consider two specific kinds of time and the relations between them.